Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

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

by downbad_ • 11 days ago

202 137 11 days ago

smithsonianmag.com

aa_is_op• 11 days ago

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

afzalive• 11 days ago

And he also invented CFCs

chistev• 11 days ago

He was bedridden because of Polio.

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

m4d• 11 days 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/

throw12345678914• 11 days ago

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

none25854• 11 days ago

Genuinely trying to help - one would generally phrase this as "... makes you stronger".

cyanydeez2• 11 days ago

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

Epa095• 11 days 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• 11 days 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.

hyperhello5• 11 days ago

Yes, the psychological effects of environmental lead last a lifetime. No, they didn’t vote differently, they have always gravitated to actors that promise simple solutions and highlight bad blood and animus.

add-sub-mul-div• 11 days ago

It doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to weaken a strong country to the point where a reality show buffoon can become president.

cyanydeez2• 11 days ago

there's no "same people"; leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80's but wasn't finished until around 2000s.

The elderly are simply more engaged and that's what happened.

schmookeeg4• 11 days ago

Calling my airplane a MAGA airplane is a good way to get my wife to argue for a boat instead. :)

ck22• 11 days 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• 11 days ago

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

mr_toad• 11 days 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.

dnemmers2• 11 days ago

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

https://g100ul.com/

projektfu• 11 days ago

Also UL94 (https://www.swiftfuelsavgas.com/) could be used in many models. Unfortunately some have been previously upgraded to high-compression engines to get a few more horsepower and they can't use UL94.

Some can run on ethanol-free 87-octane automotive fuel, generally the low-compression engines that already can run 80/87 aviation fuel.

80/87 and 100/130 leaded fuels are all but unavailable, but 100LL is ubiquitous. There is a chicken and egg problem to make G100UL and UL94 available, which will encourage its use. Even automotive fuel is hard to find at airports, possibly because they don't want the liability of improper fueling. (100LL is compatible with almost every gasoline aircraft engine, the rest are not.)

The G100UL also may have an issue with being too good of a solvent, although the developer insists that's a libel.

Swift Fuels is also supposed to introduce a different type of 100-octane unleaded called 100R that has had good results in testing but hasn't been broadly approved yet.

It was like pulling teeth from a dragon to get the FAA to move forward with G100UL as I understand it, and then they suddenly approved it for just about anything provided they write a supplemental type certificate. So maybe the same will happen when/if 100R is approved and someone will handle the marketing.

phendrenad2• 11 days 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.

hyperhello5• 11 days 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.

gilrain2• 11 days ago

The custom is dying with the veterans

You might want to update your knowledge.

jghn2• 11 days ago

Asbestos gets a bit of a bad rap. There's an enormous difference from e.g. asbestos tiles and siding in a house vs loose clumps of insulation at mass scale in large factories and such.

But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.

edelbitter• 11 days ago

I guess some forms of asbestos are fine to use in residential development.. as long as houses never burn or get damaged in earthquakes or suffer flood damage or need extensive renovations.. and as long as we do not care about some unimportant landscapes and river systems in (ideally, canada or russia or something of the sort) and all of its current and future inhabitants.

louky• 11 days 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.

mmooss3• 11 days 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.

cyberax2• 11 days ago

I don't think he really appreciated the danger of lead. Its acute toxicity was well-known, but not its chronic toxicity.

And plenty of stuff is toxic in large quantities but harmless (or even vital!) in small quantities.

embedding-shape2• 11 days ago

I had one purple link on that second Wikipedia page, which (macabre as it sounds) was very interesting to read through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...

Also leads to another great list-of-lists; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unusual_deaths

b-kf3• 11 days ago

Even more macabre (I should not admit to this publically...): I can't help but find this one (from your first link) quite... hilarious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reichelt.ogv

Elaborate contraption, jumps, falls like a stone, is dead. The end.

Imaginary person: "But he had balls and believed in his own theories."

Me: "Ehm but... how difficult would it have been to throw a wooden puppet instead... or run scaled down experiments first,... than to just immediately jump..."

