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Let's be honest. Thomas Midgley did not operate in isolation. He had many enablers and was ultimately just an employee of General Motors. By putting the blame on Midgley, it offers a convenient escape from culpability to GM, Standard Oil, DuPont, and many other corporations.
I see you are not a spawn of this disaster, you see the obvious right in front of you. Similar to uranium decaying into lead over a 4+billion year time being taught as a fact, when there is no solid evidence of it. To say you one has scientifically proven such would mean they watched the process over time, no matter if it's true or not its hypothetical yet they teach the dumbed down masses created by this disaster as if it were without question a fact. I'm glad to see there is at least one person affected by it 😛
Clair Patterson was a big part of getting lead out of gasoline. He didn't just do the research, he testified to lawmakers as well. He's one of those true heroes that we shamefully never get told about in school.
@gioyu comi I would say he grossly underestimated how bad they were rather, given he expected 10 times less lead in bones today as opposed to thousands of years ago. Who can say though if he was trying to be optimistic and ignore "skepticism" from others or were completely ignorant, he's still terrible for knowingly exposing himself to the chemicals just to fool others and make a profit. I think greed can make many go far even to risk their own life than risk being honest and losing everything, but I'm not sure he might've risked as much if he knew what he know today, especially since he did a lot of the studies himself on lead to find out, whether out of conscience or to save his invention's reputation.
So that's why millions of kids were uninterested in school in the late 50s and 60s 17:10 And we pay tax es., it should be re versed for poi son ing the pub lic !!
@@prinstyrio0 no. You've mixed it up, it was PATTERSON that measured and expected 10 times less, and found his predictions blown out of the water. Rewatch at 16:04 Midgley spent months recovering from lead poisoning in Florida and avoiding his own product. If anyone was to know about the effects of lead first hand it would have been him.
@@prinstyrio0 That skepticism is today known in covid contexts as "anti-vaxxers"... And at the centre of it all, we find once again a very greedy company making huge profits at the cost of millions of people's health.
@@dense_and_dull wrong, everybody has a little bit of greed, capitalism that enables this greed by putting profit above any human instead of the other way around is the real problem
In a way though, he was a hero or anti hero as he was instrumental in making the world know the dangers of stuff with lead in it in more depth than they had before. Can't really blame him too much for greed with the refrigerant, as it actually seemed safer and better than the existing alternatives of the time, how was he supposed to know about its effect on the Ozone?
you can claim that the damage he caused with CFCs was a accident but leaded gasoline was actually something he knew from the getgo was bad. it wasnt even the best solution to the problem he wanted to solve.
@@gdheib0430 yes. in the case of leaded gasoline he knew that it was bad. in the case of CFCs he tried to find a good solution to a big problem and peoples overused it wich increased the damage he didnt knew he was doing.
@@Irobert1115HD but still, man was a walking disaster. Edit: people don't like my comment because of my name. That's annoying. It's the same people who worship racial discrimination.
Yeah, Derek said that ethyl alcohol was written off because it was too expensive but any hayseed with a still can make it and it's literally what we put in our gasoline now instead. The problem was that you can't patent a process as simple as distillation, so there was no money to be made from it. Plus oil companies didn't like it because it increased fuel efficiency, so there was outside economic pressure against it as well.
Telling Patterson's story in parallel with Midgley's is such a good choice, really shows that the side effects of leaded gasoline were not something unknown to the generation that implemented it. they just valued easy profit over human life. Though one thing that irks me about the way that science history (and most history for that matter) is presented by stories like these is showing Patterson alone on a boat or in the arctic gathering samples. Scientists work in teams and the research credited to Midgley or Patterson is not the work of one man but a whole bunch and the people who support them.
The moment that Midgley pretended that Ethyl wasn't dangerous (especially after HE, HIMSELF, had just recovered from lead poisoning) was the moment that it was no longer an "ACCIDENT" that he poisoned the world.
Very interesting....and full of BS. Lead is bad, true. But all the claims about millions of deaths and vastly increased crime and rampant stupidity as a result? That is so absurd as to be laughable. Violent crime rising between the 1960s and the 1990s, and falling thereafter, has numerous causes, most of which are far more direct and obvious than the ridiculously stretched idea presented here. (The lead theory presented here is at least as detached as the one presented in Freakonomics, which is the legalization of abortion.) In fact, when criminal reform took hold, crime took off. When attitudes changed and society cracked down, crime plummeted. And since "defund the police" and rioting in big cities became a thing? Crime rates have shot up. Surprise! Or has there been an increase in lead levels recently? Violent crime is overwhelmingly committed by poor people in inner cities, the very people who rarely see the inside of a car. And before you say, yes James, but how about all that air they are breathing in? Well, okay, how about the folks tha live a mile or two away? Right next to Harlem is the Upper West Side, and very close to the South Bronx is Riverdale. How is it that neither the UWS nor Riverdale has high crime rates? To the contrary, violent crime is nearly unheard of there. Okay, so you'll point to lead paint in the antiquated apartment buildings. Here's my question: ALL the apartment buildings had lead paint in the 1920s. Where was all the violent crime in the '30s, '40s, and '50s? Personally speaking, my father is one of the smartest people I ever knew, and is still accomplishing at age 94. He drove a car that took leaded gas past the point that one could find such things in gas stations. I remember at a very young age when my father would ask for leaded gas until it became increasingly difficult to find stations that sold it, and then became impossible. Yet those supposed intelligence and heart problems apparently forgot to visit my father. Me? I was born during the years that supposedly were the worst ones according this video (something like 1950 - 1980, without going back to check). I grew up in a working class NYC neighborhood, with lead paint in the walls and with unclean air just outside, and traveled in my father's car. And my IQ was measured in the 99th percentile. Somehow all the stupid people around us have managed to create more inventions in the last 100 years than in all of prior world history combined, including those which have extended life expectancy by decades. Wild, isn't it? The previous handful of videos I've seen on this channel were interesting, informative, and well-made, as was this one, actually. But now I am doubting everything I ever learned here, or thought I did, having just watched a piece of utter propaganda. Lastly, if the channel host really wanted to produce a video which lives up to this one's title (save a small change, adding a "wo" in front of "man"), he could tell the world about Rachel Carson's war on pesticides, which has led to the death of more than 50m Africans and counting, with an offsetting gain of nearly or literally nothing. Somehow, though, I doubt that video will be forthcoming. Doesn't fit the narrative.
