Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented (2016)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-invented-180961368/

50•downbad_•1h ago

Comments

aa_is_op•1h ago

The guy that invented spent years bed-ridden because of it... yet he still went to trade shows to show it off

afzalive•51m ago

And he also invented CFCs

chistev•45m ago

He was bedridden because of Polio.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872443

m4d•35m ago

Anytime Thomas Midgley Jr. pops up, I take the opportunity to re-listen to his episode on the Memory Palace. Wonderful bit of historical biography: https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/

throw1234567891•34m ago

“What don’t kill you makes you more strong”.

cyanydeez•45m ago

i'm fairly certain the reason trump was elected is the long tail of leaded gasoline; the timing fits pretty well.

Epa095•29m ago

Why did these same people vote differently earlier? Does the effect of leaded gasoline show up later in life?

And does not explain all the young men voting for him.

digitaltrees•14m ago

They didn’t vote differently. There were a larger number of the greatest generation that were more comfortable with shared sacrifice in service of society and less entitled like the baby boomers are.

vlian2088•10m ago

now let's dig up some old timey polls and see how the greatest generation felt about the issues you hold dear :)

ck2•42m ago

and still sprayed all around the surrounding land at almost every airport in the USA and worldwide from prop aircraft exhaust despite knowing ANY amount is toxic and irreversible for 30+ years

* https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

londons_explore•38m ago

You say that in the past tense... But pretty much every propeller plane worldwide still uses the stuff...

mr_toad•24m ago

Only in piston engines, which are a minority of propeller planes. Most commercial propeller aircraft are turboprops, and they use jet fuel. And diesel engines are slowly taking over from gasoline in piston engines.

mh-•8m ago

Correct. For others reading this though: virtually all piston-engine GA aircraft in the US today are still burning 100LL (leaded), and there are nearly 200,000 of them actively flying.

There is a timeline to transition to UL, but very low collective confidence it'll happen by the 2030 goal.

dnemmers•7m ago

Very true that only recently, a lead-free substitute was available.

https://g100ul.com/

phendrenad2•34m ago

Same with cigarettes and asbestos. Everyone knew smokers had shorter lives, but the facts were suppressed because it was inconvenient. Everyone knew asbestos was dangerous, but they put it in every single house for decades because "fire was worse".

And don't even get me started on DDT and teflon.

hyperhello•22m ago

Cigarette smoking really got going in the world wars, I understand, especially ww2 when the world had manufacturers serving the effort. The custom is dying with the veterans as everyone knows they have a hall pass for it but the rest of us don’t. So smoking was a shorter life but that hardly matters when you’re deployed in theater.

louky•30m ago

The major proponent was also known as

Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0]

Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1]

[0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

mmooss•4m ago

> Accidentally

Based on the OP, it wasn't at all accidental. They knew it was dangerous and chose it because they could make more money than with safer alternatives such as ethanol.

ChrisArchitect•24m ago

Some previous discussion:

2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

culi•22m ago

Yes and the toxic effects of asbestos had been known for thousands of years before popcorn ceilings became a fad

dbg31415•17m ago

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA

HumanEater•11m ago

Why is this surfacing up?

phoronixrly•9m ago

Because LLMs are our current leaded gasoline.

weard_beard•4m ago

The alternative to lead that raises octane and prevents engine knocking is ethanol.

meristohm•10m ago

For an animated version of this story, see Cosmos, season 2 (I forget which episode, but it was helpful in teaching about this in high school)

p0w3n3d•9m ago

  Ah. We can't patent XYZ let's use ABC.

Such sociopathic thinking.

dnemmers•6m ago

A good Veritasium video on the subject:

https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?is=MorITIg_MvFrKtvR

leoc•4m ago

Lucas Reilly's Mental Floss article on Clair Patterson https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... is a much better piece. I'll also recycle https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo 's old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 on this article from its 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 (again, what follows is his or her work not mine!):

> Two beliefs became entrenched:

1. that lead is natural to the human body, and

2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed

Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]

A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.

Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again...

[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...

Show HN: I built a digital game master screen

Debugging Performance Regressions

Grade Down of Grade Up (2023)

Arrugaste

Gabriel Naudé (1600 – 1653)

Legionnaires' Disease Outbreak on the Upper East Side of Manhattan

Fuck Work (2016)

Ask HN: Advice for First Child?

Show HN: Free tool that generates a freelance SOW with built-in protection

How to Hide from Killer Drones

AI rebrands fail to deliver a lasting share price boost

Shipping OpenStrike: A Counter-Strike-Shaped FPS on a 2004 Handheld

Ask HN: Has single-task focus become outdated in the AI era?

Nvidia RTX 3060 returns to retail 5 years after original launch, priced at $339

Architectures Agents Can Read

ZeroFS vs. Amazon S3 Files

Our co-author is an agent; our translation pipeline refuses to be one

Washington's Bet on Intel Is Starting to Pay Off

Deadwax – tells you which pressing of a vinyl record you own is worth keeping

The Dogfood Advantage

Coder – Delegate the coding to coder tasks powered by codex/Claude engines

Safe from AI: which jobs will help you thrive in the future?

AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence

Get your work recognized: write a brag document (2019)

The Second Life of Sanskrit

NSQ: A realtime distributed messaging platform

Who manages the agents?

Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, has died

The Future Worth Building Is Human

My robot mower kept stopping with no error code, so I built diagnostics for it