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by Steven Johnson
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Thomas Midgley Jr. said he has the most beautiful lawn in the United States. Presidents of golf clubs from across the Midwest visited his property outside Columbus, Ohio, just to appreciate the course; Scott Seed Company finally put a symbol of Midgley’s lawn on its letterhead. Midgley grew his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career. He installed an anemometer on the ceiling that would sound an alarm in his room, caution him whenever the grass threatened to dry out from the breeze. Fifty years before smart home devices arrived, Midgley turned on his room’s rotary phone so that a few rotations of the dial would run the sprinklers.
In the fall of 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio and the speedy and charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first, he came to terms with his disability with the same ingenuity he implemented for maintenance. of his mythical lawn, analyzing the challenge and devising a new solution, in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, which allowed him to climb into his wheelchair every morning without help. At the time, the craft seemed iconic to each and every aspect Midgley had represented in his career as an inventor: determined, forward-thinking thinking that took on a probably intractable challenge and figured out a way around it.
Or at least, it was until the morning of November 2, 1944, when Midgley was discovered dead in his room. The audience learned that he had been strangled to death for his own invention. Privately, his death was described as suicide. Be that as it may, the device he had designed had become the tool of his death.
Midgley was buried as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. The newspapers published praise for the heroic inventions he brought to the world, advances that complicated two of the most important technological revolutions of the time: the automobile and refrigeration. a truly wonderful citizen in the death of Mr. Midgley,” Orville Wright said. I was proud to call him a friend. ” But the dark story of the disappearance of Midgley, the inventor killed for his own invention!, would take an even darker turn in the following decades. While the Times hailed him as “one of the nation’s remarkable chemists” in his obituary, Midgley is now the top producer known for the terrible consequences of this chemistry, thanks to the extension of his career from 1922 to 1928, which he controlled to invent lead gas and expand the first advertising use. of chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.
Each of those inventions presented a brilliant solution to a pressing technological challenge of the time: making cars more efficient and generating safer coolant. But it has been found to have fatal side effects on a global scale. In fact, there would possibly be no other user in history who has caused so much damage to human health and the planet, all with the most productive intentions of an inventor.
What about Thomas Midgley Jr. ‘s disturbing career?There are draped reasons to revise its history now, beyond the only accidental rhyme in history: the centenary of the first appearance of leaded gas on the market in 1923. It might seem like a remote past, but the fact is that we still live with the consequences. This year, the United Nations released an encouraging study indicating that the ozone layer was on track to completely disappear from the damage caused by Midgley’s chlorofluorocarbons, but not for some other 40 years.
The arc of Midgley’s life gives rise to a debate that has intensified in recent years, which can be summarized as follows: When making decisions today, how concerned do we deserve to be about the consequences that may take decades or centuries to emerge?Do GMOs (genetically modified organisms) probably innocent cause side effects that will only be visible to future generations?Will the first nanoscale tissue studies allow terrorists to discover killer nanorobots in urban centers?
Midgley’s inventions, especially chlorofluorocarbons, seemed like brilliant concepts at the time, but 50 years has taught us otherwise. Reflecting on Midgley and his legacy forces us to grapple with the basic questions at the core of “long-termism,” such as the long-term debate. Long-term thinking is now called: what is the right time horizon to anticipate potential threats?Does focusing on speculative futures distract us from the undeniable desires of the current moment?Invention-driven: How can we bring new things to the global when we recognize, through definition, that their long-term consequences are unknowable?
His father was a handyman for a long time who made a significant contribution to the initial design of car tires. In the 1860s, his maternal grandfather, James Emerson, patented a series of changes to circular saws and other tools. In Columbus, Midgley showed wonderful promise in implementing new chemical compounds for practical purposes, employing an extract of the bark of an elm tree as a replacement for human saliva while throwing balls of saliva onto the baseball field. It turned out to be a lifelong obsession with the periodic table, which later evolved thanks to early twentieth-century discoveries in physics and chemistry. For most of his professional career, he carried a copy of the board in his pocket. The spatial arrangement of the page elements would help motivate his two vital ideas.
After graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell in 1911, Midgley moved to Dayton, Ohio, arguably the nation’s leading innovation center at the time. They drew up their plans for the Kitty Hawk flight, but the original charm that attracted inventors to the city was unlikely: the money registry, which for the first time allowed shop owners to automate the recording of transactions and prevent worker theft. When Midgley joined the National Cash Register in 1911, it had a power plant, promoting thousands of machines around the world. It was there that Midgley began hearing stories about Charles Kettering, who designed NCR’s mechanized formula for employees to conduct credit checks. on consumers directly from the sales floor, as well as the first money login to work on Electritown.
Companies like NCR had begun experimenting with a new organizational unit, the study lab, in the spirit of the learned “muckers” Thomas Edison had assembled at his plant in Menlo Park, New Jersey. A few years after joining NCR, Kettering devoted himself to the emerging automotive technology industry, forming his own independent studio laboratory known as Delco, short for Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, in 1909. There, he invented a device that proved very important for turning cars from a hobbyist-search into conventional technology: the electric ignition system. (Before the Kettering breakthrough, cars had to start with a difficult to handle and dangerous crank that required significant physical strength to operate. )career.
Shortly after the acquisition, Midgley implemented a task in Kettering’s lab and hired him immediately. He is 27 years old; Kettering 40 years. After completing a minor task that began before he arrived, Midgley walked into Kettering’s workplace one day and asked, “What do you need me to do next, boss?””This undeniable question and its answer turned out to be the beginning of a wonderful adventure in the life of a man of maximum flexibility. “
The technical puzzle that Kettering commissioned Midgley to solve one of the few dead ends preventing mass adoption of the automobile: engine knocking.
As the call suggests, for the passenger of a car, the tapping of the engine was not only a sound, but also a physical sensation. “Driving on an incline caused the valves to vibrate, the cylinder heads to vibrate, the gearbox to vibrate, and cause the engine to suddenly lose power,” writes Sharon Bertsch McGrayne in her perfect history of fashionable chemistry, “Prometheans in the Lab. “The challenge was even more mysterious because no one had the slightest idea what was causing it. (“We don’t even know what drives a car,” Kettering admitted at one point. ) In a sense, the question Kettering and Midgley posed was whether detonation was an inevitable side effect of a gasoline engine or whether the system could simply be designed outdoors.
To examine the phenomenon, Midgley designed a miniature camera, optimized for high-speed photography. The photographs he eventually took revealed that the internal fuel of the cylinders ignited too suddenly, creating a jet of tension. The unsightly vibrations felt through the passengers reflected the basic fact that power ted: vibrating the bones of the car’s occupants instead of operating the pistons.
The photographs at least gave the challenge some specificity: how do you get fuel to burn more successfully?At first, Midgley groped in the dark; His education was as a mechanical engineer, after all, not as a chemist. One of his first avenues of study came from a strange recommendation from Kettering: that perhaps the color red could improve fuel combustion. Kettering had long been inspired by how the leaves of the crawling strawberry tree can turn red even when covered by a layer of snow, capturing the power of the sun’s rays more successfully than other plants. Perhaps adding a red tint to the fuel would solve the shock problem, Kettering recommended. Then, Midgley used iodine to dye the fuel red, and it appeared to have mild anti-knock properties. He eventually learned that it was the iodine itself, not its color, that was the active agent to quell the blow. It was not a solution in itself, however, it recommended something vital: that the ultimate solution would come from chemistry, not engineering.
The search for this solution will last five years. Kettering later said Midgley and his team had tested another 33,000 compounds. During the peak of that time, they wandered randomly around the periodic table, adding elements to the fuel to see if they were doing anything to lessen the engine curse. they had no effect other than spitting in the Great Lakes,” Midgley recalls years later.
The first breakthrough in curtains came from a newspaper article that Kettering stumbled upon by chance, reporting the discovery of a new “universal solvent” in the form of a selenium oxychloride compound. When added to fuel, the compound produces combined results: particularly reduced shocks, yet the new fuel eroded the spark plugs almost on contact. Midgley continued to search, systematically reviewing a new edition of the periodic table that had recently been introduced, identifying promising element equipment, learning commercial chemistry on the fly. He soon found that the farther he was from the heavy steels grouped in combination on the table, the more the curse of the engine dissipated. Soon, the random walk through the elements became a direct line to whatArray at that time, the heaviest steel of all: lead.