@@jimwerther quite the monologue just to disagree with literally every scientist in the world saying that lead is dangerous. Your proof being "trust me bro, my dad is smart"
In all reality, the companies, banks, and other companies involved would have simply hired someone else to advertise the product anyway. Most likely a worker, I mean - they used the radium girls. The advertising point was safety, and "nothing says safe better than breathing it!"
It's interesting that the person who caused the harm in this case did so much of it and did it with a huge amount of support. Meanwhile, the person who tried to undo it had to go to great lengths to prove there was a problem and was still seen as extreme at the time.
Its the same with microplastics and phthalates these days. Openly destroying this generation's reproductive health but still used in everything, driven by profit.
but you make tons of money, and when people realized, the problem is no longer yours, ...Lead, Freon, Carbon and many more... the business man repeats the very same trick, ...do you think that Thomas Midley Jr. jailed for thousand years, or confiscated entire of his wealth for that lead poisoning and million of deaths?
Wokeism is the devils.religion. Where truth, love, life and victory. Aren't welcomed. All souls matter to God from the womb to the tomb. Jesus loves you cares for you from the womb to the tomb.
Unfortunately the sponsor is just another example of placing the responsibility of climate change reversal on the individual, instead of corporate and legislative bodies. It's literally an identical situation to Clair Patterson, he didn't vow to never drive a lead gasoline powered car ever again, he made congress force the corporations to change.
the fact that this isnt taught in school ought to scare the hell out of everyone that watches this. i have a chemical physics degree and knew of the science, but not the industrial economic and social dimensions. awesome video.
There are a lot of things not taught in school that we should know about. Especially things we apparently should know about but if we don't we could go to jail. Taxes, basic law, property, waste disposal, how much reproduction has an impact on not only your life but the world... Education needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
That's because lead is perfectly safe for consumption. The only reason you think it's toxic is the government told you that. I can assure you they'll want to steal your money to remove our lead pipes is through more taxes. There's no way someone would've ignored this with the free market in play, or else a competitor would've stolen their business. The only thing that makes sense is the government lied to keep us dumb.
I don't want to be THAT guy but cost/benefit analysis is more than capable of accounting for negative externalities including apocalyptic events. It's just rarely done and only when the situation is really really bad. So technically humanity will save itself only when the price for not doing so is high enough in the short term.
a thing to note the heptane was rapidly become a useless and abunduint waste product with out a octaine booster. At the time the suplus heptane was just dumped in the river. the addition of lead was to convert that waste product from oil refining in to something usefull . when he said we will make 200mill it was because he prevented all that waste , and ironitlly pollution. Had they continued to dump extra the heptane in the rivers, what would that disaster look like ? in refining oil you get more heptaine than octaine, before lead the rivers next to refinerys would literally burn for months on end do to all the excess heptane being dumped. compared to that the lead probably seemed like a win win.
@@Randrew Yes, and when we die back to sustainability, most of history, along with our technology, will be lost. We will enter the "Trash Age" where we live off of our ancestors trash and whatever else we can scrounge.
"You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist, before it is generally received, and practiced on." What a hard line to end such an amazing video on. I can't believe I haven't seen this video yet, this was a great watch! It's amazing how often damage to people and our environment are caused by corporate greed, and even more amazing how many times that corporation has been DuPont.
This isn't mentioned in the video, but Clair Patterson was blacklisted for speaking out against lead in gasoline. When the government finally formed a National Research Council panel to investigate it eight years after Patterson raised the alarm, he was excluded despite being the world's leading expert on the subject. Before publishing his paper in 1963, his work was largely funded by oil companies to the tune of around $20k per year. That funding was immediately rescinded, and he also lost a contract with the Public Health Service. The oil industry asked the Atomic Energy Commission to stop funding his work, and members of the board at Caltech tried to have him silenced. He spent most of his life in relative obscurity because of the efforts to blacklist him. Some of that has changed in the past decade or so, and these days, a lot of people know who he is.
I don't know the details about Patterson's employment, but I do know that anti-science conservatives are opposing academic tenure now; no doubt it such a loss of academic freedom would be leveraged to silence all sorts of inconvenient science. They're also usually the first to decry government funding of the arts and sciences.
