[louky]

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.

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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-kf]

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)

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There just are so many unfortunate deaths, that one feels so preventable as well. I also have to admit to liking the ending of the Wikipedia image description a lot:

> [...] Police and others crowd around the body of Reichelt as it is carried away. They then measure the depth of the hole in the frozen ground made by his fall (15 cm).

At least they got something out of it I suppose :)

[mmooss]

> 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.

[cyberax]

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.

[whatisthiseven]

Then you don't know anything about the man. He intentionally inhaled large quantities of leaded gas to prove it was safe to on lockers.

He would then spend months in Florida recovering from lead poisoning.

He knew, and he didn't care.

[cyberax]

Yeah, that kinda reinforces it. He knew about the acute effects, but not about cumulative damage.

I don't think that cumulative toxicity started entering the public mindset until well into the middle of the century.

[mmooss]

He's not 'the public' but a highly educated and experienced leading expert in the subject. You have no idea what he knew (afaict) and even if the chronic problems were indeed unknown to him, anyone, even a member of 'the public', could infer that the acute problems certainly risked long-term problems

[mmooss]

Interesting - what is that based on?

He's not some incidental commentator. He's an engineer and a principle force behind this technology. He is responsible for the outcomes - 'I didn't know' is reckless negligence. And if there were clear acute problems, chronic problems weren't hard to guess at for anyone, much less an engineer, with all those resources, working on it for years.

[sysguest]

> engineer and a principle force behind this technology

well he's not some biochemist...

and even biochemists have trouble within their own field because there's so much 'unknown' stuff in biochem (eg Thalidomide scandal)

[mapmeld]

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]

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.

[tmtvl]

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

[flaunf221]

> 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.

[masklinn]

> 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.

[flaunf221]

Are we going to measure things by who got most sick or by who got the most out of it? Because if Midgley gets sick and his boss who knows everything gets a million dollars, I will blame his boss more.

For example Charles Kettering (essentially boss of Midgley) was Director of Research for 27 years at GM. Was large shareholder of GM. And he hired Robert Arthur Kehoe to prove that TEL is safe. And Kehoe did. The "proof" was that "you didn't definitively prove that TEL is unsafe, so it's okay".

Btw Kehoe is also the one who certified that Freon is safe.

[tim-tday]

He washed his hands with leaded gasoline on national television to show it was safe. It was not safe. He lied and suppressed the science. Even if other people lied he was the public face of the lie.

[Grimblewald]

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.

[gertop]

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"

[flaunf221]

Good thing I didn't absolve him of "all responsibility" and even wrote explicitly that he is complicit.

[jjk166]

There is an important subtlety which is that engineers are not responsible for which technical challenges get solved, they are responsible for how those technical challenges are solved. An engineer's ethical obligation is not to avoid working on something that could be used in a harmful way, it is to prevent incidental harm from its deliberate usage. There's nothing unethical about working on a fuel additive to prevent engine knock; knowingly using a poisonous compound which is going to create immense public health problems to solve the problem was the sin.

[hyperhello]

People who say annoy me to no end annoy me no end. They’re different phrases.

[tux3]

That's ironic, because the "no end" form was already a relatively new idiom. But "to no end" has already overtaken it in terms of popularity. Of course I meant the word "ironic" like I mean the word "literally"; which is to say, figuratively.

Being a prescriptivist creates no end of everyday pains. Language just won't conform.

[hyperhello]

The thing is that it’s always used in “annoy” or “frustrate” because they mistake the response as sympathetic annoyance or empathic frustration when it’s really just their misuse of language. I don’t want them to be responsible for their miscommunication in the future!

[jjk166]

They are not different phrases. "Annoy to no end" is the American English version while "annoy no end" is the British. Both are acceptable and mean the same thing.