the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

BEWARE SOLUTIONS THAT CREATE NEW PROBLEMS 29
“almost identical to the . . . second stage of tuberculosis,” and had to take
six weeks off work. Still, he claimed tetraethyl lead was safe in the diluted
form sold to the public, and defended that unverified theory when the
U.S. Public Health Service started asking questions about the health risks.
In a letter to a professional acquaintance concerned about the potential
damage leaded gasoline might cause, Midgley wrote: “The exhaust does
not contain enough lead to worry about, but no one knows what legislation
might come into existence fostered by competition and fanatical health
cranks.”
Midgley and his employers clearly ignored safer alternatives for decades
while marketing leaded “ethyl” gasoline to an enthusiastic driving
public, according to “The Secret History of Lead,” a damning twentyone-
thousand-word article by Jamie Lincoln Kitman in the March 20,
2000, issue of the Nation. Unfortunately, car engines make terrifi c aerosolizers,
and thus began decades of unnecessarily toxic spew from car exhaust
pipes that left an estimated 7 million tons of lead in soil, air, and
water, not to mention in the flesh and blood of every organism exposed to
it. According to U.S. government statistics, by the mid-1980s, an estimated
five thousand Americans were dying each year from lead-related
heart disease, and 68 million young children were exposed to lead between
1927 and 1987. It took more than sixty years before the federal
government had the gumption to stand against General Motors, Du Pont,
and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now known as Exxon) to outlaw lead in
gasoline in favor of less toxic additives.
Despite the scope of that disaster, Midgley’s discovery of leaded
gasoline pales when compared to the potential ecological devastation of
chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which he discovered in 1928. General Motors
had bought a small Detroit refrigeration business and renamed it
Frigidaire. Although the company was able to improve the performance,
design, and manufacturing of its home refrigerators through the 1920s,
Kettering, by then the company’s head, suspected that America was ready