Figure 1—An artist’s depiction of a lead-poisoned worker, New York Journal, October 31, 1924, page 2.
I was referring to Thomas Midgley, who "discovered" that the addition of Tetraethyllead to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines, not Charles Kettering.
"In 1924, dissatisfied with the speed of DuPont's TEL production using their "bromide process", General Motors and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now known as ExxonMobil) created the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to produce and market TEL. Ethyl Corporation built a new chemical plant using a high-temperature ethyl chloride process at the Bayway Refinery in New Jersey.[7] Within the first two months of its operation however, the new plant was plagued by more cases of lead poisoning, hallucinations, insanity, and then five deaths in quick succession.
On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever.[5][8] However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley would later have to take leave of absence from work after being diagnosed with lead poisoning.[9] Midgley was relieved of his position as vice president of GMCC in April 1925, reportedly due to his inexperience in organizational matters, but he remained an employee of General Motors."
However, Charles Kettering may be more despicable for knowingly promoting something that he knew to be lethal. He did this to obtain a patent that allowed his company a monopoly position in the market and to make his company very profitable. At best, that would be unethical.
"While use of ethanol could not be patented, TEL’s use as an additive could. Kettering and Midgley secured its patent and proceeded to promote the use of TEL as an additive in lieu of other options. Kettering became the first president of the newly founded Ethyl Corporation that started to produce TEL in 1923. One year later he hired Robert A. Kehoe as the medical expert to proclaim that leaded gasoline was safe for humans. That its use was an ecological disaster leading to a global lead contamination was not acknowledged until many decades later."
"Although other anti-knock additives were known, researchers at General Motors’ (GM’s) Dayton, Ohio, facilities believed that they could make more money with leaded gasoline. In 1923, Thomas Midgley calculated that it would be possible to capture 20% of the gasoline market and make 3 cents per gallon, for about $36 million per year. Within a decade the profits would be ten times that amount, and by the 1950s the profits would be in the billions."
"A flurry of correspondence between GM and the public health community preceded the public controversy by two years. Warnings about the danger of leaded gasoline came directly to Midgley and Kettering from Robert Wilson of MIT, Reid Hunt of Harvard, Yandell Henderson of Yale, and Charles Kraus of the University of Pottsdam in Germany. Kraus had worked on tetraethyl lead for many years and called it “a creeping and malicious poison” that had killed a member of his dissertation committee."
Figure 1—An artist’s depiction of a lead-poisoned worker, New York Journal, October 31, 1924, page 2.
1970 – US Environmental Protection Agency created. Car manufacturers ordered to begin building engines to run on unleaded gasoline by 1975. Ethyl Corp. unsuccessfully opposes phase-out of leaded gasoline in courts.
1970 – US auto makers develop catalytic converter as a stop-gap technology while they develop cleaner engines. TEL poisoned the catalytic converters so the pressure was on to get lead -free gasoline (petrol) on the market to permit catalytic converters. In response to this the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) orders introduction of unleaded gasoline and issues an order for lead-gasoline-free cars by 1975, thus beginning the world’s first national phase-out of leaded petrol. A health model predicted that the effect of the introduction of unleaded gasoline on lead concentrations in the blood of US residents would be minor. Ref and graph (adapted from USCDC) (Murdoch 2005)
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