And Edit: He did run dummy experiments and they clearly showed he shouldn't have jumped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Experiments

Edit 2: That article is very interesting, regarding the jump: "Initial reports speculated on Reichelt's state of mind: none assumed he had been suicidal, but many called him discombobulated in the brain. [...] interview with one of his friends, who claimed that the tailor had felt pressured into giving a dramatic demonstration to attract sponsors, without whom he could not expect to make a profit before any patent expired." (So human nature at play. Financial pressure, wanting to will something to work, guts in the wrong places. An heroic last ditch stunt, combined with a not quite sane state of mind)

flaunf2213• 11 days ago

The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived

The titles like annoy me to no end.

Because Thomas Midgley was an engineer. Not overlord of General Motors. Not director. Not even a large shaholder.

GM Leadership knew effects of TEL. And for decades traded everyone's health for their profits. Midgley is complicit, but he's just a small piece.

gertop• 11 days ago

People who absolve engineers of all responsibility annoy me to no end. They're omnipresent on this forum and justify working for Facebook with things like "not my decision" or "someone else would do it" or "it's not that bad you just don't understand" or "I'm just following orders"

masklinn• 11 days ago

Midgley is complicit, but he's just a small piece.

Midgley used to tour around “proving” the safety of leaded gas by pouring it on his hands. And had to be treated twice for lead poisoning.

He was very much a culprit.

Grimblewald• 11 days ago

people like him exist today. people who will do things the scientific community knows is dangerous for pay. Due to a lack of morals or intellect required to understand rammifications is unknown.

Midgley didnt invent most if any of what was packaged up and commodified, he just appropriated research at the time into products without a care in the world. its for that reason that me and many other scientists simply dont publish some results anymore.

The mind it takes to discover and formalize a thing, will understand its problems. The mind it takes to commodify something once formalized, can be many steps down, and so, is unlikely to be capable of seeing the problem.

Therefore, anything which can cause serious issues wont be released. why? because even if we as the inventors go against the profit narrative, we'll be destroyed. people only listen when there's money to be made, but when we say "ok, that's eboygh fossil fuels, we need to slow down" funding gets cut, reputation and character gets attacked, and you largly get deplatformed.

tmtvl• 11 days ago

Also the subject of a very entertaining episode of Citation Needed.

mapmeld• 11 days ago

I was in Dayton Ohio to see the Wright brothers stuff. There were sidewalk plaques for inventors and celebrities who lived in the city, and they had one for Thomas Midgley Jr. I was shocked!

Fun fact: during their time Dayton had the most patents per capita of anywhere in the US.

JKCalhoun• 11 days ago

I liked the comment someone made some months back when Thomas Midgley Jr. came up on HN: best to ban everything the guy ever invented just to be safe.

ChrisArchitect• 11 days ago

Some previous discussion:

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

culi• 11 days ago

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

dbg31415• 11 days ago

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History

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

This, my dear friend, is all I can at present recollect on the Subject. You will see by it, that the Opinion of this mischievous Effect from Lead, is at least above Sixty Years old; and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv'd and practis'd on.
Benjamin Franklin, 1786

tim-tday3• 11 days ago

Elon might take the lead with his destruction of US aid. I heard an estimate that millions of unnecessary deaths may come of it.

HumanEater• 11 days ago

Why is this surfacing up?

weard_beard• 11 days ago

hmm good question.

meristohm• 11 days 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)

fhdkweig• 11 days ago

https://www.space.com/25579-cosmos-recap-earth-age-lead-pois...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room

p0w3n3d• 11 days ago

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

Such sociopathic thinking.

dnemmers2• 11 days ago

A good Veritasium video on the subject:

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

leoc• 11 days 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...

Fricken• 11 days ago

We've known about climate change for more than a century, but we're pigs, we don't care.

tim-tday3• 11 days ago

I think it’s important not to use the “we” word here.

1) Many people know and care. 2) some people lie for profit 3) other people are willfully ignorant and allow the liars keep at it because it’s more convenient.

And even among those who know and care there’s different amounts people are willing to do about it. I imagine you (who theoretically know and care) still drive, fly, use plastic, Eat foods grown with petroleum based fertilizers, buy products shipped long distances with petroleum. (As do I)

The key is to go after the liars so we can set sane policies based on findings of fact pursued in good faith.

anonymars• 11 days ago

I think this is a good summary for politics generally

none25854• 11 days ago

"We" live in a democracy and our leaders are chosen by "us". You don't get to pick and choose. You are your government assuming you're from any western democracy.

The planet is becoming inhospitable for humans and honestly likely for the best. At least some folks will get rich out of it.