In December 1921, Midgley’s Dayton team prepared enough tetraethyl lead compound to test a kerosene-fueled engine suffering severe engine blows to the engine. an incredibly small lead supplement; They eventually opted for a lead-to-gasoline ratio of 1:1,300. The effects on engine functionality were profound. Cars running on leaded gasoline can take steep slopes without hesitation; Drivers can accelerate to pass a slower vehicle on a two-lane highway without worrying about their engine taking a hit while in the lane.
Kettering marked the new Ethyl fuel and in February 1923 it was put on sale for the first time at a downtown Dayton fuel station. In 1924, General Motors, DuPont Corporation and Standard Oil had introduced a joint venture called Ethyl Corporation to produce fuel on a giant scale, with Kettering and Midgley as executives. . During the 1920s, the number of cars registered in the United States tripled. By the end of the decade, Americans owned nearly 80 percent of all cars in the world, increasingly powered by the miraculous new fuel Thomas Midgley was inventing in his lab.
A few years after Ethyl’s triumph, Kettering and Midgley turned to another revolutionary technology, soon to be as ubiquitous in American culture as the automobile: electric refrigeration. The production of heat through synthetic means has had a long and illustrious history, from the domain of the fireplace to the steam engine and the electric cooker. But no one had tackled the challenge of keeping things clean with technological solutions until the late 19th century. For most of the 19th century, if you were looking to refrigerate something, you would buy ice that had been dug out of a frozen lake at a northern latitude last winter and shipped to a warmer part of the world. (Ice was a major export for the American industry in this period, and frozen lake ice from New England was shipped as far afield as Brazil and India. ) Willis Carrier designed the first formula for air conditioning for a printing press in Brooklyn in 1902; The first electric family refrigerators gave the impression of a decade ago. In 1918, two years after Midgley began running for Kettering, General Motors acquired a new household refrigerator company and gave it a logo name that endures to this day: Frigidaire.
But as with the automobile in the era of engine stroke, the new generation of customer cooling was held back by what was a chemical problem. The creation of synthetic bloodless required the use of some type of fuel as a coolant, but all available compounds used were prone to catastrophic failure. At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, an industrial-scale ice-making plant exploded, killing 16 people, when the ammonia it used as a coolant ignited. Another popular refrigerant, methyl chloride, had been implicated in dozens of deaths nationwide from accidental leaks. Frigidaire’s products were based on sulfur dioxide, a poisonous fuel that can cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and lung damage.
As headlines denounced “deadly fuel coolers” and a growing number of lawmakers explored the concept of banning family refrigerators altogether, Kettering turned to Midgley for a solution. Detroit about anything of minor importance. After we finished that discussion, he said, “Midge, the refrigeration industry wants a new refrigerant if they ever hope to move somewhere. “the next day to inform you about the challenge.
Once again, Midgley turned to the periodic table, this time a strategy he had come to call “fox hunting,” which proved far more effective than the random walk he hired in motor stroke research. He began by observing the maximum of the elements, which remained gaseous at low temperatures – key to cooling – were placed on the right side of the table, adding elements such as sulfur, chlorine and ammonia that were already in use. This first step particularly narrowed the search. Midgley then removed a number of neighboring elements early on were either too volatile or had a suboptimal boiling point, leading their search to the lower right corner.
He discovered the only detail that was not yet used in advertising refrigerants: fluorine. Midgley knew that fluoride itself was highly poisonous (its main advertising use as an insecticide), but he hoped to mix the fuel with some other detail to make it safer. Within hours, Midgley and his team came up with the idea of mixing fluorine with chlorine and carbon, creating a variety of compounds that would be called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs for short. Subsequent tests revealed, as Kettering would say years later in his Midgley. Praise: That its compound is “very stable, non-flammable and absolutely without destructive effects on humans or animals. “Soon after, General Motors partnered with DuPont to manufacture the compound on a large scale. In 1932, they had registered a new logo for miracle fuel: freon.
Freon arrived just in time for the refrigeration industry. In July 1929, a methyl chloride leak from “ice device fuel” in Chicago killed 15 people, prompting even more considerations about protecting existing refrigerants. of a vaudeville wizard at the level of the national assembly of the American Chemical Society in 1930, breathing a cloud of fuel and then exhaling to blow out a candle, demonstrating the non-toxicity and non-flammability of freon. Frigidaire has paid close attention to the angle of protection when announcing its new line of freon-powered refrigerators, stating that the “search for fitness and protection led to the discovery of freon. “By 1935, 8 million refrigerators with freon had been sold and Willis Carrier had used to create a new home air conditioning unit called the “atmospheric cabinet. “Bloodless artificial air quickly became a central component of the American dream.