Nothing has changed, our lives are still in the hands of lobbyists and corrupt politicians. In a few years or decades we'll be looking back at the scientists that are being silenced right now and wish we listened to them. If you know, you know
His death was kind of a reflection of his life. He tried to engineer solutions to problems only for them to backfire to create an even bigger one. Rather poetic.
I'm just sad the bed was only able to strangle him to death once for what he did. Somehow he is far more evil than ppl who killed because they believe they did the right thing. This guy was not mentally ill, he know 100% what he did, he caused huge damage and all of it because he just wanted to get rich. That's so mundane and pathetic.
is this real?? or a n attempt to shift focus from off the other evil men we think of..;; " Shitler AKA Hitler Stalins and what ever that Gengivits Kahns...
I feel like "accidentally" only applies to the second time that man caused a global environmental catastrophe, the one with the lead seemed like willful ignorance. It's honestly crazy how much damage to the earth a single man was able to do in his pursuit of short-term gain.
@@krustysurfer You're right, "feigned ignorance" is probably more accurate. He knew, but decided to do it anyway, downplaying the dangers every step of the way
The FAA has been dragging their feet on approving unleaded aviation fuel for years even though a fleet-wide replacement (G100UL) has passed all of the necessary certification tests multiple times. Naturally, approving it would create economic winners and losers, so I guess that's the holdup?
This man just managed to cover history, psychology, physics, chemistry, math, biology, geology, astronomy, economics, and philosophy. Edit: I added a bunch of stuff that was requested and fixed the Chem science thing
Textbook pessimism. The statement is true, in part, but is definitely not the whole story and is presented in a selective manner that disregards this fact.
Funny think is without people there is no profit so. They are completely blinded and we let them continue they will only wake up when it will be too late and out planet just burns up(literally).
Which is all the more ironic when you consider that the original intent was to solve the safety issue caused by the cranks. They wanted less people to die, but killed more people instead.
What about the freons? It wasnt mentioned if he knew the dangers it would have on the ozone. Not trying to sympathise with him, just saying that maybe that one was an actual accident.
@@velocirapper8862 that one actually does seem like an accident to me. It is after all very stable and safe to be around. It's not like he would have known that widespread use would have resulted in the gas ending up in the upper atmosphere where it could be chemically altered. That said, someone really should have taught him the precautionary principle of science. Assume that something is dangerous until proven safe.
“We do not feel justified in giving up what has come to the industry like a gift from heaven on the possibility that a hazard may be involved in it” That’s the sort of things a cliche villain from a sci-fi movie would say.
A lady's car breaking down, leading to a man's immediate death, leading to a development of a really loud car, leading to the development of leaded gasoline, and finally leading to the poisoning of an entire generation.
Moral of this story: Everytime you men decide to help a stranded woman who's having a car breaking down on the road side, don't forget to say this to her "Ma'am, you probably can be a person who might change a course of a history of invention and destruction at the same time."
Think about how many people were brought out of poverty, how high the human life expectancy went up, how high human population got and the advancement of modern medicine over the same period.
Yeah, lead was known to be harmful. I think a good contender for "person who accidentally killed the most people" might be Mao Zedong killing off the sparrows to protect crops, which were then decimated by insects whose population exploded without predators. This triggered one of the worse famines in history.
I think Derek deliberately used this term just to artificially drive up our engagement by complaining about it. He’s admitted openly that he engages in these sorts of tricks. It kind of annoys me, and I’m close to unsubscribing from him as a result.
I came here to say this but also add "he had a much safer alternative but refused to use it because it wasn't chemically unique enough to get a patent for it."
Most people don't intend to kill others as well when doing irresponsibly dangerous things, like driving much faster than allowed. I still want them to go into jail if that happens. Of course, he wasn't the only one who went on that road while knowing it, but the excuse "If I could get away with it, but give it up, then others will get away with doing it anyway" was and is the cause of a lot of the most terrible things done by humans.
@@dogfellow3848 he took a vacation in Miami after accidentally poisoning himself (specifically to give his lungs a break). He had to start his own company because Dupont was tired of the product killing his employees and for that company he repeatedly had to start new factories because his employees kept dying/going mad/etc.
Being able to correlate historical events related to human civilization like the rise and fall of empires and the Black Death by observing lead levels in the ice cores in Greenland is so crazy.
Can't call it "by accident" if he activly tries to keep the truth about the toxicity away from the public. He and his boss are surely in the top ten of worst human being ever lived on this planet. It does not matter if it was intentional or not. The damage he had done is irredeemable.
@@peepeepoopoo5932 Hitler purposefully had people marched out of their homes, left to die from the elements, shot and suffocated and starved to death--and he purposefully targeted people he considered to be worth less than the "superior" race, including people with disabilities. I think this is an unfair comparison. But I would compare the man who put lead in gasoline to heads of food corporations today who deny how much sugar is harming people's health and shortening their lives because sugar helps them make a better profit.
You gotta respect the sheer courage of the person asking the guy who made all children dumb and violent to be in charge of making yet another "safe" chemical compound.
