# The Inventor Who Almost Ended the World

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 11 Nov 2022, 37 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/8725984a-411d-4c1d-83e4-af4600be06bb/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

Thomas Midgley's inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn't set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer with CFCs - but while these dire consequences were unintended... could they have been anticipated? For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. Thomas Midgley Junior was born on College Hill in
[0:26] Speaker 1: Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, May eighteenth, eighteen eighty nine. His father,
[0:31] Speaker 1: Thomas Midgley Senior, was a prolific inventor in a variety
[0:34] Speaker 1: of fields, but notably that of automobile times, and his
[0:39] Speaker 1: mother had the eulogy for and invente, a hero of
[0:43] Speaker 1: industrial science who changed the world, and who died tragically young,
[0:49] Speaker 1: aged just fifty five. Thomas Midgley Junior studied mechanical engineering,
[0:55] Speaker 1: but he was just as fascinated by chemistry. As a
[0:58] Speaker 1: young researcher employed by General Motors, Midgley took to carrying
[1:03] Speaker 1: a copy of the Periodic Table around in his pocket
[1:06] Speaker 1: to inform his quest for new ideas. By the end
[1:10] Speaker 1: of his life, Midgley had accumulated over a hundred patents.
[1:15] Speaker 1: We're going to hear about three of his inventions. In
[1:19] Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, Midgley became a member of our research staff
[1:23] Speaker 1: and began then his long association with me and his
[1:26] Speaker 1: remarkably productive career in research. The eulogist is Charles Boss Kettering,
[1:33] Speaker 1: himself an inventor of some renown. Kettering was Thomas Midgley's
[1:37] Speaker 1: boss in the General Motors Research department. He went on
[1:41] Speaker 1: to become a lifelong friend, mentor, and business associate as
[1:46] Speaker 1: the two men built lucrative careers with General Motors and
[1:50] Speaker 1: the DuPont Corporation. What do you want me to do next? Boss?
[1:54] Speaker 1: That simple question and the answer to it turned out
[1:57] Speaker 1: to be the beginning of a great adventure in the
[2:00] Speaker 1: life of a most versatile man. Versatile Indeed, the brain
[2:04] Speaker 1: children of Thomas Midgley touched many areas of life. This pudgy,
[2:09] Speaker 1: bespectacled inventor seemed to personify the mid twentieth century ideal
[2:15] Speaker 1: of progress, as summed up by DuPont in their famous
[2:19] Speaker 1: nineteen thirties advertising slogan better things for better living, living
[2:25] Speaker 1: through chemistry Chemistry. In his eulogy, Boss Kettering runs through
[2:30] Speaker 1: Midgley's long list of accomplishments Presidents of the American Chemical Society,
[2:36] Speaker 1: winner of the Nichols Medal, the Perkin Medal, the Priestly Medal,
[2:41] Speaker 1: the Willard Gibbs Medal, the Longstreth Medal, honorary doctorates from
[2:46] Speaker 1: the College of Wooster, and the Ohio State University. Kettering
[2:52] Speaker 1: quotes the citation from Ohio State. Midgeley contributed so greatly
[2:57] Speaker 1: to more pleasant and efficient living. He has made science
[3:00] Speaker 1: a liberator, and we rejoice with him and the satisfactions
[3:04] Speaker 1: that must be his in seeing the fruits of his labor.
[3:07] Speaker 1: Posterity will acknow their permanent value. Posterity alas, was not
[3:15] Speaker 1: as kind to Midgley as his many admirers had expected,
[3:20] Speaker 1: but they were absolutely right to say that he would
[3:23] Speaker 1: change the world. He did, he made it much much worse.
[3:32] Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales? What
[4:15] Speaker 1: do you want me to do? An X boss? One day,
[4:18] Speaker 1: when Thomas Midgley asked that question of Charles Kettering, the
[4:22] Speaker 1: Boss had a problem he wanted Midgley to solve. The
[4:25] Speaker 1: problem had to do with refrigeration. At the time, people
[4:29] Speaker 1: didn't have fridges at home. It was too dangerous. The
[4:33] Speaker 1: chemicals you needed for the cooling coils were either toxic
[4:37] Speaker 1: or flammable, so refrigeration was mainly used in industrial settings
[4:42] Speaker 1: by trained personnel. Even then, accidents were common. Kettering wanted
[4:48] Speaker 1: Midchley to invent away to cool things safely. Midgley took
[4:54] Speaker 1: the periodic table out of his pocket. He soon zeroed
[4:58] Speaker 1: in on florine as a promising element for creating a
[5:02] Speaker 1: compound that might have the right properties. As Kettering's eulogy recalls,
[5:08] Speaker 1: he had a helpers prepared such a compound, dichlorodifluoromethane. It
[5:14] Speaker 1: proved to have just the properties required. It is highly stable, noninflammable,
[5:18] Speaker 1: and altogether without harmful effects on man or animals. Dichloro
[5:24] Speaker 1: difluoromethane it did seem to be all together without harmful effects.