Soon, Midgley’s miracle fuel would find a new use in customer goods, a use that eventually became even more environmentally damaging than its use as a refrigerant. In 1941, two Agriculture Department chemists, one of whom once worked for DuPont, invented a device to disperse the insecticide into a fine mist, a variation on Midgley’s original concoction called Freon-12 as an aerosol propellant. After malaria deaths contributed to the fall of the Philippines in 1942, the US military increased production of “bug bombs” to protect troops from insect-borne diseases, eventually leading to a total aerosol industry, which used Freon to disperse everything from DDT. with hairspray. The new app seemed, at the time, to be another example of “better life through chemistry,” as DuPont’s corporate slogan put it. “A double delight is dichlorodifluoromethane, with its 13 consonants and 10 vowels,” writes the Times. “It brings death to disease-carrying insects and provides cooling comfort to man when the July and August suns warm the city’s sidewalks. This miraculous fuel is popularly known as Freon 12”.
Two inventions: ethyl and freon, conjured up by a man who presided over a single laboratory for an era of about 10 years. Together, the two products have generated billions of dollars in profits for the corporations that made them and provided countless consumers with a new generation that has stepped forward in the quality of their lives. In the case of freon, the fuel has enabled some other generation (refrigeration) that has presented significant innovations to consumers in the form of food safety. And yet, every product in the end turned out to be harmful on an almost unimaginable scale.
The story of any primary technological or commercial breakthrough is inevitably overshadowed by a less predictable story of unintended consequences and side effects, what economists call “externalities. ” Sometimes those consequences are innocent or even beneficial. Gutenberg invents the printing press and literacy rates increase, causing a significant portion of the reading public to order glasses for the first time, leading to increased investment in lens production across Europe, leading to the invention of the telescope and the microscope. Often the appearance effects seem to belong to a totally different sphere of society. When Willis Carrier came up with the concept of air conditioning, the generation was primarily intended for commercial use – providing cool, dry air for factories that required low-humidity environments. But once air conditioning entered the home, thanks in part to Freon’s radical protection leap, it sparked one of the largest migrations in America, allowing the rise of barely-existing metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas. . when Carrier started toying with the concept in the early 20th century.
Sometimes the accidental result occurs when consumers use an invention in unexpected ways. Edison believed that his phonograph, which he called “the talking device,” would be used primarily for dictation, allowing the masses to send albums of recorded letters through the postal system. ; That is, he thought he was interrupting the mail, not the music. But later, innovators, such as the Pathé brothers in France and Emile Berliner in the United States, found a much wider audience willing to pay for musical recordings made about descendants. In other cases, original innovation comes into the world disguised as a toy, smuggling a captivating new concept in the service of a laugh that generates a host of imitators in more sophisticated fields, in the same way that the animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s encouraged Jacquard to invent the first “programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first device to be used. It fits the fashionable definition of a computer, paving the way for the programmable generation revolution that would reshape the twenty-first century. in countless ways.
We live under the developing typhoon of the most significant accidental outcome in fashion history, one to which Midgley and Kettering also contributed: carbon-based climate change. scientists and amateurs who contributed to its realization. Line up a thousand and ask them what they hoped to do with their work. No one would say their goal is to deposit enough carbon into the environment to create a heat-trapping greenhouse effect on the planet’s surface. And yet, here we are.
Both ethyl and freon belonged to the same general elegance of aspect effects: inventions whose unintended consequences stem from some sort of byproduct they emit. But the potential fitness threats to Ethyl were visible in the 1920s, as opposed to, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric carbon buildup at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The dark fact about Ethyl is that everyone involved in its creation had noted compelling evidence that tetraethyllead is surprisingly destructive to humans. Midgley himself experienced the risks of lead poisoning firsthand, through his paintings in Dayton and Ethyl’s in the lab. In early 1923, Midgley cited reasons of physical fitness in declining an invitation to a collection of the American Chemical Society, where he intended to win an honor for his most recent discovery. “After about a year of running on biolead,” he wrote to the organization, “I realize my lungs have been affected and it is necessary to stop all work and have a wonderful source of fresh air. ” In an impromptu way. In a note to a friend at the time, Midgley wrote: “The cure for said disease is not only extremely undeniable but absolutely delicious. This means packing your bags, hopping on a train, and finding a suitable golf course in the state called Florida. ” “.
