Do we like Thomas Midgley Jr.?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Two genuinely clever inventions caused huge harm to public health and the planet, and he brushed off warnings; the good is real but small beside it.
Nothing new on him lately: no fresh scandal or news hook, just the usual retrospectives. Thomas Midgley Jr. was a General Motors engineer in the 1920s, working with Charles Kettering on a problem every car had: engine knock. He found tetraethyl lead, sold as “Ethyl”, and later led the team behind Freon, the first CFC.
Here's the catch with the lead. Ethanol worked as an anti-knock fix too, but it was too cheap and couldn't be patented, so lead it was. Ethyl-treated petrol grabbed about 80 per cent of the US market in little over a decade, even though lead is a poison that hits children especially hard.
Now the harm test. At a press event in 1924 Midgley poured the additive over his hands, inhaled its fumes for about a minute and said “I could do this every day without getting any health problems whatsoever.” One account says scientists wrote urging him to stop, and that he and Kettering dismissed the warnings and fretted about “fanatical health cranks” forcing restrictive laws. That's his own words and acts, not just the company he kept.
The Freon story is murkier but still ugly in outcome. CFCs were marketed as non-toxic and non-flammable, a real improvement on refrigerants like ammonia, and he reportedly inhaled the gas and blew out a candle to prove it. The ozone damage only became public in the mid-1970s, long after he died, and the Montreal Protocol began phasing CFCs out in 1987. It's hard to pin that one on him as knowing harm.
The good stuff is real, if modest. He was a proper innovator, and the article on him credits a rare mix of practicality, science and showmanship, plus affordable refrigeration and aerosol propellants. He collected the American Chemical Society's Perkin and Priestley Medals and its presidency. Those are honours for the work, though, not evidence he was kind to people, and nothing I found shows him standing up for others at a cost to himself.
There's a fair counterpoint. Historian Bill Kovarik calls him “just an employee”, and CNN reports experts see him more as a cog in a corporate machine. Fair enough, but he was the public face of the safety claims and the one doing the hand-washing demonstration. As for the good-person test, no court or legal cases against him turned up, and the record on his private conduct is thin, so it's a mixed result rather than a fail.