[5:30] Speaker 1: Midgeley tested this by replacing all the nitrogen in air
[5:35] Speaker 1: with dichlorodifluoromethane and seeing what happened to animals who breathed
[5:40] Speaker 1: it in. Happily, for the animals, they were completely fine.
[5:45] Speaker 1: Midgley wasn't just an inventor, He was a showman. He
[5:49] Speaker 1: presented his new product in a dramatic lecture to the
[5:53] Speaker 1: American Chemical Society. Midgley lights a candle. He produces a
[5:58] Speaker 1: container of dichlorodifluoromethane. He sucks it in a long, deep sculp,
[6:06] Speaker 1: filling his lungs, and then slowly and gently he breathes
[6:13] Speaker 1: out over the candle. The flame goes out. It's a
[6:18] Speaker 1: bravura performance. Dichlorodifluomethane belongs to a class of chemicals called CFC's,
[6:27] Speaker 1: or chlorofluura carbons. Under Midgley's guidance, General Motors and the
[6:32] Speaker 1: DuPont Corporation start to produce a whole range of CFCs.
[6:37] Speaker 1: They give them the trade name free On. Thanks to
[6:40] Speaker 1: these new non hazardous coolants, people soon had refrigerators in
[6:45] Speaker 1: their own homes. That was a game changer. Food stayed fresh.
[6:50] Speaker 1: The housewives of America could spend less time endlessly shopping
[6:53] Speaker 1: for groceries. Food poisoning was easier to avoid, and it
[6:58] Speaker 1: wasn't just fridges. Air conditioners too. Even better, it soon
[7:03] Speaker 1: turned out that CFCs had uses beyond cooling. They were
[7:07] Speaker 1: ideal for making air assaul sprays, insect repellance, air freshness,
[7:12] Speaker 1: hairspray deodorance. It was just like DuPont said, better things
[7:18] Speaker 1: for better living through chemistry. In the summer of nineteen
[7:25] Speaker 1: seventy three, nearly three decades after Thomas Midgley's untimely death,
[7:30] Speaker 1: a chemistry professor named Sherwood Rowland welcomes a new postdoctoral
[7:35] Speaker 1: researcher to his team at the University of California. Irvine
[7:40] Speaker 1: Mariomelina is from Mexico. He's thirty years old, and he
[7:44] Speaker 1: needs Professor Roland to give him a project to work on.
[7:48] Speaker 1: Roland recalls something he heard over coffee at a conference
[7:52] Speaker 1: the previous year about a precise new way of measuring
[7:57] Speaker 1: trace gases in the atmosphere, gases like dichlorodifluoromethane. It turns
[8:03] Speaker 1: out that CFCs are present in the air around US
[8:06] Speaker 1: at two hundred and thirty parts per trillion. That's like
[8:10] Speaker 1: detecting a drop of gin in a swimming pool of tonic.
[8:15] Speaker 1: Roland is intrigued to hear that, not because the amount
[8:18] Speaker 1: sounds so small to him, but because it sounds so big.
[8:22] Speaker 1: He knows that it's only a few decades since CFCs
[8:26] Speaker 1: started to be manufactured on an industrial scale, not much
[8:30] Speaker 1: more than that dropful can ever have been produced. Roland
[8:35] Speaker 1: is a radio chemist. He studies how particles react and decay.
[8:40] Speaker 1: Most chemicals break down in the environment sooner or later,
[8:44] Speaker 1: but CFCs just seemed to be hanging around. So he
[8:49] Speaker 1: makes a suggestion to marry O Malina, why don't you
[8:53] Speaker 1: look into CFCs. Malina recalls, we thought it would be
[8:57] Speaker 1: a nice interesting academic exercise. We both knew that these
[9:01] Speaker 1: CFCs were rather stable, so there was nothing obvious that
[9:05] Speaker 1: would damage them soon after they'd be released. That's about
[9:08] Speaker 1: as much which as I knew at the time. If
[9:10] Speaker 1: CFCs aren't interacting much with anything in the atmosphere close
[9:14] Speaker 1: to Earth, Malina reasoned, they'll eventually drift upwards to the stratosphere,
[9:20] Speaker 1: where the air is thinner. It would take decades, but
[9:24] Speaker 1: they'd get there. When they did, they'd encounter more ultraviolet
[9:29] Speaker 1: bee waves from the Sun and maybe that would cause
[9:33] Speaker 1: the CFCs to break down. Because UVB waves are pretty destructive.