Midgley did recover from her war against lead poisoning, however other early Ethyl Enterprise entrants weren’t so lucky. Days after the first tetraethyllead mass production site opened at DuPont’s Deepwater plant in New Jersey, Midgley and Kettering pleaded guilty to one of the most gruesome chapters in the history of atrocities. of the commercial age. On the east bank of the Delaware River, not far from DuPont’s Wilmington headquarters, the Deepwater plant already had a long history of commercial accidents, as well as a series of fatal explosions in its initial operational role of manufacturing gunpowder. Canyon. But as soon as it started generating ethyl on a large scale, the factory turned into a madhouse. “Eight personnel at the DuPont Tetraethyl Fuel Plant at Deep Water, near Penns Grove, New Jersey, died of delirium from tetraethyl lead poisoning in 18 months, and three hundred others were killed,” The Times would later write. in a research report. “One of the first symptoms is a hallucination of winged insects. The victim stops, perhaps at the paintings or rational conversation, staring into space and grabbing at anything that isn’t there. Eventually, victims will fall into a state violent and self-destructive madness One painter threw himself off a ferry during a suicide attempt, another jumped from a hospital window, many had to be placed in straitjackets or strapped to their beds as they convulsed in abject terror. so widespread that the five-story building where Ethyl was produced was dubbed the “yetterfly house. “
Perhaps the most damning evidence against Midgley and Kettering that both men were aware that there was at least one possible alternative to tetraethyl lead: ethanol, which had many of the same anti-knock properties as lead. But as Jamie Lincoln Kitman points out in “The Secret History of Lead”: “GM may simply not dictate an infrastructure that can supply ethanol in the volumes that might be needed. Equally disturbing, any fool with a still can do it at home, and at the time, many did. At first glance, ethyl alcohol would have seemed like the safest option, given what is known about lead as a poison and the tragedies in Deepwater and other plants. But you may simply not patent alcohol.
In May 1925, the surgeon general formed a committee to investigate Ethyl’s fitness threats and a public hearing was held. Kettering and other industry figures spoke, confronting an organization of doctors and academics. The following January, the committee officially concluded that there was no conclusive evidence. threat to the general public by the use of leaded gas. Within weeks, factories were back online and within a decade, Ethyl was included in 90% of all gas sold in the United States.
The first real clue to the real environmental effect of lead gas emerged from one of the most mythical accidental discoveries of the twentieth century. of Chicago to identify a more accurate account of the true age of Earth, which at the time was sometimes thought to be just over 3 billion years old. Patterson’s technique analyzed the small amounts of uranium contained in zircon ore. Zircon in its initial state is lead However, uranium produces lead at a steady rate as it decays. the true age of the Earth itself. But Patterson soon discovered that the measurements were unlikely to be made, as there was too much environmental lead in the environment to get an accurate reading.
Finally, after moving to the California Institute of Technology several years later, Patterson built an elaborate “clean room,” where he was able to make enough uncontaminated measurements to determine that the Earth was a billion years old. more than in past thinking. But his war on lead contamination in the lab also sent him on an appearance-looking trip, to document the large amounts of lead that had been deposited around the world in the fashion age. By analyzing ice core samples from Greenland, he found that lead concentration quadrupled in the first two centuries of industrialization. The short-term trends were even more alarming: In the 35 years since ethyl gas became the norm, lead concentrations in polar ice cores have exceeded 350%. Other researchers, such as Philadelphia physician Herbert Needleman, published studies in the 1970s suggesting that even low levels of lead exposure can cause significant cognitive decline in young children, lowering IQ scores. and behavioral problems.
