Thomas Midgley Jr.
Everything was unusual about this chemical engineer, who, among other peculiar things, even experimented with inhaling lead. He was always searching for the substance that would mark his next revolutionary invention, and one fine day he invented Freon — the first CFC gas.
Em 1924, o inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. poured a lead additive on his hands and inhaled its fumes for about a minute. “I could do this every day without having any health problems”, he guaranteed.
Shortly afterwards, he was hospitalized. A century later, we know that he almost only messed up, but his inventions are still worth a movie written by Terence Winter, screenwriter of the film
Midgley was, at the time, a chemical engineer for General Motors, he had done the feat to support his most recent and profitable discovery: a compound called tetraethyl lead.
Added to gasoline, this substance resolved one of the biggest problems the automobile industry was facing at the time — engine knocking, or small explosions in car engines due to the low quality of gasoline, which resulted in an irritating sound and potential damage, says .
The problem: Leaded gasoline is highly harmful to healthand even though it stopped being sold in 2021, we are still living with the consequences of this additive.
According to data from, it is also estimated that around 1 million people die annually from lead poisoning.
He was known for always having a copy of the periodic tableyour main tool in searching for substance that would mark his next invention revolutionary.
One of them was particularly serious. Midgley considered that CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, would be a ideal and harmless substitute for humans, exchanging the harmful and flammable gases found in refrigeration materials and air conditioning with this substance.
However, CFCs have proven to be deadly for ozone in the atmospheresays CNN: they block dangerous ultraviolet radiation which, in addition to harming plants and animals, can cause skin cancers and other health problems.
He then created the Freon — a derivative of methane, composed of carbon, chlorine and fluorine atoms — the first CFC. In another public demonstration in 1930, Midgley inhaled the gas and blew out a candle with it, in an attempt to demonstrate its safety.
Freon, and other CFCs, have become commercial successes and made the adoption of air conditioning soar in the United States after the Second World War, explains the American television channel. These inventions earned the chemist several awards (such as the Perkin or Priestley medal) and great recognition in the area.
Everything was unusual about this inventor, and of course his death could not be an exception: in 1940, he contracted polio and was seriously disabled. He then conceived of one last contraption: a machine that lifted him from bed to a chair of wheels autonomously, using ropes and pulleys.
On November 2, 1944, he was trapped in his own machine and died strangled.
“The official cause of death was suicide,” he says. Bill Kovarikprofessor of communications at Radford University. “He had an enormous feeling of guilt. The industry told him he was brilliant. But he did things that, in retrospect, were quite irresponsible. THE lead poisoning may have contributed to his psychosis.”