[9:38] Speaker 1: They're the main reason why too much sunshine can give
[9:40] Speaker 1: you skin cancer. In fact, if the Earth had no
[9:44] Speaker 1: protection from UVB radiation, life on land might not be possible.
[9:52] Speaker 1: What does protect the Earth the ozone layer. Ozone is
[9:56] Speaker 1: a gas made from oxygen atoms up in the stratosphere,
[10:00] Speaker 1: a thin layer of ozone blocks most of the Sun's
[10:04] Speaker 1: UVB radiation. Mario Malina sat down to work out what
[10:08] Speaker 1: would happen and to a CFC molecule When it drifts
[10:11] Speaker 1: up to the stratosphere, it would get hit by a
[10:14] Speaker 1: wave of UVB radiation that would knock off a chlorine atom.
[10:19] Speaker 1: The chlorine atom would soon meet an ozone molecule. When
[10:23] Speaker 1: it did, it would split the ozone apart and form
[10:27] Speaker 1: oxygen and chlorine monoxide instead. But that's not the end
[10:31] Speaker 1: of the story. Because chlorine monoxide isn't stable. It breaks
[10:35] Speaker 1: down quickly. That frees up the chlorine atom again to
[10:40] Speaker 1: take out another ozone molecule, and the cycle repeats, chlorine
[10:45] Speaker 1: atoms pinballing around the stratosphere, hopping ozone as they go.
[10:53] Speaker 1: Melina was intrigued by this, but not alarmed. After all,
[10:57] Speaker 1: there weren't that many CFC molecules in the atmosphere. It
[11:01] Speaker 1: was a drop in a swimming pool. They couldn't possibly
[11:03] Speaker 1: destroy enough of the ozone layer to cause a problem,
[11:07] Speaker 1: could they. Malina got the data showing how much CFC
[11:12] Speaker 1: gas had been produced. He sat down with a pencil,
[11:16] Speaker 1: paper and a calculator and did the sums. That can't
[11:21] Speaker 1: be right. He checked them. He checked them again, and again.
[11:25] Speaker 1: He checked them a dozen times. That night. When he
[11:28] Speaker 1: got home, Malina's wife asked how his day had been.
[11:32] Speaker 1: The work's going well, Malina said, But it looks like
[11:36] Speaker 1: the end of the world. Cautionary tales will be back
[11:48] Speaker 1: in a moment. At the University of California, Irvine, Mario,
[12:05] Speaker 1: Melina tracks down Sherwood Rowland and may have found something important.
[12:10] Speaker 1: Roland checks Melina's sums. He checks them again. That can't
[12:15] Speaker 1: be right, but it was. The CFCs drifting slowly up
[12:19] Speaker 1: towards the stratosphere were a ticking time bomb. Barely forty
[12:24] Speaker 1: years had passed since DuPont started to manufacture their CFCs
[12:29] Speaker 1: under the Freon brand on an industrial scale. That wasn't
[12:33] Speaker 1: long enough to expect any obvious impact yet, but more
[12:38] Speaker 1: and more CFCs were being produced every year. If that continued,
[12:43] Speaker 1: what might it mean by say, the middle of the
[12:46] Speaker 1: twenty first century. Melina and Rowland calculated that up to
[12:51] Speaker 1: half the ozone layer could disappear. As Malina had put it,
[12:56] Speaker 1: it looked like the end of the world. The two
[12:59] Speaker 1: scientists wrote up their research. They published it in Nature
[13:04] Speaker 1: in the summer of nineteen seventy four, and hardly any noticed.
[13:10] Speaker 1: A few reporters got in touch from local newspapers. That
[13:14] Speaker 1: was nice, but this wasn't really a local story. An
[13:17] Speaker 1: executive from DuPont phoned Sherwood Rowland. I read your paper.
[13:23] Speaker 1: I was appalled. Thanks for getting in touch. It is
[13:26] Speaker 1: appalling throughout your paper. You talk about free On. Don't
[13:30] Speaker 1: you know that Freon's are DuPont's registered brand name. You
[13:33] Speaker 1: need to refer to CFCs generically, not free On specifically.
[13:38] Speaker 1: I have to tell you we take this very seriously.