ErroneousBosh4• 11 days ago

25 years ago in the UK, leaded petrol was being phased out but still pretty common. The UK Government was giving people grants to have existing cars converted to run on LPG, so they'd only run on a coke can of petrol for a minute or so on startup then switch over to gas.

Catalytic converters? Don't need 'em! There's no CO or unburnt fuel in the exhaust to catalyse because they run as lean as a vegan's dog!

CO2 emissions? Sure, but the stuff is getting flared off as waste at refineries anyway, and we're not going to stop making plastics and fertilisers any time soon, so may as well extract useful work from burning it!

We could have had incredibly clean cities everywhere by now, by simply keeping older cars on the road and adapting them to run on much cleaner safer fuel.

But there was a problem, an absolute bombshell of a problem. The fatal flaw that killed LPG as a road fuel.

It didn't sell new cars. It didn't sell anyone any debt.

So they came up with "scrappage schemes" where you'd get a couple of hundred quid for your old car, it would get destroyed, and then all you had to do was buy a nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel car instead, at some swingeing rate of interest (expect to pay well over twice the sticker price by the end of it - and no, you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package).

And you see how well that worked out.

bluGill• 11 days ago

LPG had the same problem as electric cars. In the early years there was no infrastructure and so if you buy one you're an early adopter and you can't actually go anywhere. It took a while to get that infrastructure and now electric cars are useful for most trips. You can use LPG cars to go for most trips in the US even today. However, you better plan ahead because finding a place of fuel is going to require some effort. I had a few LNG stations near me, but they seem to have all been torn out, meaning that never made it.

Gas cars faced the same thing when they first came out but by the time they became used for longer trips there was gas everywhere and in the meantime there was gas at least where you bought the car and so it was good enough for the short trips that bought it for.

ErroneousBosh4• 11 days ago

That was kind of it. Until maybe five years ago, every branch of Morrison's had two LPG pumps at their petrol stations, as did Asda.

Now it's mostly wholesale fuel suppliers that have pumps.

wolvoleo4• 11 days ago

LPG was really popular in Holland, that wasn't the problem. You could get it everywhere. It was cheap too.

There were just some artificial issues:

- The government didn't want LPG owners to be cheaper off (it was much cheaper per kilometer) so they raised road tax substantially making it only economical if you drove a lot

- There were no cars running on LPG off factory. You always had to deal with an aftermarket install with a big tank that took up half your trunk. It didn't replace the original tank because that was needed for starting, though part of it could have been replaced by LPG storage. After all you didn't need 80 litres of it. They didn't do that however. Some cars had donut tanks installed (for the LPG) that fit in the spare wheel space but they were tiny and you had to fill up constantly.

- Engine performance was significantly reduced on LPG.

- The tanks were pressurised which were a bit dangerous and didn't store a lot of mileage for the space. You couldn't fill them up 100% either. High pressure vessels and high energy collisions don't go well together. You can design around that but because the only options were aftermarket the cars were never designed with this in mind.

- After fuelling the hose was pressurised and when you released it it blew a whole bunch of gas in your face. Yuck. I used to kick the release lever from a distance but it didn't really help.

We had one for a while but it was kinda a clumsy affair. Lack of places to fill up was however not a problem at all. Despite all the artificially created barriers it was still a common choice for the high mileage driver in the 90s and early 2000s.

I don't think it's really a thing anymore. EVs have taken over this space. It was never a great solution anyway as it's still a fossil fuel causing CO2 release. It was never really going to be a permanent solution.

pjc502• 11 days ago

LPG and CNG had a consistent niche, but they weren't transformative and ended up not being significantly cheaper either. And recently we saw the problem with natural gas supply availability.

With EVs, all of this goes away and you can charge at home, including off your own solar panels. The technology has finally got to a tipping point, thanks to a couple of decades of phone batteries.

you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package

[Citation needed] .. but yeah the scrappage schemes (various) were of dubious value and something of a bung to the motor industry and to quieten opposition to things like the LEZ.

ErroneousBosh4• 10 days ago

Even down south here at 56°N I'd need a set of solar panels about 100m x 100m to charge even a very small car in less than a day.

