October 01 2023, 13:25

Here’s another interesting story. At the beginning of the last century, one of the main problems in car manufacturing was engine knocking, which led to their damage and decreased efficiency. In the 1920s, General Motors developed tetraethyl lead—a supplement that successfully reduced engine knocks and increased the octane rating of gasoline, allowing engines to operate more efficiently. Together with “DuPont” and “Standard Oil,” General Motors created the Ethyl Corporation to market this.

The name “Ethyl” was specifically chosen to avoid scaring people with the word “lead.” The inventor of this, Thomas Midgley, was well aware of the dangers of lead poisoning and warned his superiors, but money was more important. Almost immediately, workers in the plants began to exhibit unstable gaits and mental disorders. Thus, in 1924, at one poorly ventilated facility, five workers died within a few days, and thirty-five others became disabled. Once in the body, the substance “pretends” to be calcium, accumulating in the bones and continuing to poison the body after the initial exposure. The result—millions of deaths, and a host of various side effects in people’s behavior.

“Ethyl Corporation” always adhered to the practice of firmly denying the toxicity of its product. For several decades thereafter, the main bulk of gasoline in the USA contained tetraethyl lead in its composition.

By the way, Thomas Midgley is also the inventor of chlorofluorocarbons (freons) for refrigerators. According to historian John McNeill, the inventor “had a greater influence on the atmosphere than any other living organism in the history of Earth.” He died at the age of 55: was strangled by his own mechanism.

Interestingly, some scientists have demonstrated a correlation between the level of crime in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century and poisoning by tetraethyl lead in childhood, which led to developmental disorders of the central nervous system, and presumably resulted in increased delinquent behavior in adulthood, which presumably led to a rise in crime rates from the 1960s through the early 1990s. The drop in crime rates from the 1990s, according to this hypothesis, is explained by the reduced consumption of gasoline made using tetraethyl lead starting from the 1970s.