[13:42] Speaker 1: Oh okay. Roland and Melina were dispirited. They're discovered the
[13:49] Speaker 1: end of the world and nobody cared. They looked for
[13:53] Speaker 1: another opportunity to get attention. The Annual meeting of the
[13:57] Speaker 1: American Chemical Society was coming up, the very same event
[14:01] Speaker 1: that Thomas Midgeley had wowed forty four years earlier by
[14:05] Speaker 1: filling his lungs with die chlorodie fluo methane and softly
[14:10] Speaker 1: extinguishing a candle. Roland and Malina submitted their paper to
[14:15] Speaker 1: the annual meeting, but lots of papers get submitted, so
[14:19] Speaker 1: it's the job of the American Chemical Society's news manager
[14:23] Speaker 1: to decide which papers to publicize. Her name was Dorothy Smith.
[14:29] Speaker 1: She decided to go big, much to the displeasure of DuPont. Hello,
[14:36] Speaker 1: I've just seen your press release. You're making a big
[14:39] Speaker 1: thing of this paper on CFC's and ozone. Yes, it
[14:42] Speaker 1: seems important. We think it's an insignificant story. A lot
[14:47] Speaker 1: of people are interested. Dorothy Smith stood her ground. She
[14:52] Speaker 1: put Roland and Malina on stage at a press conference,
[14:56] Speaker 1: and finally their work started to gain some traction. Environmental
[15:00] Speaker 1: activists called for a ban on CFCs. A few politicians
[15:05] Speaker 1: took up the cause, but the industry fought back. Yes,
[15:09] Speaker 1: the scientific theory seemed sound, but that's all it was theory.
[15:15] Speaker 1: No ozone depletion has ever been detected, despite the most
[15:19] Speaker 1: sophisticated analysis. All ozone depletion figures to date are computer
[15:24] Speaker 1: projections based on a series of uncertain assumptions. The initial
[15:29] Speaker 1: burst of attention slowly began to fade. Roland and Melina
[15:34] Speaker 1: kept speaking out, but fewer and fewer people were bothering
[15:38] Speaker 1: to listen. Progress towards banning CFC's ground to a halt.
[15:45] Speaker 1: It was clear that only one thing might reboot the
[15:48] Speaker 1: interest of the world's governments. Hard evidence of damage to
[15:53] Speaker 1: the ozone layer. But if it took decades for CFCs
[15:57] Speaker 1: to drift up to the stratosphere, the first ones to
[16:00] Speaker 1: be manufactured would only just be making it there. Would
[16:04] Speaker 1: the evidence come in time to avert disaster. We'll pick
[16:13] Speaker 1: up the story of CFCs and the Ozone Layer. But
[16:17] Speaker 1: I promised you three inventions by Thomas Midgley, and as
[16:21] Speaker 1: we'll see, those three inventions have a theme, that theme
[16:27] Speaker 1: unanticipated consequences. I mentioned that Thomas Midgley died young. How
[16:33] Speaker 1: did he die exactly? Bosquetoing's eulogy tiptoed around that delicate question.
[16:40] Speaker 1: In the early fall of nineteen forty, Midgeley was struck
[16:43] Speaker 1: by an acute attack of poliomyelidis, which deprived him of
[16:47] Speaker 1: the use of his legs and made him a semi invalid.
[16:50] Speaker 1: Midgeley died unexpectedly on November second, nineteen forty four, at
[16:55] Speaker 1: the age of fifty five, confined to his bed by polio.
[17:00] Speaker 1: Midgley had applied his inventive mind to devising a series
[17:04] Speaker 1: of pullies and ropes by which he could move himself around.
[17:08] Speaker 1: He eyed unexpectedly when a rope in this device got
[17:13] Speaker 1: wrapped around his neck and strangled him. So one of
[17:20] Speaker 1: Mitchelly's inventions had ended up killing him, and another was
[17:24] Speaker 1: going to destroy the ozone layer and fry the planet.
[17:28] Speaker 1: It's fair to say that unanticipated consequences is the right
[17:32] Speaker 1: description for both these inventions. The phrase unanticipated consequences was
[17:39] Speaker 1: coined a few years before Mitchley's death in a much
[17:43] Speaker 1: cited article by the great American sociologist Robert K. Murton.
[17:49] Speaker 1: That article was called the Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.
[17:56] Speaker 1: Throughout history, Murton argued, philosophers have grappled with the idea
[18:01] Speaker 1: of unanticipated consequences, using various different words to describe it,
[18:07] Speaker 1: but nobody had thought systematically about how unanticipated consequences come about.