JumpCrisscross3• 11 days ago

countries where leaded gasoline was—or still is—used

Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021

gilrain2• 11 days ago

…but is exhausting at volume from most small aircraft you see. I say sadly, as an aviation geek; we can do better!

aftbit3• 11 days ago

We're working on it, slowly but surely. This has been a known problem for a long time, at least since 2009 if not earlier. GAMI's G100UL was approved as a 100LL replacement in 2022, but there is still some controversy.

Avweb has done a good series of videos on this. There were some real engineering concerns and some typical aviation conservative decision making. But really, it's a tragedy of the FAA fumbling the ball for decades at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F-WngVMJBQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvse4Xhzwuk

https://avweb.com/features/unleaded-avgas-airport-playbook-l...

https://avweb.com/aviation-news/judge-denies-g100ul-motion/

https://g100ul.com/

cucumber37328422• 11 days ago

There's an equal and opposite person who'll be screeching about safety if you try and monkey with the fuel.

That's exactly why this is taking so long. There's no free lunch.

FuckButtons• 11 days ago

There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.

bigibas123• 11 days ago

I've heard arsenic also being one of the elements with similar issues

jmorenoamor• 10 days ago

What does lead have to give those properties?

wartywhoa23• 11 days ago

Will anyone be held accountable though?

none25854• 11 days ago

Betteridge's law here

tokai• 11 days ago

People like to point and laugh at the Romans at their use of lead in plumbing and wine. But they were never even close to being as stupid and callous as we managed to be the last 150 years. They are going to be shaking their head at us for thousands of year hopefully.

hunmernop• 11 days ago

Gas itself is poison. Just take a deep huff at the gas station. EVs are the only way to go. At least the pollution is localized, not down every inner city street with exhaust and other vapors.

vorticalbox4• 11 days ago

Maybe you can enlighten me.

My question that once you mined the materials for the car + battery, shipped that somewhere to be built, then shipped that to be sold.

Then you have the added waste battery once it not longer hold enough charge. Is it actually better for the environment?

If we add all this extra pull on the grid we need to generate the power for that too.

kevstev• 11 days ago

Is this a real question? ICE cars have a battery too.

realusername2• 11 days ago

Yeah it's actually better and it's not even close, provided that the cars make more than 50k km.

Petrol engines have terrible efficiency and that's also what makes the petrol numbers so bad.

Superfud• 11 days ago

Batteries fortunately do not destroy the raw materials they are made from. So eventually we can stop mining new raw materials once we have built enough batteries. In addition, batteries for cars live a surprising long time - and can be used to stabilize the grid once they diminish in oomf (technical term).

pjc502• 11 days ago

This is a very stale set of talking points.

wolvoleo4• 11 days ago

Lithium batteries can be recycled really well. That's why there's so much effort going into tracking them. So they don't end up in a landfill.

jaapz• 11 days ago

Yes, electric cars are better for the environment over their entire lifespan. And yes clean energy will be needed to power them.

ICE's are actually shockingly bad at efficiently converting fossil fuel into movement. They mostly produce waste heat and exhaust gasses.

dang2• 11 days ago

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 - Sept 2021 (399 comments)

b-kf3• 11 days ago

`Discussed at the time` and here I expected a link to a HN thread from the 1920s!

But yes, `(of the article)`, guess my reaction was anticipated :)

dang2• 11 days ago

Yep we've been around the block a few times with that pre-emptive trick: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

b-kf3• 11 days ago

I vaguely remember amounts of lead exposure and IQ (as in lower) could be linked quite well and there was a map showing that for the US.

Trying to find it I stumbled upon this https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119 -> "The average lead-linked loss in cognitive ability was 2.6 IQ points per person as of 2015." Quite insane to think about. Obviously that's more than merely leaded gasoline though.

Regarding the map, not what I was looking for, but https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/... from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02735-x is interesting.

Still an ongoing issue, interesting article, some insane metrics in that image though. Lower image is showing `relative IQ cost` for children 0-9 years of age as of 2019,... as in `estimated loss of earning due to less IQ`, boy oh boy, let that sink in: Starting with incomplete exposure data, estimating the resulting IQ loss, then translating that into lifetime earnings (projected somehow into the future economy)...

casey2• 11 days ago

Switzerland banned in in 1926, the Soviet Union in major cities in the 50s. Everyone knows lead is deadly, but so is going outside. Policy makers have to weight the risks of velocity now vs crashing later.

Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

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