![]() Midgley’s innovations - particularly the chlorofluorocarbons - seemed like brilliant ideas at the time, but 50 years taught us otherwise. The arc of Midgley’s life points to a debate that has intensified in recent years, which can be boiled down to this: As we make decisions today, how much should we worry about consequences that might take decades or centuries to emerge? Will seemingly harmless G.M.O.s (genetically modified organisms) bring about secondary effects that become visible only to future generations? Will early research into nanoscale materials ultimately allow terrorists to unleash killer nanobots in urban centers? This year, the United Nations released an encouraging study reporting that the ozone layer was indeed on track to fully recover from the damage caused by Midgley’s chlorofluorocarbons - but not for another 40 years. That might seem like the distant past, but the truth is we are still living with the consequences of Midgley’s innovations. What should we make of the disquieting career of Thomas Midgley Jr.? There are material reasons for revisiting his story now, beyond the one accidental rhyme of history: the centennial of leaded gasoline’s first appearance on the market in 1923. ![]() ![]() Indeed, there may be no other single person in history who did as much damage to human health and the planet, all with the best of intentions as an inventor. But each turned out to have deadly secondary effects on a global scale. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.Įach of these innovations offered a brilliant solution to an urgent technological problem of the era: making automobiles more efficient, producing a safer refrigerant. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise - the inventor killed by his own invention! - would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it - in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. ![]() In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. Fifty years before the arrival of smart-home devices, Midgley wired up the rotary telephone in his bedroom so that a few spins of the dial would operate the sprinklers. He installed a wind gauge on the roof that would sound an alarm in his bedroom, alerting him whenever the lawn risked being desiccated by a breeze. Midgley cultivated his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career. Golf-club chairmen from across the Midwest would visit his estate on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, purely to admire the grounds the Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley’s lawn on its letterhead. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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