[18:13] Speaker 1: Murton set himself the task of categorizing all the possible
[18:17] Speaker 1: ways in which our actions might backfire. Simple error is
[18:21] Speaker 1: one way we might get unanticipated consequences. We think we
[18:25] Speaker 1: know what will happen, but we're wrong. Another is what
[18:29] Speaker 1: Murton called the imperious immediacy of interest. Roughly speaking, we're
[18:35] Speaker 1: so keen to solve some pressing problem that we don't
[18:37] Speaker 1: much care what else might happen down the line. And
[18:41] Speaker 1: then there's ignorance when we don't have the knowledge that
[18:45] Speaker 1: would be necessary to anticipate what might happen. In some cases,
[18:50] Speaker 1: that might be because we haven't put in the time
[18:52] Speaker 1: and energy that would be necessary to get that knowledge,
[18:56] Speaker 1: or maybe the situation is so novel we can't imagine
[18:59] Speaker 1: what we might need to know. That's a good description
[19:03] Speaker 1: of what happened with CFCs. Mitchelly had tried to get
[19:06] Speaker 1: some knowledge about potential risks by making animals breathe in dichlorodifluomethane,
[19:13] Speaker 1: but the interaction with ozone came completely out of the blue.
[19:17] Speaker 1: This phrase of Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences has a twist.
[19:23] Speaker 1: To find out what it is, we need to turn
[19:26] Speaker 1: to the third of Thomas Midgley's disastrous brain waves, arguably
[19:32] Speaker 1: the worst of all. It came again from that fateful question,
[19:38] Speaker 1: what do you want me to do next? Boss? This time,
[19:42] Speaker 1: the problem Charles Kettering wanted Midgley to solve was engine knock,
[19:49] Speaker 1: when you red your car and it sounds like you're
[19:51] Speaker 1: firing a machine gun. It's not a common sound nowadays,
[19:56] Speaker 1: but it blighted the lives of early motorists. General motors
[20:00] Speaker 1: wanted to invent a product that would stop it, but
[20:03] Speaker 1: nobody even understood why it happened. Thomas Midgeley worked it
[20:07] Speaker 1: out in a internal combustion engine, a piston in a
[20:11] Speaker 1: cylinder compresses a mixture of air and fuel until a
[20:16] Speaker 1: spark plug ignites it. Engine knock happens when the mixture
[20:20] Speaker 1: explodes before the piston has compressed it fully. It's not
[20:25] Speaker 1: just an unpleasant noise. It can damage the engine. But
[20:31] Speaker 1: where would you even start to look for a solution?
[20:35] Speaker 1: Kettuing and Midgley talked it over. We thought that maybe
[20:39] Speaker 1: if the fuel were colored red, it would absorb more
[20:42] Speaker 1: radiant heat and evaporate more completely, thus preventing the rough combustion.
[20:48] Speaker 1: This theory came to us then, because we both happen
[20:50] Speaker 1: to know that the leaves of the trailing arbutists are
[20:53] Speaker 1: red on the back, and that they grow and bloom
[20:56] Speaker 1: under the snow. Midgley went to a chemist's shop and
[21:00] Speaker 1: bought iodine. He put the iodine in some fuel, which
[21:04] Speaker 1: turned it red, and he ran the engine no Knock
[21:09] Speaker 1: and Kettering were astonished. But was it really the color
[21:12] Speaker 1: red that was stopping the knock? Midgley tried other ways
[21:16] Speaker 1: of dying fuel, but with no success. Apparently it wasn't
[21:21] Speaker 1: the red color, but something else about the iodine. The
[21:24] Speaker 1: leaves of the trailing arbutus had been a red herring.
[21:29] Speaker 1: Midgley then tried ethyl iodide, which has iodine but no color.
[21:35] Speaker 1: It stopped the knock just as well. Unfortunately, it also
[21:39] Speaker 1: corroded the engine. Undeterred, Midgeley pulled the periodic table from
[21:44] Speaker 1: his pocket and began to work his way through it.
[21:47] Speaker 1: Many anti knock agents were discovered along the way. Compounds
[21:51] Speaker 1: of iodine of nitrogen are phosphorus, of arsenic, of antimony,
[21:57] Speaker 1: of selenium, of tellurium, but everyone had some limitation or
[22:03] Speaker 1: shortcoming which prevented it from being used in a practical way. Eventually,
[22:08] Speaker 1: Thomas's perseverance paid off. He discovered something that he could
[22:13] Speaker 1: add to gasoline that would stop engine knock without damaging
[22:18] Speaker 1: the engine, tetra ethyl lead. Thomas Midgley had invented leaded
[22:24] Speaker 1: gasoline because of Midgley's invention, I'm about five iq points
[22:31] Speaker 1: stupider than I would otherwise have been, and so are
[22:34] Speaker 1: you if you're around my age or older, because you too,
[22:38] Speaker 1: will have spent your childhood inhaling fumes of leaded gasoline
[22:42] Speaker 1: from car exhausts. The air pollution messed up brain development
[22:46] Speaker 1: for whole generations of kids, and it caused cancers and
[22:50] Speaker 1: heart disease. And strokes. It's estimated that leaded gasoline hastened
[22:56] Speaker 1: tens of millions of deaths. Leaded gasoline completes an astonishing trifector.
