sometimes faith in progress can be so overwhelming that the world is willing to go to any lengths to ensure a new technological Leap Forward regardless of the threat it may present to both Mankind and his environment at the beginning of the 1920s the leading American oil and automobile industry added lead to gasoline to obtain a more efficient fuel at that time lead was already a known poison harmful to the nervous system especially of children however LED quickly won over the use of other less harmful additives and profits within the oil industry soared for decades to come but hundreds of thousands of tons of lead were spread around the world causing injuries such as impairing the IQ of millions lead from gasoline has literally made a lot of us a little more dim gasoline powerful stuff Modern Magic Our lives our business our cities are patterned on motor Transportation which gasoline has made possible POS nothing has had such a profound impact on the development of society in the 20th century as the motorc car during a few decades the car has become Mankind's preferred means of efficient transport to which our streets and highways bear witness more and more the world over right from its early Beginnings our enthusiasm for the car and its qualities has simply never ceased it was that wonderful day not so long ago when the automobile first came to an American town the youngsters swarmed excitedly after man's latest mechanical Marvel adventurous Riders held tight as the contraption Ken crazily along sending into frightened flight horses which had served their master so well and so long with the rapid spread of cars the production of fuel quickly became a very lucrative industry at the beginning of the century cars ran on anything which could turn over a combustion engine to propel a four-wheeled vehicle there was an abundance of them you could get Benzene from coal you could get other kinds of synthetic gasolines and you could make Al alcohol from Farm crops for example uh France Germany Denmark uh Sweden uh England Poland all these other countries were using blends of alcohol now that was considered to be the the universal choice of the future but it was a little bit more expensive than oil competition between suppliers of the most popular fuel gasoline and alcohol was tough and the car manufacturers were competing for faster and more efficient cars which drove on the relatively expensive fuel new high compression engines were developed but the automobile industry run into problems with their new engines due to their irregular combustion which caused knocking then General Motors who were producing the well-known Brands Chevrolet and Cadillac discovered that fuel was the problem so the industry invested large amounts of money in raising the octane level the general motor research effort was headed by Thomas Midgley and he tried something like 15,000 different combinations of elements uh they did find that Benzene from coal would work they did find that Al alcohol from Farm crops would work so you could add 10% alcohol to gasoline and get a higher quality fuel less knocking in the engine in 1920 Thomas Midgley took out a patent on a mixture of refined Benzene and 30% alcohol and in October of 1921 at a meeting of motor Engineers he told participants that the alcohol mixture had incredible advantages such as pure combustion without the emiss of soot and in addition fuel combustion gave more horsepower without engine knocking but Thomas Midgley continued with his research and within a few months made a new discovery it was discovered that a rare compound of lead mixed in proper proportions with gasoline made an ideal anti-ock fuel horsepower increased speed picked up and the knot was gone no man can and look at the amazing record of accomplishment here in this research division without confidence that these men are going ahead with an eye to the Future looking for new facts and principles which will make things better and make life easier for all of us in 1923 Midgley writes to his boss Charles karing at GM from Florida he's on vacation because he's actually got lead poisoning from all the research and he says can you imagine how much money we're going to make with this we're going to make $200 million maybe more the oil industry was even more carried away by this discovery and the biggest American Oil Company standard oil together with General Motors created a joint Corporation Ethel Corporation and built huge factories for the manufacturer of the lead additive tedra ethyl lead why pick Leed gasoline over alcohol if they both did the same thing well leted gasoline was far more profitable uh for one thing if you add a large percentage of alcohol into gasoline you've lost the petroleum sales so you've lost uh 10 15% maybe 20% of your market right there whereas if you add Leed gasoline you've got a product that you control you the oil industry control that's what they wanted lead is an old and well documented poison as early as the year 100 BC it was common knowledge in ancient Rome that lead could cause insanity and eventually incur death the Romans tried to protect the slaves that worked in the uh Silver Mines where they were exposed to lead uh from the dust uh by giving them crude masks to to prevent them from inhaling too much dust this is 2,000 years ago and so we knew that uh lad was poisonous what happened over the years was that uh we started to appreciate that lead toxicity could occur at lower and lower concentration lead is one of the best known poisons in history it was a well-known occupational poison in the industries of France and England and Germany in the industrial revolution and in the United States it was a well-known industrial poison so when Standard Oil and General Motors wanted to use it in gasoline Public Health officials were very very concerned they couldn't imagine why anybody would want to do a thing like this in the Autumn of 1922 the general manager of the American Health Department asked General Motors for an estimation of the health impact of using lead in gasoline at that time General Motors hadn't studied the question that closely and offered to finance an investigation and the American Ministry of mining recognizing the sensitivity of the matter and showing great understanding for some of the sponsor demands AG readed to word their findings General Motors Corporation specifically ask the US Bureau of mins not to refer to the study as a leaded gasoline study to simply not use the word LED so they would use a substitute word they would use the word which was the name of their product which was Ethel now Ethel is a woman's name and it's a very nice name for a woman my grandmother was named ethyl so they called it Ethyl gasoline but in fact it was Leed gasoline and the point was to move the attention away from lead but it was difficult to draw attention away from lead when for those Factory workers producing Tetra Eed the substance already had a bad reputation Looney gas means something that drives you crazy and that's what the workers called it because they knew that working in this particular part of the refinery was very dangerous in the DuPont facility down in deep water somebody had scrawled an enormous butterfly on the side of the wall to represent that this was the house of butterflies because what was happening was the workers saw butterflies that weren't there they were hallucinating because the poison was so malicious during the Autumn of 1924 more and more reports were published about workers growing ill and on October the 27th the new York Times printed an article about a Mr mcweeny who felt ill after coming home from work the newspaper wrote that early next morning his sister-in-law rang the police because he was acting irrationally and a patrolman was sent to the house to question him it ended with the patrolman having to enlist the aid of three other men to subdue mcweeny and take him to the Alexian hospital where he was put into a straight jacket the same day the newspaper reported that another employee and Mr dimmi had according to family members woken in the middle of the night and walked out of his second story bedroom window when Standard Oil Company opened its tetraethyl Leed plant in 1924 they had created a process so hazardous that within a month of opening operations five people died violently insane and another 45 or so uh were severely injured by the wor first lead poisoning any of the coroners or doctors had ever seen this caused an enormous outcry people said how the heck did that happen and when they find out that the same substance is being put in their gasoline and they didn't even know it uh then there is um a call for a government investigation in many cities such as New York Philadelphia and Washington the sale of leaded gasoline was forbidden