Very interesting....and full of BS. Lead is bad, true. But all the claims about millions of deaths and vastly increased crime and rampant stupidity as a result? That is so absurd as to be laughable. Violent crime rising between the 1960s and the 1990s, and falling thereafter, has numerous causes, most of which are far more direct and obvious than the ridiculously stretched idea presented here. (The lead theory presented here is at least as detached as the one presented in Freakonomics, which is the legalization of abortion.) In fact, when criminal reform took hold, crime took off. When attitudes changed and society cracked down, crime plummeted. And since "defund the police" and rioting in big cities became a thing? Crime rates have shot up. Surprise! Or has there been an increase in lead levels recently? Violent crime is overwhelmingly committed by poor people in inner cities, the very people who rarely see the inside of a car. And before you say, yes James, but how about all that air they are breathing in? Well, okay, how about the folks tha live a mile or two away? Right next to Harlem is the Upper West Side, and very close to the South Bronx is Riverdale. How is it that neither the UWS nor Riverdale has high crime rates? To the contrary, violent crime is nearly unheard of there. Okay, so you'll point to lead paint in the antiquated apartment buildings. Here's my question: ALL the apartment buildings had lead paint in the 1920s. Where was all the violent crime in the '30s, '40s, and '50s? Personally speaking, my father is one of the smartest people I ever knew, and is still accomplishing at age 94. He drove a car that took leaded gas past the point that one could find such things in gas stations. I remember at a very young age when my father would ask for leaded gas until it became increasingly difficult to find stations that sold it, and then became impossible. Yet those supposed intelligence and heart problems apparently forgot to visit my father. Me? I was born during the years that supposedly were the worst ones according this video (something like 1950 - 1980, without going back to check). I grew up in a working class NYC neighborhood, with lead paint in the walls and with unclean air just outside, and traveled in my father's car. And my IQ was measured in the 99th percentile. Somehow all the stupid people around us have managed to create more inventions in the last 100 years than in all of prior world history combined, including those which have extended life expectancy by decades. Wild, isn't it? The previous handful of videos I've seen on this channel were interesting, informative, and well-made, as was this one, actually. But now I am doubting everything I ever learned here, or thought I did, having just watched a piece of utter propaganda. Lastly, if the channel host really wanted to produce a video which lives up to this one's title (save a small change, adding a "wo" in front of "man"), he could tell the world about Rachel Carson's war on pesticides, which has led to the death of more than 50m Africans and counting, with an offsetting gain of nearly or literally nothing. Somehow, though, I doubt that video will be forthcoming. Doesn't fit the narrative.
I worked as an apprentice in a lead smelter back in the early 90’s, blood tests for lead contamination were carried out monthly, you would be removed from the smelter if the contamination was about 30ppm, my usual levels were around 11-15ppm. The smelter was based in a small mining town in a rural and remote part of Australia and we were sent to one of the capital cities for 6 weeks for college component required as part of our training for the apprenticeship. My accomodation was in a block of flats situated on a main road in the city, with constant traffic, this was in the early 90’s and lead additives to fuel hadn’t yet been phased out. At the completion of that block of college, and on returning to work, my first day back coincided with the blood test for lead, and it came back higher than I’d ever had, only a couple of ppm lower than the allowable threshold. I put it down to the lead additives in the fuel from the city traffic, it’s bizarre to think that it’s safer to work in a lead smelter than it was to live beside a high traffic area.
Makes sense though. When you melt lead now one is very carefully not to reach the temperature at which it vaporized, so you can't breath it in. Not true with leaded gasoline.
And now think that the current Liberal National Coalition government has refused to put in place emissions regulations and fuel economy regulations for cars (unlike the EU, UK, US, Canada, Japan, India and China). As a result, Australia is becoming a dumping ground for extremely dirty vehicles which are undoubtedly causing more air pollution (not to mention climate change) than is necessary.
Pretty insane if you keep in mind that a very similar problem nowadays has come up with plastic. And people don’t want to get rid of it due to the same reasons - cost effective, practical, flexible in use.
@@Kamitube We have particles of literally anything and everything in our bodies, from the pans and pots you use to cook, to the cutlery and knives you use to eat your food, to the glass and plastic cups you use to drink your stuff. So let's not nitpick here, at this point it's just a matter of what thing will kill us first. At least nothing will be worse than lead.
Make no mistake Midgley was 100% aware of the effects his inventions would cause in fact there were throughly researched articles about it which were buried by him and the company that he was working for so that they could make an epic amount of money. Greed really knows no bounds.
Quite right. Midgley knew exactly what he was doing. At one point he made a PR stunt of playing with lead for the media to supposedly demonstrate its "safety", while knowing full-well that the concern wasn't acute exposure but chronic. He was counting on the public being too ignorant to know the difference. Don't give bad-faith actors the benefit of the doubt. They've already shown they'll abuse it, and in continuing to give it to them anyway, you've deliberately made yourself complicit in their malfeasance. People tend to do it anyway because they're desperate to pretend the problem is one of ignorance instead of deliberate ignorance, as you can teach your way out of the first but must fight your way clear of the second. MLK called such people who place their privileged comfort over the rights of others "white moderates", and rightly labeled them a bigger threat to civil rights than the outspoken bigots.
I would maybe go so far to compare corporations like this to sex trafficking operations. It’s really all for money in the end. Everything is now. It’s gross. But 🤷🏼♀️ literally what can we do about any of it? it’s their world, we’re just living in it. Maybe it’s the lead poisoning talking, but honestly I life everyday wondering if anyone even cares about the earth, or other human lives. But in the end it’s true, nobody cares more about money than the millionaires/billionaires. SMH
I remember being in class at school, when I was young and we were learning a brief history of Romans, and the teacher talked about how their downfall came to many factors, invasion, internal strife, and the fact that they used lead as their plumbing and many people in Rome were being slowly poisoned. And as someone who worships history, I never forgot one kid who said: People in the past were so stupid, how could they not realise they were poisoning themselves. And the teacher said: Well we today might be using materials that in the future they will learn are actually poisonous to us.
