Talk:Thomas Midgley, Jr.
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if im correct CFCs are still used in asthma inhalers and are one of the acceptable applications-Ricky(barcode)
Is the ironic death line really necessary? I think it could be worded better.
I'd say that if we wanted to remove the comic slant it would be more appropriate to get rid of the two topics "career" and "aftermath", as though he were some kind of natural disaster. I think they should stay, given the damage he's done to the planet. - Patrick
There's one explicit reference (and a few implicit ones) to the "environmental danger of CFCs", but the word "ozone" does not appear in the article. I'm not saying the whole CFCs article needs to be duplicated here, but surely there's somewhere appropriate to insert the phrase "ozone depletion". - Roy
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[edit] Smell
A physics teacher of mine once told us that the work with petrol and lead meant that Midgley was not someone you would want to share a railway carriage with. Any corroboration on this? GraemeLeggett 11:43, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- I recall this too; it was in our school A-Level Chemistry book. It's about tellurium. When he was working systematically through the periodic table for anti-knock additives, it was one of the promising possibilities: except it was absorbed through the skin, causing a strong garlic odour. Confirmation here (PDF): "Three years later their hopes soared when they found that tellurium was effective. But tellurium reeked so of garlic that for weeks Ket’s boys were banned from society and were unwelcome in their own homes 86.143.209.12 02:34, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
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- Dimethyltelluride would be the culprit. Man, this guy has got to be the unluckiest chemist in the world. Two of the most regrettable chemicals of the 20th century... — Jack · talk · 15:12, Friday, 6 April 2007
[edit] Caverns
Interesting biographical oddment here, about the catacombs Midgley had built on his estate. 86.143.209.12 02:34, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] His impact on the ozone
Would it be right to mention his impact on the atmosphere at large? Since both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons had been invented by this guy, there have been historians quoting that he "had more impact on the atmowphere than another other signle organism" in the history of the world. - 134.71.133.216
[edit] According to the British Quiz Show QI....
They said he was "the one human responsible for more deaths than any other in history", beating Hitler, Stalin and Mao (apparently), due to the impact of leaded petrol and CFCs. --81.105.176.121 13:37, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
He was just part of the problem. What is amazing is that leaded gasoline was allowed at all and then for so long. I can maybe see that there was a time when cars were relatively rare --no one anticipated how big a part of life they would become -- but even so, there were doctors who opposed TEL.
The knowledge of the toxicity of lead is fairly old -- when Wedgewood put it in glazes people even then (late 1700s) were complaining. --Jrm2007 (talk) 23:34, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Polio?
I had read that he in fact became disabled due to neurological effects of tetraethyl lead. Never heard the polio thing before. Is there a reference that discusses his contracting polio?--Jrm2007 (talk) 19:05, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
