the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

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conditioning. In 1952, Pop u lar Mechanics magazine celebrated its fi fty-
year anniversary by honoring fi fty Americans for their “contributions to
the welfare of mankind during the past half- century,” and Midgley was
listed among luminaries such as Orville and Wilbur Wright, Charles
Lindbergh, and Albert Einstein. He also was inducted into the National
Inventors Hall of Fame in 2003, where he rightfully took his place in the
pantheon of architects of modern American living alongside Alexander
Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.
At the same time, though, Midgley’s two landmark inventions
were, by century’s end, linked to untold deaths, widespread disease, and a
potentially cataclysmic change in the very atmosphere of the planet. As
epic goofs go, leaded gas and chlorofluorocarbons together had the same
destructive potential as global nuclear holocaust. We are assured that,
were he alive today, the ever-creative Midgley would be leading the effort
to solve the problems he inadvertently created. Given his track record,
though, maybe it’s best that he isn’t trying to help.
“Midgley was an engineer by training,” wrote author Bill Bryson
in his 2003 bestseller A Short History of Nearly Everything, “and the world
would no doubt have been a safer place if he had stayed so.”
Midgley’s transformation from mechanical engineer to renowned
chemist began in 1916 while he was working for the fabled Charles Kettering
at Dayton Research Laboratories (which later became the General
Motors Research Division) in Dayton, Ohio. In the fall of that year, Kettering
asked Midgley to figure out why internal- combustion engines had
an annoying knock which seemed to rob them of power. Midgley’s work
on the problem was delayed by the start of World War I. But by 1921 he’d
not only identified the source of the knock but figured out a way to stop it
by adding a mea sure of tetraethyl lead—a long- known neurotoxin—to
gasoline. By 1922, according to several accounts, Midgley’s experimentation
with leaded gasoline was taking a toll on his own health. He was suffering
from lead-poisoning symptoms, which he described in a letter as