Lead poisoning from lead pipes was probably not the cause of lead poisoning bc the mineral deposit effectively kept the water from coming into to contact with the lead pipes. It would have most likely came from the ruling class of Romans and elites drinking and dining with pewter cups and plates.
Upper class Romans used lead to sweeten wine. If the pH stays relatively high (for drinking water) and the pipes have calcium scale, Pb levels will stay low. I am not advocating using lead pipes, but the lead levels can be minimized by monitoring and acting on the chemistry.
Yeah thanks for mentioning this there were things that mitigated lead poisoning. Also this is a great way of illustrating how humans need the scientific method to process info. Simply observing things in everyday life isn’t going to give you the answer.
Like, say, the internet? While we sit around watching RUclips, Google and the other big tech companies are using their profits to build AI robots that will have a catastrophic effect on humanity. By merely acting as consumers (just like the people who had to use leaded petrol to get to work) we're culpable in messing up the world for future generations. Have a nice day.
Accidental has nothing to do with the person, but the whole sequence of events and their timings. None of this would have happened if the lady's car didn't break down or someone else came up with a less toxic additive or a different design for combustion engine etc. No matter what his real intentions were there was no way he could have known the extent of damage his actions brought.
the danger of ingeniuity. The real question though is where would society be now if not for what he did? Hard to say. The butterfly effect can take reality to strange places.
@@Jormungadrhumans are very very delicate! Everything we invent can kill us! We take a beautiful opium plant and kill ourselves with it by making it illegal whilst make ethanol and sell it in shops when it's pure poison
After knowing that he "spent a long time recovering from lead poisoning and wouldn't go anywhere near the product", calling the deaths accidental is not appropriate, it's at least gross negligence and at worst mass murder. Anyway, great video! I am in awe.
@@electrictroy2010 But lead is not OK in any quantity. The more you have, the more poisoned you are - who knows how much smarter you and I would be if folks had used a little more common sense back then?
@gioyu comi so many scientists went out of their way to combat corporate greed. They are forgotten because of paid smear campaigns and are never given the recognition they deserved. They were heroes that saved lives.
I apologize for this comment but I am not really patient, however I am really curious to hear what the man did. Could someone (who spent 25 minutes watching this video) recap it for me?
The fact that ice is literally a physical time capsule for humanity (and the Earth) is absolutely fascinating, the fact that you can see the rise and fall of nations and major events in the ice is mind blowing, thanks for sharing!
Be wary. I have heard of some people dispute the accuracy of ice coring. And to be transparent, I do not know the level of truthfulness of this as...tertiary sourced information. But it is a thought I think wise to keep in mind. Just like the quote I just heard him say around 23:00 minutes.
The worst part? His chemistry is extremely sound, and even today anti-knocking agents that can compete with tetraethyl lead are hard to come by. Also, Freon is an incredibly efficient gas to use as a refrigerant. A similar thing happens in gold refining, where cyanide and mercury are STILL the undefeated kings of efficient chemical refining of gold as they can pick up NANOGRAMS of gold in solution efficiently, and many alternative processes struggle to reach this level of recovery. Just goes to show that sometimes the most ideal chemical solutions have the worst side effects.
Indeed. Midgley had a team of scientists working under Kettering. They were the one's who actually found and isolated Tetraethyllead after going through the periodic table The discovery was made when midgley was on a break seeing his father. CFC discovery was made by Albert Leon Henne and Robert McNary, Midgley. They observed that the refrigerants then in use comprised relatively few chemical elements, many of which were clustered in an intersecting row and column of the periodic table of elements. The element at the intersection was fluorine, known to be toxic by itself. Midgley and his collaborators felt, however, that compounds containing fluorine could be both nontoxic and nonflammable.
@@jeddaniels2283 yeah the Freon thing was especially unfortunate because that was before a lot was understood about radical chemistry. If CFCs didn’t have such a detrimental effect due to radical generation, they’d actually be a perfect inert chemical solution to a lot of refrigerant problems.
@@spiderdude2099 Without knowing the detrimental effect. The three of them must of thought they had found a near perfect solution to the problem. I wonder if there were any awards handed out to the trio. Thankfully the Ozone layer has a natural cycle triggered via the Chapman cycle. With high energy UV lb protection via the Hartley cycle.
I'll accept that the Freon thing was probably accidental. Given the sequence of events that would need it to be broken apart to react with ozone, it's probably something one could easily overlook. But using lead in a compound that is being intentionally converted into a gas? Lead, a heavy metal that was discovered to be highly dangerous to humans almost two centuries earlier? Nah, that's no accident. That's despicable greed. Everything done by the Ethyl company was nothing more than a poor cover-up for the truth.
Academic research in Europe at the same time already knew that CFCs in the upper atmosphere would degrade ozone, however there was no way an industrialist in the US would easily come across that research.
