January 13, 2026 • 57 mins
The widespread use of leaded gasoline in the 20th century led to one of the world’s biggest public health and environmental disasters, the effects of which are still present today. Since its development in the 1920s, leaded gasoline has been linked to premature death, cognitive impairment, and behavioral issues in millions around the globe. How was such a toxic substance permitted to be sold, despite the tireless efforts of industrial medicine warriors like Alice Hamilton? In American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice, award-winning author and historian Daniel Stone tells the story of leaded gasoline - its heroes, its villains, and the lessons we can learn. What will emerge as this generation’s leaded gasoline? PFAS? Microplastics? Something else entirely? History doesn’t have to repeat, but it will unless we heed the lessons of the past. Tune in for a fascinating episode!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is This Podcast Will
Kill You. You're tuning in to the latest episode of the
tpw k Y book Club, a series where I bring
on authors of popular science and medicine books to chat
with them about their most recent work. We have covered
some wonderful topics so far this season, from important failures
(01:07):
in the history of medicine to the evolution of human language,
from how bacteria phases may help us in the fight
against antibiotic resistance, to the promising future of regenerative medicine,
and we've got more books on the horizon. To check
out what books you may have missed or those will
feature in upcoming episodes, head over to our website This
(01:30):
Podcast Will Kill You dot com and find the extras tab.
Under that tab, click on the link for our bookshop
dot org affiliate page, which has a bunch of TPWKY booklists,
including one for this book club. Make sure you're checking
back in on these lists regularly because I am always
adding more to them. If you have any books that
(01:51):
you think would be a great fit for the TPWKY
Book Club, we'd love to hear about them. The best
way to get in touch is through the contact us
form on our website. Two last things before we move
on to this week's book, and that is first to
please rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help us out.
And secondly, you can now find full video versions of
(02:13):
most of our newer episodes on YouTube. Make sure you're
subscribed to exactly Write Media's YouTube channel so you never
miss a new episode drop. The twentieth century was a
time of profound scientific and technological progress, from transportation via
horse drawn carriage to transoceanic airplanes, from telegrams to cell phones.
(02:36):
From sky high infant mortality rates to vaccines for dozens
of previously deadly infections. Over a mere one hundred years,
people's lives drastically changed, mostly for the better. But progress
comes at a cost. Sometimes that cost can only be
tallied in retrospect, while other times it can be and
(03:00):
thus preventable, but only if proper action is taken. When
tetra ethyl leaded gasoline was developed by Thomas Midgley in
the early nineteen twenties, it seemed like a miraculous and
inexpensive solution allowing cars to drive faster and farther. There
was just one small problem. Lead poisoning. While the manufacturers
(03:24):
of leaded gasoline insisted that their product was entirely safe,
other people, like occupational health pioneer Alice Hamilton, knew the
truth that if this product was widely introduced, it would
lead to a global lead poisoning pandemic. Despite these warnings,
we of course know how the story ends. Leaded gasoline
(03:47):
was sold around the world for decades before being banned,
harming untold millions. How this toxic substance was permitted to
be used in spite of ample evidence of its dangers
carries a powerful lesson for our society today. In this
week's episode, best selling author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins
(04:07):
University Daniel Stone joins me to discuss the story of
leaded gasoline and those who fought against it in his
book American Poison, A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who
Battled for Environmental Justice. His compelling storytelling transports readers back
to the United States in the early nineteen twenties, when
it seemed like anything was possible and technology would save
(04:31):
the day while corporations grew very wealthy in the process.
Stone then introduces us to an unsung hero of industrial medicine.
Alice Hamilton, who fights for those who didn't have a voice,
who were seen as expendable in the pursuit of progress.
In Midgley and his letted Gasoline, she finds a formidable foe,
(04:53):
and the resulting battle would leave permanent scars on the
health of the entire world. The story of Alice Hamilton
and letted Gasoline. It's difficult to take in knowing how
things end, but it's one that we need to bear
in mind, given our failure to learn from the past.
What will be the next letted gasoline, the next asbestos,
(05:16):
the next radiation, things viewed as miraculous in their early
years but later found to be dangerous, deadly even will
it be microplastics, p fasts, or so called forever chemicals,
something else we don't yet know about. Unfortunately, we can't
undo the harm that letted gasoline has already caused, but
(05:39):
we can use its story as a roadmap for a
better future. I am really excited to share this conversation
with you all, so let's take a quick break and
get started. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today.
(06:14):
Thanks for having me in American Poison. You tell the
story of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline and the woman who
fought to bring its negative health effects to light. And
you mentioned that you first came across the story of
Alice Hamilton, or at least her name in a footnote.
What made you decide to dig deeper into her story
(06:35):
and where did it ultimately leave you?
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, it was a footnote, which is sort of fitting
for women of that era, right to be remembered, right
in such a minor way like that. I teach environmental
science and policy to graduate students, and I'm very steeped
in environmental history. You know what started the environmental movement
(06:58):
two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago? Who were
these big people, these big events that made us start
to care about the planet. And I teach this every semester.
And about five or six years ago, I came across
a footnote about Alice Hamilton, and I said, I've never
heard of this person. Who is this? And so I
googled her and read her whole Wikipedia page and I thought, Wow,
(07:21):
this she was someone, someone real and someone influential that
had completely escaped my view in the field and a
lot of my colleagues too. So I dug deeper and
deeper and was continually surprised at the sheer volume of
work this woman had done for the benefit of humanity,
(07:42):
really and got kind of not entirely forgotten, but certainly
not celebrated to the extent she deserved.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
She is an incredible just a truly remarkable person, and
her life journey is fascinating because it kind of takes
us roundabout way where she didn't set out to become
one of the leaders of this new field of industrial medicine,
but yet that is ultimately what she did become. And
I'm wondering, you know, if you could tell me more
(08:12):
about the origins of this field and why it emerged
when it did.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Yeah, I often describe her as the Aaron Brockovich of
the early twentieth century, a woman who took on very
powerful polluting industries and tried to dislodge them or derail
them in ways that were dangerous. Sometimes she won, a
lot of times she didn't, but she was vindicated over
(08:38):
time in all of them. And so this is a
woman who was born in Indiana in eighteen sixty nine,
right after the Civil War. She grows up in a
very wealthy family among a lot of sisters and cousins
who are all taught basically to be helpful, you know,
find your way to help people, whatever it is. Go
(09:00):
into law, go into medicine, go into teaching, anything that
you think could improve someone else's life, not just your own.
Her path is through medicine. She becomes a doctor, which
is pretty rare in those days for a woman. You
had to be from a wealthy family to get into
medical school and go to medical school. And so she
becomes a doctor, and her first kind of twist in
(09:24):
her path comes in the eighteen nineties when she's a doctor,
but instead of being kind of a wealthy doctor who
serves rich people only, she decides she wants to serve
the poor, and she wants to serve marginalized people, immigrants,
people who don't speak English. And this was very much
not done in those days, to the extent that there
(09:45):
was really only one place that took on this kind
of work that had been started by Jane Adams in Chicago,
and it was called Hull House. Hull House was kind
of this melting pot of cultures and classes. They called
it a bridge between the classes because it was a
house where you know, people who didn't speak English, people
(10:05):
who didn't know how to read, people who needed help
getting jobs or their kids getting daycare while they went
to their jobs. It all sort of happened in this house.
We would now call this social work or social welfare work.
It didn't have a name back then. But Alice Hamilton
goes in and it's through here that she applies her
medical skills and knowledge to helping improve people's lives, mostly babies,
(10:30):
gets babies sick, but she also starts to notice that
other people in the community are getting sick too, People
have coughs, people have stomach issues, and she starts to
drop patterns. Right, all of the men who have the
same kind of like deep cough work in the same factory,
and all the ones who have like the wrist problems
(10:50):
are working in that other factory. And so she draws
these kind of patterns that we now call epidemiology. Back then,
it was called shoe leather epidemiology, because you'd literally have
to go from factory to factory and put these patterns together.
And eventually she do enough of this that she would
have like a body of research that she would take
(11:10):
to that factory or that boss or that industry and
say this thing you're doing is dangerous and here's how
or here's how to mitigate it or correct it. And
that's what started the field called occupational hygiene occupational medicine.
She really started it.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Tell me more about the primary concerns about working conditions
at the turn of the twentieth century. It was not
a very safe place, or most most factories were not
a very safe place to work. There was little oversight,
you know, what were some of the prevailing concerns or
things that emerged during that time that kind of drove
interest in this field.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, it was very dangerous to work in a factory
and very underpaid. You know. There was no sense of
what we now would call like workplace compensation or OSHA
or like anyone inspecting anything dangerous. There were a series
of like horrific accidents. There's one of the most famous
is the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York where
(12:12):
they locked the doors and so all these people burned
up in a building that should normally have had some
safety precautions. But the biggest storytelling element to this was
a book in nineteen oh six by a journalist named
Upton Sinclair who wrote a novel called The Jungle. We've
all heard of The Jungle now, and it was very
(12:34):
lightly fictionalized, but it was kind of an expose of
the pecking yards in Chicago, and the conditions he describes
were so horrific to the extreme that it sort of
woke up the upper classes in a way that they
could just completely close their eyes to this like horrifying
(12:55):
condition before, you know, like men burning alive, and people
get their limbs chopped off and falling into vats and
getting ground up with meat, you know, just like stomach churning,
things that had never before gotten out in a big
public way. And so this was an era, sort of
first decade of the twentieth century, when people were newly
(13:16):
confronting horrors in industrialization that had existed for a while
but were sort of newly.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Coming to light, right, right. And when Alice begins to
dig into this field and she starts to observe these
patterns that are coming out, especially in certain workers in
certain factories, you know, these lead factory employees with these
horrific coughs, she might not have realized that, yes, this
(13:44):
was a problem that was at least decades old, but
when it comes to lead. I mean this is a
problem that is millennial, Like it's thousands of years people
have been being exposed to lead and experiencing symptoms of
lead poisoning. Could you briefly take me on a tour
of like the highlights or low lights of the history
of lead and in many ways that we've used it
(14:06):
throughout human history.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, I mean, lead is as old as the planet itself.