[23:04] Speaker 1: Thomas Midgley invented a rope and pulley device that killed him,
[23:08] Speaker 1: an additive for fuel that killed lots of other people,
[23:11] Speaker 1: and a refrigerant that was on course to wipe out
[23:14] Speaker 1: life on earth all together. How unlucky can one man be?
[23:22] Speaker 1: But luck isn't the whole story. In the early nineteen eighties,
[23:35] Speaker 1: the radiochemist Sherwood Rowland and his colleague Mario Melina kept
[23:39] Speaker 1: on talking about the danger of CFCs to the ozone layer.
[23:44] Speaker 1: Nobody wanted to listen. Roland became more and more exasperated.
[23:49] Speaker 1: What's the use of having developed a science well enough
[23:51] Speaker 1: to make predictions if in the end all we're willing
[23:54] Speaker 1: to do is stand around and wait for them to
[23:56] Speaker 1: come true. The predictions, however, were all too easy for
[24:01] Speaker 1: the industry to dismiss. Remember the line from DuPont all
[24:06] Speaker 1: ozone depletion figures to date are computer projections based on
[24:11] Speaker 1: a series of uncertain assumptions. Only actual evidence of damage
[24:17] Speaker 1: to the ozone layer would get CFCs back on the agenda,
[24:21] Speaker 1: but the evidence would be hard to come by. The
[24:24] Speaker 1: first CFCs to be produced decades earlier would only just
[24:28] Speaker 1: have reached the stratosphere. If they were starting to reduce
[24:32] Speaker 1: the levels of ozone, that might be hard to see
[24:35] Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons. First, ozone levels fluctuate naturally. Second,
[24:41] Speaker 1: there are different ways to measure ozone from the ground,
[24:44] Speaker 1: from satellites, from special instruments tied to helium balloons, which
[24:48] Speaker 1: were most accurate, no one was entirely sure. Tantalizing hints
[24:53] Speaker 1: of evidence began to emerge. Some Japanese researchers sent balloons
[24:58] Speaker 1: to the stratosphere. The ozone readings came back worryingly low,
[25:03] Speaker 1: but you really needed a long term series of data
[25:06] Speaker 1: points to establish there was a trend. The Panese team
[25:09] Speaker 1: didn't have that, but someone else did. For twenty five years,
[25:15] Speaker 1: an obscure organization called the British Antarctic Survey had been
[25:20] Speaker 1: toiling away on a shoestring budget, sending researchers to a
[25:24] Speaker 1: remote outpost in Antarctica to measure all sorts of things.
[25:28] Speaker 1: They weren't looking for anything in particular. They just liked
[25:32] Speaker 1: to collect data in case it ever happened to share
[25:35] Speaker 1: anything interesting. For twenty five years, we never had. Now,
[25:41] Speaker 1: in the early nineteen eighties, it did. The ozone measurements
[25:45] Speaker 1: were all over the place. The researchers suspected that their
[25:49] Speaker 1: instruments had gone haywire. They send new ones to Antarctica,
[25:53] Speaker 1: but the data came back the same. At first, it
[25:57] Speaker 1: seemed random, but when the researchers looked more closely, they
[26:00] Speaker 1: realized there was a pattern to the unusually low readings,
[26:04] Speaker 1: a pattern related to the seasons, a pattern that reactions
[26:09] Speaker 1: with chlorine could plausibly explain. NASA's satellites had also picked
[26:15] Speaker 1: up some surprisingly low readings over the Antarctic solo. The
[26:20] Speaker 1: computers had initially thrown them out as obvious anomalies. Now
[26:25] Speaker 1: it was clear that something was happening. There was still
[26:28] Speaker 1: room to doubt. Why was it really a chemical reaction
[26:32] Speaker 1: caused by chlorofleur carbons, or was it solar activities or
[26:36] Speaker 1: wind There was only one way to be sure. NASA
[26:40] Speaker 1: rushed to put together a team of scientists and flew
[26:44] Speaker 1: them to Antarctica. In charge of the mission was thirty
[26:47] Speaker 1: year old doctor Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist, Solomon had
[26:53] Speaker 1: never been to Antarctica before, and she didn't have the
[26:56] Speaker 1: right equipment. Her team had brought instruments to analyze light
[27:00] Speaker 1: from the Moon, but they hadn't had time to build
[27:02] Speaker 1: a tracking device to focus the Moon's rays. Instead, someone
[27:06] Speaker 1: had to sit on the laboratory roof at night holding
[27:10] Speaker 1: a mirror at just the right angle. The first time
[27:13] Speaker 1: Solomon took the roof shift, she squinted to direct the
[27:17] Speaker 1: mirror's reflection, found that her eye had frozen shut, but
[27:23] Speaker 1: the results of the experiments pointed only in one direction.