It is not a stretch to assume that BOTH were entirely accidental, and if we are honest, then the mere notion that Freons might NOT have been would mark one as someone whose tin foil hat has been on way too tight for way to long. Keep in mind the dates. These inventions were effectively riding the coat tails of the later days of the industrial revolution. Science as a whole had simply not advanced enough. Remember Dr. Harvey Wiley and his work to eliminate poisonous chemicals from american Foodstuffs. Those chemicals had not been put in there for shits and giggles or because greedy American industrialists wanted to kill consumers. They had been put in there becuase they worked and because a cursory examination had deemed them safe. Again, it was not like the people mentioned in THIS video DIDN'T do any safety testing. The inhalation of Freons and Ethyl is CLEARLY mentioned. They THOUGHT it was safe at first, and it simply took DECADES for any evidence to the contrary to come along. No one had as of yet imagined that regulations like the one we have today might be necessary. Something was either toxic or it wasn't, and if the former, you would feel consequences in a short timeframe. You would die, or your teeth would fall out, or your bones would rot (all real things that happened in early industrialization, look up "Phossy Jaw" if you want to traumatize yourself...). Studies on long term exposures to dangerous chemicals were just beginning to emerge. The very concept of such stringent rules as we now know to be necessary would have seemed needlessly alarmist to EVERYONE. People simply did not know better yet. If anything, this highlights how incredibly important agencies like the FDA are (again, see Dr Wiley), to prevent something like this getting into common use in the first place.
The day I learned that the same dude who gave us leaded gasoline also shares partial credit in the development of CFCs was the day I learned that one person really can change the world.
“He knew the dangers, avoided his product as much as possible, and couldn’t do interviews/talks because he was literally experiencing the effects of his own poison” And then he turned around, covered it all up, and explicitly lied that it was safe for personal profit. That right there is a mass murderer.
@@mike-cc3dd the vaccines have saved millions of lives. By not getting the vaccine you could be responsible for someone else's death. So shut up Why are you even on a science related channel if you don't believe in science?
I was a kid in the 70's and 80's. I remember my parents saying to never pick roadside blackberries because they were full of lead from the car exhaust. They must have heard about this on the news.
I remember parents saying not to eat paint chips too, how much of 'disparity in IQ' that they try to blame on lead exposure also came from inattentive parents.
@@VenerhiaStellarvore and it was in every water pipe since about 2500 years ago until a few decades ago. This videos creator had some overzealous, and at times simply incorrect sources. Burned lead is absolutely a danger, so is directly consuming it like kids with paint chips, lead pipes are only a danger when the fluid going through them is acidic as sediment buildup prevents the denser lead from leaching into the fluid. Lead exposure is used as an excuse to handwave away genetic disparity in IQ, videos like this serve to protect chemical companies who could have lobbied to use ethanol as it's not at all expensive but was illegal at the time, and to have a non genetic reason for repeatable and proven IQ disparities. My family were farmers, probably exposed to as much burning fuel as urban kids, yet if there's any lowered IQ from it that's measurable (the 10 points the video talks about is actually within a standard deviation of 15 and therefore not measurable as a real reduction), it would only make the genetic disparity larger.
@@poopsmith6853 Even if it's not as iq impacting as he claims it, my point still stands there's only little parents could do back then to save their kids from any kind of pollution like that. It wasn't removed from all these products for nothing yknow, maybe it didnt made boomers go dumb per say but it definitly hasnt helped them.
Lead poisoning is no joke, I work in the metal recycling industry and have been exposed to large amount of lead, my last lead blood test was 26.7μg/dL with the lab results saying levels should be
I know how it feels, I live where the groundwater(drinking water) are polluted with lead and many other chemicals since the industries basically have no oversight and dump everything everywhere they can. Especially the river, I have hard time remembering anything, hands always jittery, and many other health problems. And sadly, even today, nothing is done to prevent this pollutions. Eventually profits are always more important than lives.
I'm sorry to hear about the issues you have and hope you're able to alleviate the effects they have on you. The answer to your question is money. In the end it's always money.
My lead story: I am went from being an extremely skilled student in middle school to getting less and less able to focus on work in high school until I eked by with low grades in my senior year. I'm still considered a very "smart" person by those who know me, but my mental disability has kept me from finishing college or finding work, because I just can't focus for long periods of time and my working memory ranges from amazingly good in areas I'm interested in to staggeringly poor when I'm less motivated. I'm now 26. It turned out that my high school's water supply was extremely lead-poisoned, worse than Flint, Michigan. Some of the worst lead levels were in the water pipes for the gym, where I'd be super active and get very very thirsty. If I had a time machine and could send a message back saying "please please please don't drink the water at school!"... thinking about it makes my heart hurt.
Bless your heart! I'm so sorry! I was brilliant in school also but when they threw me into all Advanced classes in High School I began flunking them, but I think it was because I hadn't learned to study when everything before had come so easily to me, you know? My father was a brilliant man and I inherited his IQ. Like you, I HAVE to be interested in something to pursue it and that makes perfect sense! If only schools and especially COLLEGES would pay attention to that! Thank you for your comment and the reminder of how that all went down when I was a teen. I dearly hope you're doing better now.
@@Runescape. This isn't a contest of who is the most miserable. Only because someone has it worse, doesn't mean his problem isn't relevant to at least him.
My best friend died due to lead poisoning. It took doctors six years to figure it out. David was an electronics engineer who spent years in an electronics lab intermittently bent over bread boards soldering connections. David inadvertently ended up breathing the lead in the solder in very small quantities, and the build up in his body finally caught up to him.