Patterson and Needleman were ridiculed for their discoveries in the automotive and lead industries, but as clinical evidence began to accumulate, a consensus eventually emerged that leaded gas had proven to be one of the most destructive pollutants of the twentieth century, one that proved to be concentrated in urban areas. Globally, the phase-out of leaded gas that began in the 1970s is estimated to have saved 1. 2 million lives a year. As Achim Steiner of the United Nations noted, “the elimination of lead gas is a massive achievement comparable to the global elimination of primary killer diseases. “
The realization that CFCs were damaging the environment began in the same way as understanding the effect of lead: with a new measurement technology, namely a device known as an electron capture detector. Invented in the 1950s by James Lovelock – a British scientist who became famous more than a decade ago by formulating the “Gaia hypothesis” – this device can measure minute concentrations of fuel in the surrounding area with much greater precision than was possible in the past. In some of his first observations with the device, Lovelock discovered a strangely giant amount of CFCs, with more of them circulating in and around the Northern Hemisphere than in the South.
Lovelock’s discoveries piqued the interest of chemists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, who made two alarming discoveries in the mid-1970s: first, the fact that CFCs had no herbal “sinks” on Earth where the chemical could dissolve, meaning that all CFCs emitted by human activity would eventually be deposited in the upper atmosphere; and second, the fact that at those maximum altitudes, intense ultraviolet light from the sun would eventually cause them to break down, releasing chlorine that specifically destroyed the ozone layer. Shortly after Rowland and Molina published their work, evidence emerged that ozone levels had been depleted. in the stratosphere above the South Pole; A bold high-altitude effort overseen by atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon has finally shown that the “hole” in the ozone layer was caused by artificial CFCs that Thomas Midgley had invented in his lab more than 50 years earlier.
As with the fight against leaded gasoline, industries involved in CFC production resisted efforts to reduce the presence of the fuel in the atmosphere, but during the late 1980s the evidence of potential harm was undeniable. (Unlike the existing debate over global warming, no political groups had emerged to challenge this consensus, with the exception of industry players who had a monetary interest in continuing CFC production. )the world to phase out CFC production and consumption, nearly 60 years after Kettering asked Midgley to find a solution to the refrigerant problem. It took a few days for a small team in a lab to solve the Kettering problem, but it took a global collaboration of scientists, businesses, and politicians to repair the damage their creation inadvertently caused the world.
Based on Rowland’s original studies in the 1970s, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that continued production of CFCs at the same rate would destroy 50% of the ozone layer by 2050. About a decade ago, a foreign team of meteorological scientists created a computer style to simulate what would have happened if the Montreal Protocol had not entered into force. The effects are even more worrisome than expected: by 2065, nearly two-thirds of the ozone layer will be gone. In mid-latitude cities like Washington and Paris, five minutes of sun exposure would have been enough to get you sunburned. Skin cancer rates have reportedly skyrocketed. A 2021 study by scientists at Lancaster University tested the impact that continued CFC production would have had on plant life. The additional ultraviolet radiation would have particularly decreased the absorption of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, creating an additional global warming of 0. 8 degrees Celsius, in addition to temperature. The accumulation caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
In his 2020 ebook on existential risk, “The Precipice,” Oxford philosopher Tothrough Ord tells the story of a concern, originally raised by physicist Edward Teller in the months before the first detonation of a nuclear device, that the fusion reaction in the bomb’s fuel can also cause a fusion reaction in the surrounding nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere, “thus engulfing the Earth in flames. . . and [destroying] not only mankind , but also to all complex life on Earth. Teller’s considerations sparked a vigorous debate among Manhattan Project scientists discussed the probability of an accidental atmospheric chain reaction. In the end, they said that the firestorm engulfing the planet was unlikely to occur, and that the Trinity test took place as planned at 5:29 AM. m. local time on the morning of July 16. , 1945. Teller’s fears turned out to be unfounded, and in the pile of nuclear detonations since then, no atmospheric doomsday chain reaction has been set in motion. Our understanding of nuclear fusion and the computers to aid its calculations have shown that this is indeed impossible,” Ord writes. “And yet there had been a kind of risk. “
Ord traces the genesis of what he calls the precipice, the era of existential threat, on that July morning in 1945. Their fox hunting party worked its way through the periodic table to the progression of chlorofluorocarbons. After all, Teller had been wrong about his imaginary chain-reaction apocalypse. But CFCs produced a chain reaction in the atmosphere, a reaction that did not diminish possibly We have reshaped life on Earth as we know it. Whether Freon was “completely innocent to humans or animals,” as Kettering claimed, depended on the timescale he was using. Over the years and decades, it probably stored many lives. : preventing food from spoiling, allowing vaccines to be safely stored and transported, reducing malaria deaths. However, on the scale of a century, it posed a significant threat to humanity itself.