[27:28] Speaker 1: On October the twentieth, nineteen eighty six, journalists gathered in Washington,
[27:32] Speaker 1: d C. To hear Solomon relay her team's preliminary findings
[27:37] Speaker 1: over a Crackerly satellite link from Antarctica. We have not
[27:42] Speaker 1: conclusively established the cause of the oz on whole. However,
[27:46] Speaker 1: we have strong evidence against theories that upward wins or
[27:50] Speaker 1: high solar activities caused the deplica. We suspect a chemical
[27:55] Speaker 1: process is fundamentally responsible for the formation of the whole.
[28:00] Speaker 1: Solomon was right. More experiments confirmed it. The world's leaders
[28:06] Speaker 1: acted with commendable speed. In nineteen eighty seven, they agreed
[28:11] Speaker 1: the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. Sherwood Rowland and
[28:16] Speaker 1: Mario Molina shared a Nobel prize. The end of the
[28:21] Speaker 1: world was averted. By now the impacts of leaded gasoline
[28:27] Speaker 1: on human health were equally playing to see. Governments around
[28:31] Speaker 1: the world were banning that too, albeit more slowly. As
[28:35] Speaker 1: for Thomas Midgley, well with hindsight, Boss Kettwing's eulogy sounds
[28:41] Speaker 1: a little different. Midgley contributed so greatly to more pleasant
[28:45] Speaker 1: and efficient living, so he did say refrigerators, aerosols, smoothly
[28:52] Speaker 1: running gas engines, pleasant and efficient, just deadly too. Seventy
[28:59] Speaker 1: years after Kettering's eulogy, the New Scientist looked back on
[29:03] Speaker 1: Midgley's life, memorably describing him as a one man environmental disaster,
[29:10] Speaker 1: far from the epitome of industrial progress. He starts to
[29:14] Speaker 1: look more like a bye word for that phrase coined
[29:16] Speaker 1: by the great sociologist Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences and
[29:25] Speaker 1: yet unanticipated consequences isn't a phrase you hear much anymore.
[29:30] Speaker 1: It's given way to unintended consequences. Merton himself switched from
[29:35] Speaker 1: using one phrase to the other. They might sound like synonyms,
[29:39] Speaker 1: but they're not. A professor of political science named Frank
[29:43] Speaker 1: de Javart points out that this shift in language obscures
[29:47] Speaker 1: a whole category of impacts, ones that you don't intend
[29:52] Speaker 1: but you might nonetheless anticipate. Think of a doctor prescribing
[29:57] Speaker 1: a drug that often has side effects. She doesn't want
[30:01] Speaker 1: you to suffer the side effects, but she does foresee
[30:04] Speaker 1: the possibility, or at least she should, and she should
[30:08] Speaker 1: be honest about it. Two. We expect doctors to speak
[30:11] Speaker 1: truthfully about risks and trade offs. Other decision makers might
[30:16] Speaker 1: not when they stand to gain while the risks fall
[30:19] Speaker 1: on others. In cases like that, says de Jarart, we
[30:23] Speaker 1: should be skeptical when someone apologizes for unintended consequences. It
[30:29] Speaker 1: can be an attempt to evade responsibility for harms they
[30:32] Speaker 1: didn't intend, but should have foreseen. That CFCs would destroy
[30:39] Speaker 1: the ozone layer was genuinely unanticipated until Mariomelina sat down
[30:45] Speaker 1: with his pencil and paper and calculator. It simply hadn't
[30:48] Speaker 1: occurred to anyone as a possibility. But when Thomas Midgeley
[30:53] Speaker 1: and Boss Kettering launched tetra ethyl lead as a fuel
[30:58] Speaker 1: additive to stop engine knock. The danger was all too predictable.
[31:02] Speaker 1: It had been known for centuries that lead was poisonous.
[31:07] Speaker 1: America's foremost expert in lead was doctor Alice Hamilton. In
[31:12] Speaker 1: nineteen twenty five, she pleaded with US regulators not to
[31:17] Speaker 1: allow Midgeley and Kettering to put lead in gasoline. I
[31:22] Speaker 1: am not one of those who believe that the use
[31:25] Speaker 1: of this leaded gasolene can ever be made safe. No
[31:29] Speaker 1: lead industry has ever, even under the strictest control, lost
[31:33] Speaker 1: all its dangers. Where there is lead, some case of
[31:37] Speaker 1: lead poisoning sooner or later develops. Even under the strictest supervision.