While I am sorry your friend suffered and died he was partly to blame. I solder everyday and use a HEPA fume extractor to pull the solder fumes away. In addition, I wash my hands frequently to reduce the amount of lead absorbed. Part of my education was how to work safely with solder.
@@tomp7835 "David inadvertently ended up breathing the lead in the solder in very small quantities, " From above. What makes you think that Anthony's best friend didn't do the same precautions as you do? Nowhere does it say that he didn't.
@@nephthysbastet4809 because I see it everyday, many people know what they should do, but don't. Many have the attitude that it won't hurt them; others just don't care. Much like the inventors of leaded gas.
Indeed. Willfully downplaying and ignoring the hazards, real and potential, can hardly be called accidental. All in the name of making money. Unfortunately that time period in particular has many examples of that kind of behavior, the consequences and results of which the world continues to deal with today. And don't forget industrial lobbying.
Would've been hard for him to undo all of that. Sad, because he was a great scientist and even helped find the age of the Earth and helped nuclear technology, but one innovation had more problems than he could've ever imagined.
Yeah, he KNEW from the very beginning that his product was harmful and he chose greed and self-interest over the good of his fellow man, that's just plain evil, smh.
I cant tell how much i rewatched this video. its such an interesting tidbit in human history. About one man, motivated by profit, poisoined and endangered the entire world. I seriously wish there's a docu series about this. If there is, lemme know 😭
@@ls6jay true, though it's part lubrication, partly cushioning the valves when they closed. Modern components can withstand those stresses, old engines either needed a change of valves and seats or have leaded fuel. But, confounding the story is another source of lead that remains a problem today, lead paint. Ironically, there's still another source and one that's two feet away from me, lead solder for electronic circuits. Now, modern solders use greater amounts of silver and tin, which then introduces tin whiskers into the mess...
@@junarshfago We have a blend of E85, which is the ethanol solution to the knock problem. Without his input, we'd probably be in the same place today, minus some of the damage
I am a pilot, a general aviation pilot, we work with 100LL on the daily. I was never told about the dangers of lead, I am feeling extremely ignorant and naturally concerned, not to even mention that the lineman in my particular college are not trained properly and have no safety equipment. I have heard of some of them ingesting by accident 100LL. And most of us, including myself, when having to check the fuel we constantly enter in contact with it and inhale it. I am outraged I was never told about this, and how little care is being put into our safety.
if history has taught me anything, it's that you can never underestimate how easily people would doom others for a quick buck; and the wealthier and/or more powerful the person, the more this holds true
Not true about more wealth = more evil. If anything thats the opposite of reality. You think Elon Musk is the most evil person in the world, but a penniless serial killer isn't?
This lead pollution is the reason why the boomers and Xers have so many crazy people. You see a divide in politics from people above 40 and below. The above 40s that vote for hateful people are literally brain damaged by lead.
Gotta say the guy’s death is pretty poetic. He spends his whole life making inventions that kill millions of people knowing how harmful they are. With his last invention it’s dangerous like all his others but with this one he doesn’t know it similar to the people who death’s he caused. Being brutally strangled by his own invention is also fittingly gruesome
Gotta say I don’t really believe in capitol punishment, but in this very specific case I wouldn’t be that upset if someone tortured him for like 10 years. Feels so much eviler to do it for a bit of cash and not some awful mental illness.
This documentary omits the story of how, when first reports of lead poisoning started to occur on Standard Oil factories, they went ahead and measured blood concentration of lead in all of their workers. They found that even those that didn't have symptoms had 80ppm of lead in their blood. From that, they claimed that 80ppm was the 'normal' and 'safe' 'acceptable' concentration, and they bullied their way for that number to be written into the OSHA and EPA standards. It took Patterson more than a decade of battling against the ridicule from both the scientific community and malicious harassment from the lead industry before that 'standard' was questioned and finally overturned.
A few years ago, on a talk show, Stephen Fry gave a clue to the other guests; "This man is considered to be the worst polluter in the history of mankind". The guests couldn't understand how a man could be a worse polluter than a country or a corporation. I knew who he was referring to.
This sounds like a perpetrated crime against not just humanity but all life on earth rather than just an 'accident'. A crime perpetrated by corporations, not one man.
Instead of demonizing the corporations, we need to figure out a way to create a hybridized capitalist system, because the as a whole, free markets have brought us things like the internet, and iPhones, global shipping and has reduced suffering, but on the same token has caused countless deaths even outside of the relatively narrow scope of leaded gas. Think of the deaths, and extinctions that unleaded fuels are causing today. And that's not to mention coal etc. and consumerism in general. To quote Woodhouse from the TV series Archer: "The mind fairly boggles..."
@@One.Zero.One101 he said a crime perpetrated by corporations, not one man. HE didn't intentionally poison the planet, corporations willfully ignored the science and continued denying it.
Thank you very much for this video as someone who has been greatly affected by lead poisoning at a very,young age. My family experiences a lot of the negative hardships that you have stated everything from cataract and other eye problems to Neurodiverse learning challenges, such as ADHD and dyslexia and lots of complications with cardiac issues. All of this is very prominent in my families health history and it’s also very prominent in my personal health history. Thank you for this. I feel seen.
I wouldn’t exactly say he killed the most people accidentally. He knew the dangers, he poisoned himself, yet he went along with the production anyway. Instead of being rewarded by the scientific community, he should have been discredited and shunned. This like so many things in our society were done with a single goal in mind, to solve a problem and make money and who cares who it hurts.