Indeed, it is moderate to view CFCs as a precursor to the kind of risk we are likely to face in the coming decades, as it is increasingly conceivable that Americans or small teams will create new clinical advances, through chemistry, biotechnology, or textile science. – triggering accidental consequences that have a global impact. The dominant models of technological apocalypse in the twentieth century were variants of the Manhattan Project: government-controlled, industrial-scale weapons of mass destruction, designed from the ground up to kill in gigantic quantities. In the twenty-first century, existential risks could come from Midgley-style innovators, creating new risks through the probably innocent act of meeting customer needs, but this time using CRISPR, or nanobots, or a new avenue that no one has any idea about. . Again.
All this makes it imperative to ask the question: was it imaginable that Midgley (and Kettering) had moved away from the precipice and unleashed such destructive forces on the world?Twenty-first century Midgleys cause the same damage on the planet, or worse?The answers to those questions are very different depending on whether the innovation in question is ethyl or freon. than CFCs, it was really a more manageable and safer kind of risk. What deserves to be kept awake at night is the modern equivalent of CFCs.
In the end, leaded gas was a mistake of epic proportions, but also an avoidable mistake. The rise of Ethyl, an old story: a personal enterprise reaping the benefits of a new innovation while socializing prices from their accidental consequences and overriding the objections of time through a mere power plant of advertisements. It is well established that they lead to physical danger; whereas the manufacture of Ethyl itself can have devastating effects on the human body and brain; that cars with Ethyl engines emitted lead lines into the atmosphere. The only question is whether those lines alone can cause health problems.
Since the Surgeon General’s hearing in 1926, we’ve invented a wide range of equipment and facilities to explore exactly those kinds of questions before bringing a new compound to market. We have created remarkably complicated systems to design and anticipate the long-term effects of chemical compounds on the environment and the physical state of people. We have designed analytical and statistical equipment, such as randomized controlled trials, that can stumble upon complicated causal links between a potential pollutant or poisonous chemical and adverse effects on physical fitness. We’ve created establishments, like the Environmental Protection Agency, that try to keep 21st century ethyls off the market. We have legislation like the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which is intended to ensure that new compounds go through testing and threat assessment before they can be placed on the market. Despite their limitations, all of those things — regulatory establishments, threat control teams — deserve to be understood as inventions in their own right, rarely celebrated the way customer breakthroughs like ethyl or freon are. There are no advertising campaigns that promise “a better life through deliberation and supervision”, that is exactly what more legislation and establishments can do for us.
The Freon story, however, offers a more troubling lesson. Scientists had observed in the late 19th century that there seemed to be a puzzling break in the spectrum of radiation hitting the Earth’s surface, and soon suspected ozone fuel was to blame for this “missing” radiation. “. British meteorologist G. M. B. Dobson made the first large-scale measurements of the ozone layer in 1926, just a few years before Kettering and Midgley began exploring the challenge of solid refrigerants. It took decades for Dobson’s investigations to become an integral perception. (Dobson made all of his paintings from ground-level observations. No human had ever visited the upper environment before Swiss scientist and balloonist Auguste Piccard and his assistant ascended 52,000 feet in a sealed gondola in 1931. ) until the 1970s. Unlike at Ethyl, where there was transparent negative dating on the table between lead and human health, it never occurred to anyone that there might be a connection between what was going on in the refrigerator coils from his kitchen and what was going down 100,000 feet above the South Pole. The CFCs started dealing their damage with almost no delay after the Freon arrived to market, however, science was still 40 years away from realizing the sophisticated atmospheric chain reactions behind this damage.
Is it imaginable that we will do something today whose long-term accidental consequences are not comprehensible to science before 2063?That there are far fewer white dots on the map of comprehension is indisputable. But the white dots that remain are the ones that capture all the attention. We have already made ambitious bets on the edge of our understanding. When building particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, scientists seriously debated the option that activating the accelerator would trigger the creation of tiny black holes that would engulf the entire planet. in seconds. That didn’t happen, and there was really extensive evidence that it wouldn’t happen until they flipped the switch. But stay.