[31:45] Speaker 1: They had already been ample evidence of the risk. At
[31:49] Speaker 1: a plant making tetra ethyl lead in New Jersey, five
[31:52] Speaker 1: of the forty nine workers had died. Most of the
[31:56] Speaker 1: rest had been taken to hospital in strait jackets, hallucinating, screaming,
[32:02] Speaker 1: and convulsing. Midgeley and Kettuing said that they could make
[32:06] Speaker 1: the factors is safe for workers. If that were true,
[32:10] Speaker 1: said Alice Hamilton, you'd still have millions of cars belching
[32:14] Speaker 1: lead in exhaust fumes into the air we all breathe.
[32:18] Speaker 1: You make control conditions within a factory. But how are
[32:22] Speaker 1: you going to control the whole country. Midgley insisted there'd
[32:27] Speaker 1: be too little lead in exhaust fumes to cause any
[32:30] Speaker 1: problems for human health. He didn't intend to poison people,
[32:35] Speaker 1: but he should have anticipated that he might. Alice Hamilton did,
[32:41] Speaker 1: and she warned him. Faced with this kind of criticism,
[32:45] Speaker 1: bosquecheuing knew that he needed to get public opinion on
[32:48] Speaker 1: his side. Fortunately for him, Thomas Midgley wasn't just an inventor.
[32:53] Speaker 1: Remember he was that consummate showman we heard about earlier,
[32:57] Speaker 1: filling his lungs with die chlorodie fluo methane to blow
[33:01] Speaker 1: out a candle. At a press conference on leaded gasoline,
[33:05] Speaker 1: Midgeley put on a similar kind of show, produced a
[33:09] Speaker 1: container of tetra ethyl lead, poured the liquid all over
[33:13] Speaker 1: his hands, and ostentatiously breathed in the fumes. I'm not
[33:21] Speaker 1: taking any chance whatever, nor would I take any chance
[33:25] Speaker 1: doing that every day. The journalists were wowed, but Midgley
[33:32] Speaker 1: must have known how disingenuous he was being, and how reckless.
[33:37] Speaker 1: He had just taken months off work to recover from
[33:40] Speaker 1: lead poisoning himself, kettering and Midgley knew the risks. Was
[33:46] Speaker 1: there really no alternative? Well, when governments finally banned leader gasoline,
[33:53] Speaker 1: scientists found different ways to prevent engine knock. When governments
[33:57] Speaker 1: banned CFC's, scientists found alternative ways to make fridges and
[34:03] Speaker 1: air conditioners and air assouls. Science is great. Midgley Kettering
[34:10] Speaker 1: knew of at least one promising potential alternative, ethyl alcohol.
[34:15] Speaker 1: But any old farmer could make ethyl alcohol from grain,
[34:19] Speaker 1: whereas tetra ethyl lead was something that could be patented
[34:23] Speaker 1: and monetized. They just had to get past experts such
[34:27] Speaker 1: as Alice Hamilton. First. Midgley went to work on the
[34:31] Speaker 1: job of introducing the new product of the public and endeavor,
[34:35] Speaker 1: which he met with and finally overcame many obstacles and
[34:39] Speaker 1: much opposition. Overcoming obstacles in opposition. It's a fitting line
[34:45] Speaker 1: for a eulogy, but I can't help thinking of another
[34:48] Speaker 1: fine phrase. The sociologist Robert K. Merton, the imperious immediacy
[34:56] Speaker 1: of interest leaded gasoline would make a lot of money.
[35:03] Speaker 1: Who really cared what might happen next. For a full
[35:24] Speaker 1: list of our sources, please see the show notes at
[35:27] Speaker 1: Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
[35:33] Speaker 1: Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley
[35:37] Speaker 1: with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughne. The sound
[35:41] Speaker 1: design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
[35:45] Speaker 1: It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge,
[35:49] Speaker 1: Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
[35:53] Speaker 1: been possible without the work of Mia La Belle, Jacob Weisberg,
[35:56] Speaker 1: Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
[36:02] Speaker 1: Royston basserv Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Caaning.
[36:08] Speaker 1: Caution Retales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
[36:12] Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
[36:16] Speaker 1: tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want
[36:18] Speaker 1: to hear the show, adds free and listen to four
[36:21] Speaker 1: exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts. Then sign up for Pushkin Plus
[36:25] Speaker 1: on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin
[36:29] Speaker 1: dot fm, slash plus

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