It's an element, it's found on the periodic table, it
existed when the Earth was formed, and it also is
created when uranium decays, So uranium decays into an isotope
of lead. So we've had lead for longer than human
history by a lot. But we've also had it for
(14:29):
thousands of years in our use. And one of the
most prominent uses or use eras was really the Roman Empire.
And this was the time of again great sort of innovation,
advances of inventions, and the Romans had a lot of
things they liked to do with lead. Lead has these
miraculous qualities where it doesn't road, it doesn't really break down,
(14:53):
It adds texture, it adds brighter color, it adds sweeter
taste to almost everything. So the Romans used it not
only for their aqueducts and their plumbing. Of course, the
word plumbing comes from the word plume boom in lead.
That is why we call lead PB on the periodic table.
Plumbing effectively is named for lead. The Romans also used
(15:16):
it for their cooking utensils. They used it in the
powders on people's faces and makeup. They put it in
food to make it taste better, and of course they
put it in paints or any type of colorization to
make the colors brighter. This was a sort of miraculous use.
This was the miracle element. I call it the plastic
of its era, right, like you could basically do anything
(15:39):
with it. It was transformative. But people started to notice
that people who used it a lot started to have
these effects. And this is a very long running debate
in history of whether lead caused or contributed to, or
was a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
What do you think? What's your take?
Speaker 2 (16:00):
It's unmistakable that the rich people used it most, especially
the emperors, and many of them are very well known
to have gone crazy, like really crazy, like one of
them appointed a horse as a console, or one would
be like drooling and all of their you know, so
these effects that we now know are caused by lead
poisoning were seen back then. Of course, there were a
(16:22):
lot of other things going out at the time, but yeah,
it definitely contributed, is my opinion. Flash forward, you know,
hundreds of years, and we see some of these same
things repeat, especially in the nineteenth century here in America.
Led you know, makes great pipes, it makes makeup brighter,
it makes colors on walls and paint even brighter. So
(16:47):
we start to basically repeat the same mistakes and start
to see the same effects also, So we have this
long history with this same element that what's interesting, I
think is it started really with rich people who enjoyed
the benefits of lead the most thousands of years ago,
and over time it migrates to basically a poison that
(17:11):
is the domain and inflicted upon the lower classes and
people who are less seen in the shadows.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Let's take a quick break and when we get back,
there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
(17:41):
been chatting with Daniel Stone about his book American Poison,
A Deadly Invention and the Woman who Battled for environmental justice.
Let's get back into things. We all know today that
lead is a poison It is a toxin. What are
some of the health effects that it's associated with or
some of the symptom of lead poisoning.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Mostly neurological breakdown. Lead has this effect on cells where
it causes cells to basically atrophy prematurely. There's a lot
of reasons why, biological reasons, but it's been poisonous to
every living organism for this reason. It affects cellular growth.
It chiefly affects the brain, and that's why people start to,
(18:23):
you know, kind of slur their words or struggle to
keep thoughts straight. In some cases, even mild poisoning, we
see lack of impulse control or struggle to keep emotions,
you know, together, like all of these effects from very
slight exposure up to lead poisoning, which of course can
kill you.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Prior to the introduction of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline, which
we'll get to, and Alice Hamilton's recognition starting to dawn
on her these connections between lead and health. What was
widely known or what was known in medical circles about
the time toxicity of lead was it considered that might
(19:04):
be a little bit bad or no amount is safe?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Great question. So lead was a well known poison even
in those days, but there was debate over how much
did it take to poison someone. And it was kind
of like black or white. It was like you either
didn't have lead poisoning or you did. Binary and so
there was some number and there was a lot of
(19:27):
debate over what the number was. It was like, at
what point does too much lead make you go crazy?
And as long as you stay under that number, it's fine,
you know, totally fine. And that was like the prevailing
scientific opinion in those days. A lot of debate over
what was that threshold. The lead industry argued the threshold
was pretty high. Other people argued the threshold was pretty low.
(19:52):
Today we know that the threshold is zero. There is
no amount of lead that is safe. Tiny amounts have
some effect on.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Us, right, And so now turning to the other main
character of the story, which is Thomas Midgley Junior. He
introduced the world to tetra ethyl leaded gasoline. When he
developed this idea or this this product. How much was
lead used in the US, Like just trying to get
a picture of like how much did the introduction of
(20:25):
leaded gasoline change how much lead was used.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
We used a lot of lead, certainly not to the
degree that we used later much more. But yeah, plumbing
and paint were the main two uses in the economy.
But this was also the time of the Industrial Revolution,
where we had a lot of new chemical uses, you know,
a lot of new elements that were put into use
in a new way to spark you know, chemical reactions
(20:53):
or to expedite the way things were made. So lead
was not like the dominant thing we used in those days.
It was kind of in the background, one element of many.
I often think of it like like we use a
lot of things today to grow our food and fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides.
Lead was one of those types of things that we
(21:14):
used in our industrial machine. It wasn't the worst, it
wasn't the best. It just was there, and that's why
it didn't really pop out immediately to Thomas Midgley as
possible in gasoline. He had to work toward it and
discover it.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
And what is the difference between organic lead and tetra
ethyl lead? Is there any difference in the health effects
or like the way that it seeps into the environment, Yeah,
tell me about lead.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, so lead has two main states, organic and inorganic.
Tetra ethyl. Lead comes from an organic state, but the
tetra ethyl part is four ethyl compounds that are attached
on the sides, and so those are you know, ethyl
is its own kind of compound when you attach it
to lead. What it basically does is it allows lead
(22:03):
to dissolve in a gallon of gasoline. So you think
of sort of mixing, maybe like apple juice and orange juice.
You want them to mix evenly together, but if one
of them can't really mix, it'll just settle to the bottom. Right,
So the tetra ethyl allows the lead to dissolve, and
that was like the main innovation of it that used lead.
(22:26):
I mean, lead is still lead, but it was evenly
distributed and evenly burned in a car's engine.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Okay, So now let's talk about that development, like how
did Midgley come up upon this idea? And you know
what problem ultimately was he looking to solve with tetrathyl
leaded gasoline.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Cars in those days were the biggest innovation in maybe
human history. They were so exciting. Cars had been invented
in kind of like the eighteen seventies and eighties, but
it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that people start to
see them more on roads, and not until the early
twentieth century where you know, you start to see your
(23:09):
neighbor's flying cars and you could afford a car, and
Henry Forward's assembly line cars are rolling off. But the
problem cars had was basically a maximum amount of power
that would come from the internal combustion engine. The engine
would burn gasoline, but the engines would burn it inefficiently
or incompletely. They wouldn't burn all of the gasoline, and
(23:32):
so over time you'd get this sort of build up
of residue and what they call premature combustion. And the
problem that did was that, you know, the engine can
only run so powerfully before it would kind of reach
its maximum and kind of stall out. This was known
as engine knock because when this happened, the engine would
make this like loud clanging sound that would announce to
(23:54):
everybody on the road you know that your car was
having this problem. And again it was like a ceiling
in the growth of car power, and so everyone wanted
to figure out this problem of engine knock. How can
we innovate our way past this or figure out how
to make cars more powerful. And the answer was, we
could make gasoline burn better. So how do you make
(24:17):
it burn better? Well, the idea was gasoline has an
quality called octane, and that basically refers to how hot
it can burn. And in those days the octane was
like in the sixties, low seventies, that was high octane.
Today our lowest octane when you buy gas is eighty five, right,
(24:38):
So it's like a big, big room for growth. And
so the idea was to how do you raise the
octane of gasoline to make it, you know, burn better?
And the answer was, we add something to it. But
what do we add to it? You know, what compound,
what element, what chemical can we add to it that
makes it burn better? And so this was what was
(24:59):
really the goose for Thomas Midgley. He was a chemist
and he wanted to be the one to solve engine knock.
And so he goes to work in his lab and
he tries all sorts of you know, anything that's lying around.
He tries you know, iodine, he tries chlorine, he tries
you know, pure hydrogen, anything he can, and some of
(25:20):
them work better than others. He has this test engine
that he feeds everything into and sees how they run.
You know, when he puts these things in and he
tries really smelly compounds, he tries really expensive ones. He
tries two of them mixed together, and it's really a
goose chase, that's how he describes it. And he's looking
at the periodic table and trying to figure out what
(25:42):
will work and what won't.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
But that he's just like tracing down the elements like, hmm,
we'll see process of elimination.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yes, although you know the periodic table, the way it's arranged,
of course, is by quality. So you know, if you
look at what kind of worked in one row and
compare it against what kind of worked in another row,
it's like treasure map. You could kind of like guess
which direction you need to go. And so this took
almost three years for him to run through everything, and
finally he gets in nineteen twenty one. He gets to
(26:12):
lead and he tries it with this tetra ethyl component
to it, and it works right, and it worked. Wow,
it really works. And then he tries to reduce it.
What's the minimum amount we need and it's a very
small amount. It's basically like a drop into a gallon
of gasoline, very small amount. Now what's interesting here is
(26:34):
there were other compounds at the time that could also
eliminate engine knock, and the most well known of all
of them was ethanol. Ethanol is like alcohol basically, you know,
you put a little bit in, it increases the octane
and engine ot goes away. But ethanol comes from like cells,
(26:55):
so you need it from like wood, you know, pulp
or plants that are that are burned in the field
or whatnot. And there just wasn't enough of that stuff.
Now we could have made more of that stuff, but
the other problem with ethanol is that you couldn't patent it.
Because everybody could make ethanol on their farms, you couldn't
file a patent on ethanol. So that's why Midgeley and
(27:18):
his bosses at General Motors are not interested in pursuing
ethanol at all. And when tetra ethyl lead works, they're
ready to pursue that and market it as as much
and as fast as possible.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Oh God, that's just like depressing. It's so depressing. There
are so many elements, but it's like, oh, here are
some other options that maybe don't lead to widespread poisoning,
but because there were voices warning about the dangers of
lead or leaded gasoline at the time, and Midgley himself
experiences lead poisoning, and yet this doesn't really seem to
(27:56):
alarm him or make him take a step back and go, whoa,
this might be bad on a wide scale. Why is that?
And is the answer just capitalism?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Like, yeah, that's one. It's a big reason. But Mitchley
kind of had this interesting thing happen to him, and
you just alluded to it in nineteen twenty one. You know,
he had been working with lead now for like six
months every day in the lab in large quantity, and
he gets lead poisoning, right, and he you know, feels
the effects and his wrists and in his breathing and
(28:26):
his brain and he has to go down to Florida
to recover, you know, in the fresh air for months.