As the writers said, the factor of lead gas health threats to the general public was a known unknown. We knew there was a valid question that needed to be answered, but big industry has just overwhelmed total research for almost part of a century. . The threat to fitness posed by the Freon was a more mercurial beast: an unknown stranger. There was no way to answer the question—are CFCs bad for the planet’s fitness?—in 1928, and there was no genuine indication that it was even a consultation. Have we become more capable of imagining those threats?It is possible, perhaps even likely, that we have it, thanks to a loose Internet of developments: science fiction, situation planning, environmental movements and, recently, the so-called long-term, including Tothrough Ord. But the white points on the map of understanding are white dots. It’s hard to see beyond them.
This is where the consultation of the time horizon becomes essential. Long-term people feel a lot of pain about focusing on remote science fiction futures, and ignoring our existing suffering, but from a certain point of view, Midgley’s story can be interpreted as a refutation of those criticisms. Saturating our urban centers with poisonous degrees of environmental lead for more than half a century was a bad idea, and if we had an idea of that decades-long time horizon in 1923, we might have made another decision: maybe opt for ethanol instead. of ethyl. And the effects of this long term would have had a clear progressive bias. The positive effect on low-income marginalized communities would have been far greater than the effect on affluent traders who have their gardens in the suburbs. If you gave a new environmental activist a time device and granted him a twentieth-century change, it’s hard to believe that a more important intervention than the closure of Thomas Midgley’s laboratory in 1920.
But Freon’s story suggests another argument. We didn’t want to enlarge our time horizon to assess the potential effect of CFCs because we didn’t have the conceptual equipment to carry out those calculations. Given the acceleration of generation from Midgley. Time, it is a waste of resources to see where we will be in 50 years, let alone 100. The long term is too unpredictable, or these are variables that are not yet visual for us. You can have the most productive intentions, run your long-term scenarios, try to believe all the unforeseen side effects. But on some level, he has condemned himself to chase ghosts.
The acceleration of the generation casts another ominous shadow over Midgley’s legacy. Much has been made of his prestige as a “one-man environmental disaster,” as The New Scientist has called him. But in reality, his concepts needed a massive formula (commercial corporations, the US military) to magnify them into forces of global change. Kettering and Midgley lived in a world governed by linear processes. He will have to have done many paintings to produce his innovation at scale, if he was lucky enough to invent something worth scaling. But much of the commercial science lately exploring the fringes of those pristine areas—synthetic biology, nanogeneration, gene editing—involves another kind of generation: things that copy themselves. Today, the cutting edge science in the fight against malaria is not aerosols; is a generation of “genetic control” that uses CRISPR to tune the genetics of mosquitoes, allowing human-created gene sequences to spread through the population, either by reducing the insects’ ability to spread malariaArray or by driving them away to extinction. The gigantic commercial factories of the Midgley era are giving way to nanofactories and biotech labs where new pathways are not made, but grown. A recent essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated that there are probably well over a hundred people who now have the ability and generation to single-handedly reconstruct an organism such as the smallpox virus, Variola major, in all probability the largest. killer. in human history.
Tellingly, the two moments when we were on the edge of the “precipice” of Tovia Ord in the twentieth century concerned chain reactions: the fusion reaction triggered through Trinity control and the chain reaction unleashed through CFCs in the ozone layer. But self-replicating organisms (or technologies) provide another kind of threat: exponential, nonlinear threat, whether viruses engineered through gain-of-function studies to be more lethal, venturing into nature through a lab leak or act of terrorism, or an unbridled nano-factory that generates microscopic machines for an admirable goal beyond their creator.
In his 2015 book, “A Dangerous Master: How to Prevent Technology from Escaping Beyond Our Control,” Wendell Wallach talks about the elegance of problematic short-term technologies that usually fall under the umbrella of the “God of Play”: cloning, gene editing, “curing” death, creating artificial life forms. There is something strangely divine about the magnitude of the effect Thomas Midgley Jr. had on our environment, but the fact is that his inventions required immense infrastructure, all ethyl and freon plants. , fuel stations and aerosol cans, to really cause this long-term destruction. But today, in the age of artificial replicators, it is much less difficult to believe in a next-generation Midgley game God in the laboratory, with clever or bad intentions. —and sending his creations with the oldest of commandments: Come and multiply.
Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of “Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer. “Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and designer in Portugal. She is known for her retro-inspired collages.
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