And this is very well known. It's not like a
secret either. And he's writing letters back to his bosses
saying like, you know, I had too much lead. I
need to recover. But one reaction could have been, wow,
this has gotten out of hand, Like this is clearly
(28:48):
a poison we should stop and do something else. But
his reading of the situation was, well, I work with
lead every day. Of course, yes, I got lead poisoning.
You know. It's like I'm a fireman who works in
a burning building. Of course I'm the first to get burned.
But everybody else who works in making this stuff or
(29:12):
burning it in their cars, it's going to encounter it
in such small quantities, much smaller that they won't have
nearly the effects that I did. So that's how he
does these sort of mental gymnastics to rationalize. Oh and
by the way, it's going to make us a lot
of money too. We just have to be more careful
to make sure that I or no one else gets sick.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Again, let's take a quick break here. We'll be back
before you know it. Welcome back, everyone, I'm here chatting
(29:55):
with Daniel Stone about his book American Poison. Let's get
into some more qui questions. As you mentioned, his goal
in life was to be an inventor, and if this
is his invention and the thing that he has valued for,
then suddenly it's like, oh, actually, this is going to
harm more people, and it's wrapped up in his identity,
like he's not going to want to reject that.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Now, it was very much a runaway train kind of situation.
I mean he had invested so much time, so much effort,
and you know, his reputation was wrapped up in its succeeding.
So it's hard to get off a train moving that
fast once it leaves the station. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, And once it was introduced, tetra ethyl leaded gasoline
really just enjoyed instant popularity. Right, It was like everyone
loved it. But then there were some hiccups along the way.
In nineteen twenty four, you tell the story of these
like these lurid reports that came out about these five
(30:57):
workers in New Jersey, I think who died from stream
lead poisoning. And it was this incident that ultimately got
Alice kind of involved in the fight against leaded gasoline.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the
context of that story and the effect that it had.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, So, leaded gasoline was very popular, you know when
it was released because it came with this great technological leap.
Not only would it solve engine knock, it would allow
your car to be more powerful, it would allow you
to travel further and faster. I mean, it was kind
of one of those like you know, a big advance
in your iPhone like these days that like it doesn't
(31:35):
seem like there's any downside. It's great, you know, it
makes life better. And it wasn't until nineteen twenty four when,
as you mentioned, these four men, five men in New
York work in a manufacturing plant that's making large quantities
of tetra ethy lead and they go vividly insane. And
(31:55):
this is like the wording of the reports at the
time when these men would like go crazy at work,
you know, start fighting with people or acting like wild animals,
and then like you know, they put in be put
into strait jackets and hauled away to an acydylum, right,
Like that's what they did in those days. But because
it was New York and because all of these men died,
(32:18):
the media environment was so like ravenous there for a
story and for what seemed like a conspiracy or a
great big mystery. No one knew why these men went crazy,
No one knew what they were working with. So these
reporters hounded it for days and days and days, and
all of their reports get syndicated out to papers in
the country, and so everyone starts to worry what were
(32:40):
they working with? And when it comes out that they
were working with tetra ethyl lead that was being put
into gasoline, you know a lot of people said, oh
my god, you know, could I be next? Could this
happen to me? And so it led to this great
reckoning of is this too dangerous? And the government got
involved in Alice Hamilton very much led the effort that yeah,
(33:01):
we've known for thousands of years lad is dangerous and
this is not an exception. This is a bad idea,
and the industries should find something else.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Why do you think that story marked a turning point
for her?
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Well, she was used to inspecting industries and factories and
finding sick men all the time. I mean she had
been doing this for almost thirty years at this point.
What was different here was that it became such a
big media story. So what had traditionally been sort of
the domain of scientific journals and small reports and you know,
(33:38):
her reports for you know, state governments, had suddenly become
a national media storm. She also realized that unlike you know,
the work she had done in factories that you know,
she could see men getting sick from maybe not wearing
gloves or not wearing masks or you know, working with
dangerous chemicals. Something like tetra ethletic gasoline had the potential
(34:01):
to affect everybody, right, I mean, this was a problem
that could affect millions and possibly billions around the world
if it wasn't kept in check or regulated early.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Alongside this reaction from Alice, what we see with this
story that is kind of remarkable is the is how
the companies responded and just like this you kind of
talk about this period of time not just to this story,
but to the story that these early warning cries about
the dangers of tetra ethyl letted gasoline in these businesses
(34:39):
that are producing it ethyl mainly saying oh, there's no
problem with this whatsoever. Like it becomes not just like
a defensive campaign, but just almost like an aggressive like
stop hassling us about this. These are lies, just a
really no accountability whatsoever. Were they among the first to
(34:59):
kind of utilize this corporate denial?
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah, I mean this was an era in American history
when business was booming, right, This was the nineteen twenties
when everything was growing and everything was exciting, and businesses
and culture and fashion and dancing and you know, everything
was sort of happening at the same time, and so,
you know, an American company, especially one that was succeeding
(35:24):
and making a lot of money and making people's lives better.
You know, the effect of the government on a company
like that. You know, it's not just that the government
couldn't really do much, but they also didn't want to.
They didn't want to, you know, get too deeply involved
and pull everyone back. So you know, there's kind of
a lack of regulation to begin with. But there's also
(35:45):
this public relations campaign also where Ethyl because they're making
a lot of money selling ethyl gasoline, starts to engage
in pr and some of the earliest form of corporate pr.
It happens in the story where you know, they try
to explain to people, well, you know, actually you're not
(36:06):
working in a factory, so you're only going to encounter
a much smaller amount of this stuff. It's like, you know,
less than a drop per gallon. It's going to be
burned up entirely in the engine. Nothing comes out dirty,
don't worry. And this gets up the question of whose
job is it to disprove that?
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Right?
Speaker 2 (36:25):
The industry is not motivated, you know, certainly does not
have the incentives to diminish its own success. But also
whose job is it then to be skeptical or to
find counter evidence or to create counter evidence with scientific studies.
And that was also a problem that was new in
this era, that the burden of proof really fell to
(36:49):
the public.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, and you know, part of part of the reaction
to that was Alice Hamilton and colleagues kind of coming
together and going, we have a problem with these these
you know, corporate produced studies showing that Letted gasoline is
perfectly safe and it's wonderful and no problem whatsoever. And they,
you know, they're pointing out the flaws. Ultimately, as you mention,
(37:12):
the US government gets involved, and there's this conference where
the US Surgeon General calls together everyone a little bit
seems a little slightly biased towards ethel And the outcome
ultimately was that a committee should be formed to conduct like,
one more study. All right, one more study. Let's see
is Letted gasoline safe or not? Tell me more about
(37:36):
the outcome of this study and some of the problems
to begin with, just leading up to whether this was
actually a study that could do the job that it
was commissioned to do. Essentially.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, So this conference in May of nineteen twenty five
was really thought to be the end of the argument. Right,
let's get everybody in a room on all sides of
this matter and figure out what's right, what's wrong, and
what we should do from here. Very nice idea, right,
And so the Surgeon General brings everyone together and he
(38:10):
arranges this conference, but he arranges it kind of selectively
where instead of like you know, a trial, where like
the prosecution goes first and then the defense defends itself,
he allows ethel which is really the defendant in this case,
it's not a trial, but the defendant to speak first,
and they they kind of filibuster the whole morning with
(38:33):
all of their corporate favorable information and their corporate studies
and anything they can say to promote it. And that
leaves all of the doctors and the scientists and the
opponents of this idea, like Alice Hamilton, to go in
the afternoon. And so not only were they sort of
diminished in the structure of the conference, but Alice Hamilton
(38:54):
is also further diminished as a woman among these male
scientists at this conference, so she doesn't really speak till
the very end. So that alone stacks sort of what
comes next. And as you mentioned, you know, the idea is,
let's have one more study that's conducted by professional scientists
who are not engaged with the industry at all, which
(39:18):
is also a very nice idea, but you know, ultimately
there's not a lot of funding for this kind of study.
The scientists who are asked to do it, they don't
have a lot of time outside of their jobs. So
this study that normally should be you know, take two
to three years, really be done across the country and
involved a lot of people, you know, sampling, a control
group whatnot, is really crammed into like four months and
(39:41):
looked at just kind of one little factor that at
the end is not positive or negative, but is inconclusive,
and inconclusive ultimately means there's no evidence that it's dangerous,
and so inconclusive means it's safe. And that's how it's
sort of steered by the industry outside of that review.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
With this inconclusive results of this study, then letted gasoline
essentially gets the AOK, not just in the US, but
really around the world. So how did letted gasoline end
up across the entire globe despite the fact that it
was known to be a toxic substance.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, once it sort of got out of that government
review without any major blemishes and which was spun into
it being completely safe, that stamp of approval from the
government effectively was its credence around the world, and so
foreign governments basically said, oh, the US government did a
(40:45):
review of this, they didn't find it was dangerous, so
we'll take it too, And they wanted to sell it
in other countries because the same reason here it made
cars more powerful. It solved this big problem. Ethel also
underpriced it. They started to reduce the price of it
over time so that more and more people would use
it as volume play. Eventually until kind of the early
(41:08):
nineteen thirties when ethyl gasoline, this brand name is just
becomes gasoline, and gasoline almost everywhere has tetra ethyl lead
in it without it even being in the name.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
It's chilling. But of course we don't have leaded gasoline today,
and there were some pretty incredible steps. The story that
you tell of the recognition of just how widespread lead
like the distribution of lead is from leaded gasoline. Tell
me about Claire Patterson and how his search for the
(41:44):
age of the Earth ultimately uncovered lead contamination on this
global scale.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
This is a wild story. So after ethyl gasoline sort
of blankets its way across the country and eventually the world,
it's just everywhere, and it is for a few decades
until the nineteen fifties when this scientist at Caltech in
Los Angeles. His name's Claire Patterson. He's a geologist, a geochemist,
(42:11):
so he's not really related to industrial chemicals at all.
But his goal in his doctoral dissertation is to find
the age of the Earth. He wants to discover how
all the Earth is. No one's ever known it's It
would be a huge breakthrough in geology. And so he
undergoes to try to date uranium. And uranium breaks down
(42:33):
into lead. So if you could sort of take an
ore of uranium or i'm sorry, of lead and count
you know how much of the element uranium is still
in it, you can sort of work backwards and try
to date the Earth that way by comparing it to
the rate of decay. And so he starts to do this,
and he has a mass spectrometer which he uses and
you know, to look at chemical elements and samples and
(42:57):
he tries to get a reading, and he can't get
a reading because it's too noisy. That's what they call it,
when there's too much you know, stuff in the sample
that obscures what he's trying to see. Much too much noise.
So he started, Okay, I need to clean up my lab.
So he starts to clean up his lab and scrub
this and scrub that and make sure all the samples
are clean. And there's still too much noise, like a
(43:19):
lot of noise, and most of it's lead and he
can't figure out why, and so you know, eventually, over
time he spends years doing this. He has his whole
building repiped with non lead pikes, He removes the gaskets
from his windows, anything that might include just a tiny
bit of lead, and you know, he starts to restrict
who can come in the lab and what they have
to wear and has matsuits whatnot. And eventually he gets
(43:43):
a clear reading. And Claire Patterson is the man we
can thank for dating the Earth to four point five
billion years old. That was his finding. Today we think
of it like four point six, but it was very close.
So after he makes this breakthrough in the field of geology,
he starts to one, why was there so much lead
in all these noisy samples? Where's all this lead coming from?
(44:05):
And there was actually a pretty easy way to find out.
He goes to Greenland, and in Greenland you could take
ice cores, and ice has a way of forming by year,
so like in the winter, the snowfalls. In the summer,
you know, there's like a layer of dust, and then
the next winter, more ice, next summer, more dust, and
so you could really see year by year changes in
(44:26):
the atmosphere. And he looks at all the cores and
he goes year by year and he discovers that all
this lead really started in nineteen twenty one, And it
wasn't hard to piece together what happened in nineteen twenty one.
It was the release, the creation and then eventual release
of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
I mean, what a sobering moment to see that just
night and day, like just this tremendous rise, and the
implications of that were also huge. And when did that
sort of the widespread health implications of this global lead contamination.
When was that realized and when did that then translate
(45:11):
into Okay, we have to do something about leaded gasoline.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Now, yeah, so he sort of passes the baton in
a non official way to a pediatrician, a doctor who
works with children named Herbert Needleman worked in Philadelphia who
worked with kids, and he noticed, you know, after this
sort of lead disclosure is made about how much lead
there is in the world and where it came from,
Herbert Needleman notices that their children that work near his,
(45:37):
that play near his clinic, that have these weird neurological
effects right like, they're really tired, really lethargic. They don't
want to play, they don't you know, they don't behave
like kids normally would. So he starts to wonder what's
going on. And normally, in this case, you would, you know,
the best thing would be to inspect their bones, take
biopsies from their bones and see how much lead is
(45:59):
in them. You can't do that with kids, or really
with anyone, you know, with too many people. But he
decides to collect baby teeth. You know, teeth have lead
accumulation also, So he starts to offer like a silver
dollar to any kid in Philadelphia who will give him
one of their teeth that falls out, and he collects
a lot of them. And it's here where he starts
(46:19):
to find these jaw dropping patterns of lead exposure. That
children who lived on busy roads had much higher lead
in their boat and their teeth than children who lived elsewhere,
and this started to yield other discoveries, like children who
had high lead exposure were also much harder to keep
(46:41):
focused in class, and as they got older, these kids
were more likely to engage in reckless behavior. And so
over time this body of research grows and the same
patterns are found all over the country and effectively the world.
That counties with high lead exposure, you know, have higher
crime than ones with low lead exposure. And as lead
(47:03):
changed over time, so did crime loosely change with it,
And so you have this connection, a relationship between lead
and crime, lead and reckless behavior that today we now
know as the lead crime hypothesis in criminology.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Was anyone ultimately held accountable for the widespread use of
leaded gasoline?
Speaker 2 (47:27):
No, no one ever, not in a court case. No
one has ever gone to jail for any of it.
What effectively ended ethyl gasoline and leaded gas entirely was
not regulation. It wasn't this budding environmental movement not even
these discoveries about its danger. It was a new innovation entirely.
(47:47):
It was a new innovation put on cars starting in
the nineteen seventies, known as the catalytic converter. Right, we
all have them now, and it would reduce the emissions
of all sorts of bad pollution and gases that would
come out, but lead would gunk it all up. So
no one wanted lead in their gasoline anymore because it
(48:08):
would mess up their catalytic converter, and that alone was
enough to dramatically reduce the amount of lead. And Ethyl
Corporation tried to fight the catalytic converter as you would expect,
of course, you know, they disrupted the market in the
nineteen twenties with their innovation and were eventually disrupted themselves
(48:29):
fifty years later by another It's.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
The law of nature. Yes, this isn't really part of
the story, but I do just want to ask you
to tell me a little bit more about Midgley's other
tragic invention that would then just his legacy is kind
of ridiculous. First leaded gasoline and then chloroflor carbons.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Yeah, yeah, So Thomas Mitchley's very celebrated after he discovers
ethyl gasoline. I mean, it's not only transformative to the
auto industry, but everybody loves it, and every little royalty,
even three cents on every gallon of gasoline make General
motors hundreds of millions of dollars, So he's a very
wealthy man in that. On that score, he's also still
(49:14):
a really good chemist. He's really good at hunting and
pecking and finding, you know, chemical solutions to the world's problems.
And one of the big problems in the nineteen thirties
was refrigeration, which effectively is the same as air conditioning.
It's the same technology. Refrigeration works in this kind of
(49:35):
like chemical circle where you evaporate a gas that gives
off cold air, and then you cycle that gas back through.
You turn it into a liquid so it could evaporate
again and just keep cycling through. But the gas is
kind of really important to get the right one, and
we didn't have the right one until the thirties, and
so Thomas Midgley decided he was going to find the
best refrigerant gas. And it takes him not long at all,
(50:01):
I mean less than a week to basically hunt through
his periodic table discover it, and it's the gas that
eventually became known as free on refrigerant one thirty four A.
The effect is transformative. I mean this effects refrigeration, changes,
air conditioning. Refrigeration alone, you know, helps keep medicine and
(50:21):
food safe much longer. It extends the human life span.
I mean, these are enormous advances. But free on and
the chemicals in it also cause a slow erosion of
the ozone layer, and we don't really know this until
decades later when someone's you know, some British scientists are like,
(50:42):
why is there a big hole above Antarctica? What's going on?
And they trace it back to one of the compounds
in free on, known as chlorofluorocarbons, we call them CFCs,
that destroy some of the elements up there, and eventually
we rein it in and we eliminate the use of
(51:04):
free on in that same form, and the ozone layer
is actually on pace I think to close within the
next like two or three decades. But still it's a
dramatic and horrifying effect and damage done to the planet,
and it's sort of striking that the same guy, one
guy did both of these things. Letted gasoline that poisoned
(51:27):
millions of people around the world. It's uncountable how many
were affected at least in some way by letted gasoline
and also the hole in the ozone layer. I think
New Scientist magazine while I was researching, they call Midgeley
the single most destructive organism in the history of the planet.
Speaker 1 (51:46):
I mean, I yes, yes, it is. To compare like
that his legacy with Alice Hamilton's, it's a very striking
legacy difference there, Like what impact do you leave on
the world? And I kind of want to like bring
this full circle by talking about today. You know, the
(52:07):
story of leaded gasoline is one that is familiar, right,
and some of the elements are very familiar where there's
this negative health effect, it's ignored for a long time.
After people like Alice Hamilton push for the truth to
get out there, finally something is done about it. You know,
things like asbestos, radiation, arsenic this, chlorophoric carbons, tobacco, you know,
(52:31):
other toxins once hailed as miraculous then are seen as harmful.
Where do you think that this is playing out today? Like,
have we learned any lessons?
Speaker 2 (52:44):
Oh? I mean, it's everywhere today. This is a very
common cycle. You know, we saw it not only with
leaded gasoline, but with cigarettes, industrial pesticides. You know, we
see it today with a lot of microplastics. I think
we've kind of been over adult and how we've advanced
the use of plastics and put them in everything that
(53:04):
we'll probably rain in or regret later. We also have PFA's,
the so called permanent chemicals forever chemicals that are used
in almost every consumer product now that again make life better, easier,
They're exciting and also you know, linked to health effects
and general pollution of the planet. There's also non industrial
(53:28):
things that I think we'll also look back on with
a measure of regret. One of the big ones I
think is social media, right, which has like transformed the
world and benefited all of our lives in a lot
of ways. But I think fifty one hundred years from now,
we'll look back and say, wow, that was done very fast,
very recklessly, with not enough guardrails, and you know, really
(53:50):
affected not only a generation of teenagers, but you know,
also changed our discourse, our politics, our governance, our economy
in ways that maybe we have done differently. So I
think there are all these things that are being tested
in real time on the public, which in many ways
(54:10):
are you know, how things happen, how innovation happens. But
without sort of the close supervision and watchful eye of
a responsible party and you know, a sense of regulation,
these things could get out of hand. And this story
shows us, you know, kind of a parable of what happened.
Speaker 1 (54:28):
If only we could just make sure that we listen
to it, and he'd you know, use history as a
guidance to things that we don't have to repeat to
learn again these lessons over and over again.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
I think there are Alice Hamilton's all around us at
the moment who are trying to warn us. Many of
them are screaming at the top of their lives like stop,
don't do this. But you know, they're working in a
very complicated ecosystem of ideas, of technology, of innovation, with
many competing interests and incentives, and it's a very hard
case to make, so time is usually what makes the
(55:05):
cases stronger and more clarifying.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
Well, Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time
to chat today. This was so enlightening. I mean, this
story is depressing, but also there are moments of hope
that I think are really important.
Speaker 2 (55:19):
So thanks, thanks Erin, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (55:42):
A big thank you again to Daniel Stone for taking
the time to chat with me. I still can't get
over the story of Letted Gasoline, and Midgley and Hamilton
and just the legacies that we leave behind. If you
enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check
out our website this podcas cast will kill you dot com.
We're I'll post a link to where you can find
(56:03):
American Poison, a Deadly invention, and the Woman Who Battled
for environmental justice, as well as a link to Daniel's
website where you can find his other incredible work. And
don't forget you can check out our website for all
sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
Quarantini and Placibrita, recipes, show notes and references for all
(56:25):
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Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all
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Bryfogel for our audio mixing and thanks to you listeners
(56:46):
for listening. I hope you liked this episode and our
loving being part of the TPWKY book Club. A special
thank you, as always to our fantastic patrons. We appreciate
your support so very much. Much well, until next time,
Keep washing those hands, U
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is This Podcast Will
Kill You. You're tuning in to the latest episode of the
tpw k Y book Club, a series where I bring
on authors of popular science and medicine books to chat
with them about their most recent work. We have covered
some wonderful topics so far this season, from important failures
(01:07):
in the history of medicine to the evolution of human language,
from how bacteria phases may help us in the fight
against antibiotic resistance, to the promising future of regenerative medicine,
and we've got more books on the horizon. To check
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(01:30):
Podcast Will Kill You dot com and find the extras tab.
Under that tab, click on the link for our bookshop
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(01:51):
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And secondly, you can now find full video versions of
(02:13):
most of our newer episodes on YouTube. Make sure you're
subscribed to exactly Write Media's YouTube channel so you never
miss a new episode drop. The twentieth century was a
time of profound scientific and technological progress, from transportation via
horse drawn carriage to transoceanic airplanes, from telegrams to cell phones.
(02:36):
From sky high infant mortality rates to vaccines for dozens
of previously deadly infections. Over a mere one hundred years,
people's lives drastically changed, mostly for the better. But progress
comes at a cost. Sometimes that cost can only be
tallied in retrospect, while other times it can be and
(03:00):
thus preventable, but only if proper action is taken. When
tetra ethyl leaded gasoline was developed by Thomas Midgley in
the early nineteen twenties, it seemed like a miraculous and
inexpensive solution allowing cars to drive faster and farther. There
was just one small problem. Lead poisoning. While the manufacturers
(03:24):
of leaded gasoline insisted that their product was entirely safe,
other people, like occupational health pioneer Alice Hamilton, knew the
truth that if this product was widely introduced, it would
lead to a global lead poisoning pandemic. Despite these warnings,
we of course know how the story ends. Leaded gasoline
(03:47):
was sold around the world for decades before being banned,
harming untold millions. How this toxic substance was permitted to
be used in spite of ample evidence of its dangers
carries a powerful lesson for our society today. In this
week's episode, best selling author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins
(04:07):
University Daniel Stone joins me to discuss the story of
leaded gasoline and those who fought against it in his
book American Poison, A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who
Battled for Environmental Justice. His compelling storytelling transports readers back
to the United States in the early nineteen twenties, when
it seemed like anything was possible and technology would save
(04:31):
the day while corporations grew very wealthy in the process.
Stone then introduces us to an unsung hero of industrial medicine.
Alice Hamilton, who fights for those who didn't have a voice,
who were seen as expendable in the pursuit of progress.
In Midgley and his letted Gasoline, she finds a formidable foe,
(04:53):
and the resulting battle would leave permanent scars on the
health of the entire world. The story of Alice Hamilton
and letted Gasoline. It's difficult to take in knowing how
things end, but it's one that we need to bear
in mind, given our failure to learn from the past.
What will be the next letted gasoline, the next asbestos,
(05:16):
the next radiation, things viewed as miraculous in their early
years but later found to be dangerous, deadly even will
it be microplastics, p fasts, or so called forever chemicals,
something else we don't yet know about. Unfortunately, we can't
undo the harm that letted gasoline has already caused, but
(05:39):
we can use its story as a roadmap for a
better future. I am really excited to share this conversation
with you all, so let's take a quick break and
get started. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today.
(06:14):
Thanks for having me in American Poison. You tell the
story of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline and the woman who
fought to bring its negative health effects to light. And
you mentioned that you first came across the story of
Alice Hamilton, or at least her name in a footnote.
What made you decide to dig deeper into her story
(06:35):
and where did it ultimately leave you?
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, it was a footnote, which is sort of fitting
for women of that era, right to be remembered, right
in such a minor way like that. I teach environmental
science and policy to graduate students, and I'm very steeped
in environmental history. You know what started the environmental movement
(06:58):
two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago? Who were
these big people, these big events that made us start
to care about the planet. And I teach this every semester.
And about five or six years ago, I came across
a footnote about Alice Hamilton, and I said, I've never
heard of this person. Who is this? And so I
googled her and read her whole Wikipedia page and I thought, Wow,
(07:21):
this she was someone, someone real and someone influential that
had completely escaped my view in the field and a
lot of my colleagues too. So I dug deeper and
deeper and was continually surprised at the sheer volume of
work this woman had done for the benefit of humanity,
(07:42):
really and got kind of not entirely forgotten, but certainly
not celebrated to the extent she deserved.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
She is an incredible just a truly remarkable person, and
her life journey is fascinating because it kind of takes
us roundabout way where she didn't set out to become
one of the leaders of this new field of industrial medicine,
but yet that is ultimately what she did become. And
I'm wondering, you know, if you could tell me more
(08:12):
about the origins of this field and why it emerged
when it did.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Yeah, I often describe her as the Aaron Brockovich of
the early twentieth century, a woman who took on very
powerful polluting industries and tried to dislodge them or derail
them in ways that were dangerous. Sometimes she won, a
lot of times she didn't, but she was vindicated over
(08:38):
time in all of them. And so this is a
woman who was born in Indiana in eighteen sixty nine,
right after the Civil War. She grows up in a
very wealthy family among a lot of sisters and cousins
who are all taught basically to be helpful, you know,
find your way to help people, whatever it is. Go
(09:00):
into law, go into medicine, go into teaching, anything that
you think could improve someone else's life, not just your own.
Her path is through medicine. She becomes a doctor, which
is pretty rare in those days for a woman. You
had to be from a wealthy family to get into
medical school and go to medical school. And so she
becomes a doctor, and her first kind of twist in
(09:24):
her path comes in the eighteen nineties when she's a doctor,
but instead of being kind of a wealthy doctor who
serves rich people only, she decides she wants to serve
the poor, and she wants to serve marginalized people, immigrants,
people who don't speak English. And this was very much
not done in those days, to the extent that there
(09:45):
was really only one place that took on this kind
of work that had been started by Jane Adams in Chicago,
and it was called Hull House. Hull House was kind
of this melting pot of cultures and classes. They called
it a bridge between the classes because it was a
house where you know, people who didn't speak English, people
(10:05):
who didn't know how to read, people who needed help
getting jobs or their kids getting daycare while they went
to their jobs. It all sort of happened in this house.
We would now call this social work or social welfare work.
It didn't have a name back then. But Alice Hamilton
goes in and it's through here that she applies her
medical skills and knowledge to helping improve people's lives, mostly babies,
(10:30):
gets babies sick, but she also starts to notice that
other people in the community are getting sick too, People
have coughs, people have stomach issues, and she starts to
drop patterns. Right, all of the men who have the
same kind of like deep cough work in the same factory,
and all the ones who have like the wrist problems
(10:50):
are working in that other factory. And so she draws
these kind of patterns that we now call epidemiology. Back then,
it was called shoe leather epidemiology, because you'd literally have
to go from factory to factory and put these patterns together.
And eventually she do enough of this that she would
have like a body of research that she would take
(11:10):
to that factory or that boss or that industry and
say this thing you're doing is dangerous and here's how
or here's how to mitigate it or correct it. And
that's what started the field called occupational hygiene occupational medicine.
She really started it.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Tell me more about the primary concerns about working conditions
at the turn of the twentieth century. It was not
a very safe place, or most most factories were not
a very safe place to work. There was little oversight,
you know, what were some of the prevailing concerns or
things that emerged during that time that kind of drove
interest in this field.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, it was very dangerous to work in a factory
and very underpaid. You know. There was no sense of
what we now would call like workplace compensation or OSHA
or like anyone inspecting anything dangerous. There were a series
of like horrific accidents. There's one of the most famous
is the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York where
(12:12):
they locked the doors and so all these people burned
up in a building that should normally have had some
safety precautions. But the biggest storytelling element to this was
a book in nineteen oh six by a journalist named
Upton Sinclair who wrote a novel called The Jungle. We've
all heard of The Jungle now, and it was very
(12:34):
lightly fictionalized, but it was kind of an expose of
the pecking yards in Chicago, and the conditions he describes
were so horrific to the extreme that it sort of
woke up the upper classes in a way that they
could just completely close their eyes to this like horrifying
(12:55):
condition before, you know, like men burning alive, and people
get their limbs chopped off and falling into vats and
getting ground up with meat, you know, just like stomach churning,
things that had never before gotten out in a big
public way. And so this was an era, sort of
first decade of the twentieth century, when people were newly
(13:16):
confronting horrors in industrialization that had existed for a while
but were sort of newly.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Coming to light, right, right. And when Alice begins to
dig into this field and she starts to observe these
patterns that are coming out, especially in certain workers in
certain factories, you know, these lead factory employees with these
horrific coughs, she might not have realized that, yes, this
(13:44):
was a problem that was at least decades old, but
when it comes to lead. I mean this is a
problem that is millennial, Like it's thousands of years people
have been being exposed to lead and experiencing symptoms of
lead poisoning. Could you briefly take me on a tour
of like the highlights or low lights of the history
of lead and in many ways that we've used it
(14:06):
throughout human history.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, I mean, lead is as old as the planet itself.
It's an element, it's found on the periodic table, it
existed when the Earth was formed, and it also is
created when uranium decays, So uranium decays into an isotope
of lead. So we've had lead for longer than human
history by a lot. But we've also had it for
(14:29):
thousands of years in our use. And one of the
most prominent uses or use eras was really the Roman Empire.
And this was the time of again great sort of innovation,
advances of inventions, and the Romans had a lot of
things they liked to do with lead. Lead has these
miraculous qualities where it doesn't road, it doesn't really break down,
(14:53):
It adds texture, it adds brighter color, it adds sweeter
taste to almost everything. So the Romans used it not
only for their aqueducts and their plumbing. Of course, the
word plumbing comes from the word plume boom in lead.
That is why we call lead PB on the periodic table.
Plumbing effectively is named for lead. The Romans also used
(15:16):
it for their cooking utensils. They used it in the
powders on people's faces and makeup. They put it in
food to make it taste better, and of course they
put it in paints or any type of colorization to
make the colors brighter. This was a sort of miraculous use.
This was the miracle element. I call it the plastic
of its era, right, like you could basically do anything
(15:39):
with it. It was transformative. But people started to notice
that people who used it a lot started to have
these effects. And this is a very long running debate
in history of whether lead caused or contributed to, or
was a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
What do you think? What's your take?
Speaker 2 (16:00):
It's unmistakable that the rich people used it most, especially
the emperors, and many of them are very well known
to have gone crazy, like really crazy, like one of
them appointed a horse as a console, or one would
be like drooling and all of their you know, so
these effects that we now know are caused by lead
poisoning were seen back then. Of course, there were a
(16:22):
lot of other things going out at the time, but yeah,
it definitely contributed, is my opinion. Flash forward, you know,
hundreds of years, and we see some of these same
things repeat, especially in the nineteenth century here in America.
Led you know, makes great pipes, it makes makeup brighter,
it makes colors on walls and paint even brighter. So
(16:47):
we start to basically repeat the same mistakes and start
to see the same effects also, So we have this
long history with this same element that what's interesting, I
think is it started really with rich people who enjoyed
the benefits of lead the most thousands of years ago,
and over time it migrates to basically a poison that
(17:11):
is the domain and inflicted upon the lower classes and
people who are less seen in the shadows.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Let's take a quick break and when we get back,
there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
(17:41):
been chatting with Daniel Stone about his book American Poison,
A Deadly Invention and the Woman who Battled for environmental justice.
Let's get back into things. We all know today that
lead is a poison It is a toxin. What are
some of the health effects that it's associated with or
some of the symptom of lead poisoning.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Mostly neurological breakdown. Lead has this effect on cells where
it causes cells to basically atrophy prematurely. There's a lot
of reasons why, biological reasons, but it's been poisonous to
every living organism for this reason. It affects cellular growth.
It chiefly affects the brain, and that's why people start to,
(18:23):
you know, kind of slur their words or struggle to
keep thoughts straight. In some cases, even mild poisoning, we
see lack of impulse control or struggle to keep emotions,
you know, together, like all of these effects from very
slight exposure up to lead poisoning, which of course can
kill you.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Prior to the introduction of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline, which
we'll get to, and Alice Hamilton's recognition starting to dawn
on her these connections between lead and health. What was
widely known or what was known in medical circles about
the time toxicity of lead was it considered that might
(19:04):
be a little bit bad or no amount is safe?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Great question. So lead was a well known poison even
in those days, but there was debate over how much
did it take to poison someone. And it was kind
of like black or white. It was like you either
didn't have lead poisoning or you did. Binary and so
there was some number and there was a lot of
(19:27):
debate over what the number was. It was like, at
what point does too much lead make you go crazy?
And as long as you stay under that number, it's fine,
you know, totally fine. And that was like the prevailing
scientific opinion in those days. A lot of debate over
what was that threshold. The lead industry argued the threshold
was pretty high. Other people argued the threshold was pretty low.
(19:52):
Today we know that the threshold is zero. There is
no amount of lead that is safe. Tiny amounts have
some effect on.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Us, right, And so now turning to the other main
character of the story, which is Thomas Midgley Junior. He
introduced the world to tetra ethyl leaded gasoline. When he
developed this idea or this this product. How much was
lead used in the US, Like just trying to get
a picture of like how much did the introduction of
(20:25):
leaded gasoline change how much lead was used.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
We used a lot of lead, certainly not to the
degree that we used later much more. But yeah, plumbing
and paint were the main two uses in the economy.
But this was also the time of the Industrial Revolution,
where we had a lot of new chemical uses, you know,
a lot of new elements that were put into use
in a new way to spark you know, chemical reactions
(20:53):
or to expedite the way things were made. So lead
was not like the dominant thing we used in those days.
It was kind of in the background, one element of many.
I often think of it like like we use a
lot of things today to grow our food and fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides.
Lead was one of those types of things that we
(21:14):
used in our industrial machine. It wasn't the worst, it
wasn't the best. It just was there, and that's why
it didn't really pop out immediately to Thomas Midgley as
possible in gasoline. He had to work toward it and
discover it.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
And what is the difference between organic lead and tetra
ethyl lead? Is there any difference in the health effects
or like the way that it seeps into the environment, Yeah,
tell me about lead.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, so lead has two main states, organic and inorganic.
Tetra ethyl. Lead comes from an organic state, but the
tetra ethyl part is four ethyl compounds that are attached
on the sides, and so those are you know, ethyl
is its own kind of compound when you attach it
to lead. What it basically does is it allows lead
(22:03):
to dissolve in a gallon of gasoline. So you think
of sort of mixing, maybe like apple juice and orange juice.
You want them to mix evenly together, but if one
of them can't really mix, it'll just settle to the bottom. Right,
So the tetra ethyl allows the lead to dissolve, and
that was like the main innovation of it that used lead.
(22:26):
I mean, lead is still lead, but it was evenly
distributed and evenly burned in a car's engine.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Okay, So now let's talk about that development, like how
did Midgley come up upon this idea? And you know
what problem ultimately was he looking to solve with tetrathyl
leaded gasoline.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Cars in those days were the biggest innovation in maybe
human history. They were so exciting. Cars had been invented
in kind of like the eighteen seventies and eighties, but
it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that people start to
see them more on roads, and not until the early
twentieth century where you know, you start to see your
(23:09):
neighbor's flying cars and you could afford a car, and
Henry Forward's assembly line cars are rolling off. But the
problem cars had was basically a maximum amount of power
that would come from the internal combustion engine. The engine
would burn gasoline, but the engines would burn it inefficiently
or incompletely. They wouldn't burn all of the gasoline, and
(23:32):
so over time you'd get this sort of build up
of residue and what they call premature combustion. And the
problem that did was that, you know, the engine can
only run so powerfully before it would kind of reach
its maximum and kind of stall out. This was known
as engine knock because when this happened, the engine would
make this like loud clanging sound that would announce to
(23:54):
everybody on the road you know that your car was
having this problem. And again it was like a ceiling
in the growth of car power, and so everyone wanted
to figure out this problem of engine knock. How can
we innovate our way past this or figure out how
to make cars more powerful. And the answer was, we
could make gasoline burn better. So how do you make
(24:17):
it burn better? Well, the idea was gasoline has an
quality called octane, and that basically refers to how hot
it can burn. And in those days the octane was
like in the sixties, low seventies, that was high octane.
Today our lowest octane when you buy gas is eighty five, right,
(24:38):
So it's like a big, big room for growth. And
so the idea was to how do you raise the
octane of gasoline to make it, you know, burn better?
And the answer was, we add something to it. But
what do we add to it? You know, what compound,
what element, what chemical can we add to it that
makes it burn better? And so this was what was
(24:59):
really the goose for Thomas Midgley. He was a chemist
and he wanted to be the one to solve engine knock.
And so he goes to work in his lab and
he tries all sorts of you know, anything that's lying around.
He tries you know, iodine, he tries chlorine, he tries
you know, pure hydrogen, anything he can, and some of
(25:20):
them work better than others. He has this test engine
that he feeds everything into and sees how they run.
You know, when he puts these things in and he
tries really smelly compounds, he tries really expensive ones. He
tries two of them mixed together, and it's really a
goose chase, that's how he describes it. And he's looking
at the periodic table and trying to figure out what
(25:42):
will work and what won't.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
But that he's just like tracing down the elements like, hmm,
we'll see process of elimination.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yes, although you know the periodic table, the way it's arranged,
of course, is by quality. So you know, if you
look at what kind of worked in one row and
compare it against what kind of worked in another row,
it's like treasure map. You could kind of like guess
which direction you need to go. And so this took
almost three years for him to run through everything, and
finally he gets in nineteen twenty one. He gets to
(26:12):
lead and he tries it with this tetra ethyl component
to it, and it works right, and it worked. Wow,
it really works. And then he tries to reduce it.
What's the minimum amount we need and it's a very
small amount. It's basically like a drop into a gallon
of gasoline, very small amount. Now what's interesting here is
(26:34):
there were other compounds at the time that could also
eliminate engine knock, and the most well known of all
of them was ethanol. Ethanol is like alcohol basically, you know,
you put a little bit in, it increases the octane
and engine ot goes away. But ethanol comes from like cells,
(26:55):
so you need it from like wood, you know, pulp
or plants that are that are burned in the field
or whatnot. And there just wasn't enough of that stuff.
Now we could have made more of that stuff, but
the other problem with ethanol is that you couldn't patent it.
Because everybody could make ethanol on their farms, you couldn't
file a patent on ethanol. So that's why Midgeley and
(27:18):
his bosses at General Motors are not interested in pursuing
ethanol at all. And when tetra ethyl lead works, they're
ready to pursue that and market it as as much
and as fast as possible.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Oh God, that's just like depressing. It's so depressing. There
are so many elements, but it's like, oh, here are
some other options that maybe don't lead to widespread poisoning,
but because there were voices warning about the dangers of
lead or leaded gasoline at the time, and Midgley himself
experiences lead poisoning, and yet this doesn't really seem to
(27:56):
alarm him or make him take a step back and go, whoa,
this might be bad on a wide scale. Why is that?
And is the answer just capitalism?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Like, yeah, that's one. It's a big reason. But Mitchley
kind of had this interesting thing happen to him, and
you just alluded to it in nineteen twenty one. You know,
he had been working with lead now for like six
months every day in the lab in large quantity, and
he gets lead poisoning, right, and he you know, feels
the effects and his wrists and in his breathing and
(28:26):
his brain and he has to go down to Florida
to recover, you know, in the fresh air for months.
And this is very well known. It's not like a
secret either. And he's writing letters back to his bosses
saying like, you know, I had too much lead. I
need to recover. But one reaction could have been, wow,
this has gotten out of hand, Like this is clearly
(28:48):
a poison we should stop and do something else. But
his reading of the situation was, well, I work with
lead every day. Of course, yes, I got lead poisoning.
You know. It's like I'm a fireman who works in
a burning building. Of course I'm the first to get burned.
But everybody else who works in making this stuff or
(29:12):
burning it in their cars, it's going to encounter it
in such small quantities, much smaller that they won't have
nearly the effects that I did. So that's how he
does these sort of mental gymnastics to rationalize. Oh and
by the way, it's going to make us a lot
of money too. We just have to be more careful
to make sure that I or no one else gets sick.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Again, let's take a quick break here. We'll be back
before you know it. Welcome back, everyone, I'm here chatting
(29:55):
with Daniel Stone about his book American Poison. Let's get
into some more qui questions. As you mentioned, his goal
in life was to be an inventor, and if this
is his invention and the thing that he has valued for,
then suddenly it's like, oh, actually, this is going to
harm more people, and it's wrapped up in his identity,
like he's not going to want to reject that.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Now, it was very much a runaway train kind of situation.
I mean he had invested so much time, so much effort,
and you know, his reputation was wrapped up in its succeeding.
So it's hard to get off a train moving that
fast once it leaves the station. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, And once it was introduced, tetra ethyl leaded gasoline
really just enjoyed instant popularity. Right, It was like everyone
loved it. But then there were some hiccups along the way.
In nineteen twenty four, you tell the story of these
like these lurid reports that came out about these five
(30:57):
workers in New Jersey, I think who died from stream
lead poisoning. And it was this incident that ultimately got
Alice kind of involved in the fight against leaded gasoline.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the
context of that story and the effect that it had.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, So, leaded gasoline was very popular, you know when
it was released because it came with this great technological leap.
Not only would it solve engine knock, it would allow
your car to be more powerful, it would allow you
to travel further and faster. I mean, it was kind
of one of those like you know, a big advance
in your iPhone like these days that like it doesn't
(31:35):
seem like there's any downside. It's great, you know, it
makes life better. And it wasn't until nineteen twenty four when,
as you mentioned, these four men, five men in New
York work in a manufacturing plant that's making large quantities
of tetra ethy lead and they go vividly insane. And
(31:55):
this is like the wording of the reports at the
time when these men would like go crazy at work,
you know, start fighting with people or acting like wild animals,
and then like you know, they put in be put
into strait jackets and hauled away to an acydylum, right,
Like that's what they did in those days. But because
it was New York and because all of these men died,
(32:18):
the media environment was so like ravenous there for a
story and for what seemed like a conspiracy or a
great big mystery. No one knew why these men went crazy,
No one knew what they were working with. So these
reporters hounded it for days and days and days, and
all of their reports get syndicated out to papers in
the country, and so everyone starts to worry what were
(32:40):
they working with? And when it comes out that they
were working with tetra ethyl lead that was being put
into gasoline, you know a lot of people said, oh
my god, you know, could I be next? Could this
happen to me? And so it led to this great
reckoning of is this too dangerous? And the government got
involved in Alice Hamilton very much led the effort that yeah,
(33:01):
we've known for thousands of years lad is dangerous and
this is not an exception. This is a bad idea,
and the industries should find something else.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Why do you think that story marked a turning point
for her?
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Well, she was used to inspecting industries and factories and
finding sick men all the time. I mean she had
been doing this for almost thirty years at this point.
What was different here was that it became such a
big media story. So what had traditionally been sort of
the domain of scientific journals and small reports and you know,
(33:38):
her reports for you know, state governments, had suddenly become
a national media storm. She also realized that unlike you know,
the work she had done in factories that you know,
she could see men getting sick from maybe not wearing
gloves or not wearing masks or you know, working with
dangerous chemicals. Something like tetra ethletic gasoline had the potential
(34:01):
to affect everybody, right, I mean, this was a problem
that could affect millions and possibly billions around the world
if it wasn't kept in check or regulated early.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Alongside this reaction from Alice, what we see with this
story that is kind of remarkable is the is how
the companies responded and just like this you kind of
talk about this period of time not just to this story,
but to the story that these early warning cries about
the dangers of tetra ethyl letted gasoline in these businesses
(34:39):
that are producing it ethyl mainly saying oh, there's no
problem with this whatsoever. Like it becomes not just like
a defensive campaign, but just almost like an aggressive like
stop hassling us about this. These are lies, just a
really no accountability whatsoever. Were they among the first to
(34:59):
kind of utilize this corporate denial?
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah, I mean this was an era in American history
when business was booming, right, This was the nineteen twenties
when everything was growing and everything was exciting, and businesses
and culture and fashion and dancing and you know, everything
was sort of happening at the same time, and so,
you know, an American company, especially one that was succeeding
(35:24):
and making a lot of money and making people's lives better.
You know, the effect of the government on a company
like that. You know, it's not just that the government
couldn't really do much, but they also didn't want to.
They didn't want to, you know, get too deeply involved
and pull everyone back. So you know, there's kind of
a lack of regulation to begin with. But there's also
(35:45):
this public relations campaign also where Ethyl because they're making
a lot of money selling ethyl gasoline, starts to engage
in pr and some of the earliest form of corporate pr.
It happens in the story where you know, they try
to explain to people, well, you know, actually you're not
(36:06):
working in a factory, so you're only going to encounter
a much smaller amount of this stuff. It's like, you know,
less than a drop per gallon. It's going to be
burned up entirely in the engine. Nothing comes out dirty,
don't worry. And this gets up the question of whose
job is it to disprove that?
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Right?
Speaker 2 (36:25):
The industry is not motivated, you know, certainly does not
have the incentives to diminish its own success. But also
whose job is it then to be skeptical or to
find counter evidence or to create counter evidence with scientific studies.
And that was also a problem that was new in
this era, that the burden of proof really fell to
(36:49):
the public.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, and you know, part of part of the reaction
to that was Alice Hamilton and colleagues kind of coming
together and going, we have a problem with these these
you know, corporate produced studies showing that Letted gasoline is
perfectly safe and it's wonderful and no problem whatsoever. And they,
you know, they're pointing out the flaws. Ultimately, as you mention,
(37:12):
the US government gets involved, and there's this conference where
the US Surgeon General calls together everyone a little bit
seems a little slightly biased towards ethel And the outcome
ultimately was that a committee should be formed to conduct like,
one more study. All right, one more study. Let's see
is Letted gasoline safe or not? Tell me more about
(37:36):
the outcome of this study and some of the problems
to begin with, just leading up to whether this was
actually a study that could do the job that it
was commissioned to do. Essentially.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, So this conference in May of nineteen twenty five
was really thought to be the end of the argument. Right,
let's get everybody in a room on all sides of
this matter and figure out what's right, what's wrong, and
what we should do from here. Very nice idea, right,
And so the Surgeon General brings everyone together and he
(38:10):
arranges this conference, but he arranges it kind of selectively
where instead of like you know, a trial, where like
the prosecution goes first and then the defense defends itself,
he allows ethel which is really the defendant in this case,
it's not a trial, but the defendant to speak first,
and they they kind of filibuster the whole morning with
(38:33):
all of their corporate favorable information and their corporate studies
and anything they can say to promote it. And that
leaves all of the doctors and the scientists and the
opponents of this idea, like Alice Hamilton, to go in
the afternoon. And so not only were they sort of
diminished in the structure of the conference, but Alice Hamilton
(38:54):
is also further diminished as a woman among these male
scientists at this conference, so she doesn't really speak till
the very end. So that alone stacks sort of what
comes next. And as you mentioned, you know, the idea is,
let's have one more study that's conducted by professional scientists
who are not engaged with the industry at all, which
(39:18):
is also a very nice idea, but you know, ultimately
there's not a lot of funding for this kind of study.
The scientists who are asked to do it, they don't
have a lot of time outside of their jobs. So
this study that normally should be you know, take two
to three years, really be done across the country and
involved a lot of people, you know, sampling, a control
group whatnot, is really crammed into like four months and
(39:41):
looked at just kind of one little factor that at
the end is not positive or negative, but is inconclusive,
and inconclusive ultimately means there's no evidence that it's dangerous,
and so inconclusive means it's safe. And that's how it's
sort of steered by the industry outside of that review.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
With this inconclusive results of this study, then letted gasoline
essentially gets the AOK, not just in the US, but
really around the world. So how did letted gasoline end
up across the entire globe despite the fact that it
was known to be a toxic substance.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, once it sort of got out of that government
review without any major blemishes and which was spun into
it being completely safe, that stamp of approval from the
government effectively was its credence around the world, and so
foreign governments basically said, oh, the US government did a
(40:45):
review of this, they didn't find it was dangerous, so
we'll take it too, And they wanted to sell it
in other countries because the same reason here it made
cars more powerful. It solved this big problem. Ethel also
underpriced it. They started to reduce the price of it
over time so that more and more people would use
it as volume play. Eventually until kind of the early
(41:08):
nineteen thirties when ethyl gasoline, this brand name is just
becomes gasoline, and gasoline almost everywhere has tetra ethyl lead
in it without it even being in the name.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
It's chilling. But of course we don't have leaded gasoline today,
and there were some pretty incredible steps. The story that
you tell of the recognition of just how widespread lead
like the distribution of lead is from leaded gasoline. Tell
me about Claire Patterson and how his search for the
(41:44):
age of the Earth ultimately uncovered lead contamination on this
global scale.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
This is a wild story. So after ethyl gasoline sort
of blankets its way across the country and eventually the world,
it's just everywhere, and it is for a few decades
until the nineteen fifties when this scientist at Caltech in
Los Angeles. His name's Claire Patterson. He's a geologist, a geochemist,
(42:11):
so he's not really related to industrial chemicals at all.
But his goal in his doctoral dissertation is to find
the age of the Earth. He wants to discover how
all the Earth is. No one's ever known it's It
would be a huge breakthrough in geology. And so he
undergoes to try to date uranium. And uranium breaks down
(42:33):
into lead. So if you could sort of take an
ore of uranium or i'm sorry, of lead and count
you know how much of the element uranium is still
in it, you can sort of work backwards and try
to date the Earth that way by comparing it to
the rate of decay. And so he starts to do this,
and he has a mass spectrometer which he uses and
you know, to look at chemical elements and samples and
(42:57):
he tries to get a reading, and he can't get
a reading because it's too noisy. That's what they call it,
when there's too much you know, stuff in the sample
that obscures what he's trying to see. Much too much noise.
So he started, Okay, I need to clean up my lab.
So he starts to clean up his lab and scrub
this and scrub that and make sure all the samples
are clean. And there's still too much noise, like a
(43:19):
lot of noise, and most of it's lead and he
can't figure out why, and so you know, eventually, over
time he spends years doing this. He has his whole
building repiped with non lead pikes, He removes the gaskets
from his windows, anything that might include just a tiny
bit of lead, and you know, he starts to restrict
who can come in the lab and what they have
to wear and has matsuits whatnot. And eventually he gets
(43:43):
a clear reading. And Claire Patterson is the man we
can thank for dating the Earth to four point five
billion years old. That was his finding. Today we think
of it like four point six, but it was very close.
So after he makes this breakthrough in the field of geology,
he starts to one, why was there so much lead
in all these noisy samples? Where's all this lead coming from?
(44:05):
And there was actually a pretty easy way to find out.
He goes to Greenland, and in Greenland you could take
ice cores, and ice has a way of forming by year,
so like in the winter, the snowfalls. In the summer,
you know, there's like a layer of dust, and then
the next winter, more ice, next summer, more dust, and
so you could really see year by year changes in
(44:26):
the atmosphere. And he looks at all the cores and
he goes year by year and he discovers that all
this lead really started in nineteen twenty one, And it
wasn't hard to piece together what happened in nineteen twenty one.
It was the release, the creation and then eventual release
of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
I mean, what a sobering moment to see that just
night and day, like just this tremendous rise, and the
implications of that were also huge. And when did that
sort of the widespread health implications of this global lead contamination.
When was that realized and when did that then translate
(45:11):
into Okay, we have to do something about leaded gasoline.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Now, yeah, so he sort of passes the baton in
a non official way to a pediatrician, a doctor who
works with children named Herbert Needleman worked in Philadelphia who
worked with kids, and he noticed, you know, after this
sort of lead disclosure is made about how much lead
there is in the world and where it came from,
Herbert Needleman notices that their children that work near his,
(45:37):
that play near his clinic, that have these weird neurological
effects right like, they're really tired, really lethargic. They don't
want to play, they don't you know, they don't behave
like kids normally would. So he starts to wonder what's
going on. And normally, in this case, you would, you know,
the best thing would be to inspect their bones, take
biopsies from their bones and see how much lead is
(45:59):
in them. You can't do that with kids, or really
with anyone, you know, with too many people. But he
decides to collect baby teeth. You know, teeth have lead
accumulation also, So he starts to offer like a silver
dollar to any kid in Philadelphia who will give him
one of their teeth that falls out, and he collects
a lot of them. And it's here where he starts
(46:19):
to find these jaw dropping patterns of lead exposure. That
children who lived on busy roads had much higher lead
in their boat and their teeth than children who lived elsewhere,
and this started to yield other discoveries, like children who
had high lead exposure were also much harder to keep
(46:41):
focused in class, and as they got older, these kids
were more likely to engage in reckless behavior. And so
over time this body of research grows and the same
patterns are found all over the country and effectively the world.
That counties with high lead exposure, you know, have higher
crime than ones with low lead exposure. And as lead
(47:03):
changed over time, so did crime loosely change with it,
And so you have this connection, a relationship between lead
and crime, lead and reckless behavior that today we now
know as the lead crime hypothesis in criminology.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Was anyone ultimately held accountable for the widespread use of
leaded gasoline?
Speaker 2 (47:27):
No, no one ever, not in a court case. No
one has ever gone to jail for any of it.
What effectively ended ethyl gasoline and leaded gas entirely was
not regulation. It wasn't this budding environmental movement not even
these discoveries about its danger. It was a new innovation entirely.
(47:47):
It was a new innovation put on cars starting in
the nineteen seventies, known as the catalytic converter. Right, we
all have them now, and it would reduce the emissions
of all sorts of bad pollution and gases that would
come out, but lead would gunk it all up. So
no one wanted lead in their gasoline anymore because it
(48:08):
would mess up their catalytic converter, and that alone was
enough to dramatically reduce the amount of lead. And Ethyl
Corporation tried to fight the catalytic converter as you would expect,
of course, you know, they disrupted the market in the
nineteen twenties with their innovation and were eventually disrupted themselves
(48:29):
fifty years later by another It's.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
The law of nature. Yes, this isn't really part of
the story, but I do just want to ask you
to tell me a little bit more about Midgley's other
tragic invention that would then just his legacy is kind
of ridiculous. First leaded gasoline and then chloroflor carbons.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Yeah, yeah, So Thomas Mitchley's very celebrated after he discovers
ethyl gasoline. I mean, it's not only transformative to the
auto industry, but everybody loves it, and every little royalty,
even three cents on every gallon of gasoline make General
motors hundreds of millions of dollars, So he's a very
wealthy man in that. On that score, he's also still
(49:14):
a really good chemist. He's really good at hunting and
pecking and finding, you know, chemical solutions to the world's problems.
And one of the big problems in the nineteen thirties
was refrigeration, which effectively is the same as air conditioning.
It's the same technology. Refrigeration works in this kind of
(49:35):
like chemical circle where you evaporate a gas that gives
off cold air, and then you cycle that gas back through.
You turn it into a liquid so it could evaporate
again and just keep cycling through. But the gas is
kind of really important to get the right one, and
we didn't have the right one until the thirties, and
so Thomas Midgley decided he was going to find the
best refrigerant gas. And it takes him not long at all,
(50:01):
I mean less than a week to basically hunt through
his periodic table discover it, and it's the gas that
eventually became known as free on refrigerant one thirty four A.
The effect is transformative. I mean this effects refrigeration, changes,
air conditioning. Refrigeration alone, you know, helps keep medicine and
(50:21):
food safe much longer. It extends the human life span.
I mean, these are enormous advances. But free on and
the chemicals in it also cause a slow erosion of
the ozone layer, and we don't really know this until
decades later when someone's you know, some British scientists are like,
(50:42):
why is there a big hole above Antarctica? What's going on?
And they trace it back to one of the compounds
in free on, known as chlorofluorocarbons, we call them CFCs,
that destroy some of the elements up there, and eventually
we rein it in and we eliminate the use of
(51:04):
free on in that same form, and the ozone layer
is actually on pace I think to close within the
next like two or three decades. But still it's a
dramatic and horrifying effect and damage done to the planet,
and it's sort of striking that the same guy, one
guy did both of these things. Letted gasoline that poisoned
(51:27):
millions of people around the world. It's uncountable how many
were affected at least in some way by letted gasoline
and also the hole in the ozone layer. I think
New Scientist magazine while I was researching, they call Midgeley
the single most destructive organism in the history of the planet.
Speaker 1 (51:46):
I mean, I yes, yes, it is. To compare like
that his legacy with Alice Hamilton's, it's a very striking
legacy difference there, Like what impact do you leave on
the world? And I kind of want to like bring
this full circle by talking about today. You know, the
(52:07):
story of leaded gasoline is one that is familiar, right,
and some of the elements are very familiar where there's
this negative health effect, it's ignored for a long time.
After people like Alice Hamilton push for the truth to
get out there, finally something is done about it. You know,
things like asbestos, radiation, arsenic this, chlorophoric carbons, tobacco, you know,
(52:31):
other toxins once hailed as miraculous then are seen as harmful.
Where do you think that this is playing out today? Like,
have we learned any lessons?
Speaker 2 (52:44):
Oh? I mean, it's everywhere today. This is a very
common cycle. You know, we saw it not only with
leaded gasoline, but with cigarettes, industrial pesticides. You know, we
see it today with a lot of microplastics. I think
we've kind of been over adult and how we've advanced
the use of plastics and put them in everything that
(53:04):
we'll probably rain in or regret later. We also have PFA's,
the so called permanent chemicals forever chemicals that are used
in almost every consumer product now that again make life better, easier,
They're exciting and also you know, linked to health effects
and general pollution of the planet. There's also non industrial
(53:28):
things that I think we'll also look back on with
a measure of regret. One of the big ones I
think is social media, right, which has like transformed the
world and benefited all of our lives in a lot
of ways. But I think fifty one hundred years from now,
we'll look back and say, wow, that was done very fast,
very recklessly, with not enough guardrails, and you know, really
(53:50):
affected not only a generation of teenagers, but you know,
also changed our discourse, our politics, our governance, our economy
in ways that maybe we have done differently. So I
think there are all these things that are being tested
in real time on the public, which in many ways
(54:10):
are you know, how things happen, how innovation happens. But
without sort of the close supervision and watchful eye of
a responsible party and you know, a sense of regulation,
these things could get out of hand. And this story
shows us, you know, kind of a parable of what happened.
Speaker 1 (54:28):
If only we could just make sure that we listen
to it, and he'd you know, use history as a
guidance to things that we don't have to repeat to
learn again these lessons over and over again.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
I think there are Alice Hamilton's all around us at
the moment who are trying to warn us. Many of
them are screaming at the top of their lives like stop,
don't do this. But you know, they're working in a
very complicated ecosystem of ideas, of technology, of innovation, with
many competing interests and incentives, and it's a very hard
case to make, so time is usually what makes the
(55:05):
cases stronger and more clarifying.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
Well, Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time
to chat today. This was so enlightening. I mean, this
story is depressing, but also there are moments of hope
that I think are really important.
Speaker 2 (55:19):
So thanks, thanks Erin, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (55:42):
A big thank you again to Daniel Stone for taking
the time to chat with me. I still can't get
over the story of Letted Gasoline, and Midgley and Hamilton
and just the legacies that we leave behind. If you
enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check
out our website this podcas cast will kill you dot com.
We're I'll post a link to where you can find
(56:03):
American Poison, a Deadly invention, and the Woman Who Battled
for environmental justice, as well as a link to Daniel's
website where you can find his other incredible work. And
don't forget you can check out our website for all
sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
Quarantini and Placibrita, recipes, show notes and references for all
(56:25):
of our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot Org
affiliate page, our Goodreads list, a first hand account form
and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to
Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all
of our episodes. Thank you to Leona Sculaci and Tom
Bryfogel for our audio mixing and thanks to you listeners
(56:46):
for listening. I hope you liked this episode and our
loving being part of the TPWKY book Club. A special
thank you, as always to our fantastic patrons. We appreciate
your support so very much. Much well, until next time,
Keep washing those hands, U
Hosts And Creators
Erin Welsh
Erin Allmann Updyke
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