His death was a valuable lesson because if he didn't die. You probably would. Edit: Or you would probably be incredibly dumb and weird and racist and a lot of other things.
The reason people attribute Mao’s famine deaths of the to him was because of the war on sparrows he declared. Thomas Midgley was more a direct mass murderer then Mao, because Mao was unaware that killing the sparrows would lead to famine, Thomas Midgley sold out the planet, Humanity, and his life, all so he could be rich. There is no way a man could be more disgusting then Thomas Midgley.
@@captain-chair keywords : liberty and individual rights. People who has no respect for those two are very very far away from "unaware of killing people". Get your 'never truly tried system' apologist somewhere else.
One person single handedly decreased the average intelligence, increased crime rates, made a hole in the ozone layer, killed millions of people (himself included), and made people worldwide help him AND pay.
Not necessarily. There were other sources of lead than just the gasoline back then. Lead paint, lead pipes, etc. To blame all the lead poisoning on one guy is a false narrative
@@rightsideup6304 Me: "To blame all the lead poisoning on one guy is a false narrative." You: "But not necessarily a wrong one." I can see you understand lead poisoning from first hand experience.
@@flintironstag7722 probably not true because all the lead leaching parts of the potable water isn't reported. They make leaded parts just for the water meters and when local groups get active and make it illegal. The corporations just make new meters for the area involved and sell their left over existing meters to the neighboring state, or nation, who's people might be unaware. Like in the case of California and Oregon.
In this episode: 0:30 who was Patterson, 1:20 uranium decay to lead, 2:25 zircon & Earth age measuring, 3:00 crankless Cadilac story, 3:45 Kettering & 4:27 engine knocking, fuel efficiency, 5:30 octane number 5:55 98octane-diesel comparison, 7:10 ethanol & (tetraethyl lead) leaded gasoline, 10:25 lead poisoning, 13:20 Earth age (4,55 bil) 14:40 lead concentration caused by people only 15:43 lead pollution diagram
Way better than documentaries on TV/streaming services nowadays. They often have stunning cinematography, sure, but are not often nearly so information dense!
Just came across this. In my youth we were still using leaded gas before unleaded came out. After the switch. They had an additive for unleaded gas being used in leaded engines. If I remember correctly. It was to prevent damage to the valves. Also I worked at AutoZone when R12 was started being phased out and R134 starting in new vehicles. I believe R12 use to sell for 99 cents a can. Interesting video.
you can actually convert a leaded engine to unleaded, just need to change the valvetrain. i have a 2 stroke vespa here thats from 1978, a time when leaded fuel was still a thing in germany, yet it runs fine on modern unleaded or even e10 fuel. the engine is all original. totally fine. that engine is insanely inefficient, you can literally smell the unburnt fuel going out the exhaust, but it runs on just about any petrol there is.
Imagine if that one guy had said "No, I can't responsibly go on developing leaded gasoline when I know how unhealthy it is. Even with that profit-margin it's just not worth it," noted a failure in his research paper and abandoned that line of research to instead keep on looking for other additives.
what and not become wildly rich? hahaha i believe so little in humanity that I don't for one moment think any single person on this planet would choose any different than this guy did.
"Thanks for the research. Now we know how effective leaded gas is, and how dangerous it is." "Since you are not interested in using it, we will now proceed without you."
I always loved this channel, but man... I had no ideia how deep you was going on others subjects. This one, lead toxicity, was my area of study for the entire college and master degree, and I am totally impressed by how well you explained it! I really appreciate your dedication to bring very good quality knowledge here on RUclips! Keep up the good work, greetings from Brazil 😄
In Brazil, they use ethanol or an ethanol fuel mix correct? Ethanol functions as lead, but was required at least 10% of the fuel mixture as stated in the video, but at the time it was expensive?
@@Mickeycuatropatas Ethanol is not very expensive, but it doesn't have the same combustion power that gasoline has, the cars we have today can utilize gasoline, pure ethanol or mix of the two at any proportion. (Our gasoline comes with 27% ethanol, if I not mistaken). Today it costs R$7 per liter (around 1,5 US dollars 😭). Ethanol price ends by been almost the same, since we need a bit more to get the same travel distance than gasoline.
Back in the 70s and 80s, I was a meteorologist in the US Army, responsible for sending up weather balloon flights. The radiosonde at the bottom of the balloon recorded temperature, humidity, and pressure. The pressure was measured by a commutator bar which was a bar with alternating conductors and insulators, and a bellows with a needle running across it would detect the pressure. This was inaccurate since the conductors were only about 1/100th of an inch across. So, to increase the accuracy, hypsometers were added to the radiosondes. A hypsometer is a tube filled with liquid trichloromonofluoromethane (modified Freon) with a thermistor measuring the temperature of the boiling point of the liquid. The higher the altitude, the lower the pressure, and the lower the boiling point. This worked well until the mid 1970s when scientists realized that Freon was messing up the ozone in the stratosphere. Steps were immediately taken (and orders given to us meteorologists) to eliminate hypsometers since they were delivering a critical dose of Freon (about 1 1/2 to 2 oz) directly into the stratosphere (and sometimes the mesosphere), enough to nearly eliminate the ozone in the vicinity of the radiosonde flight. What took Freon years to do from the ground, a hypsometer could do in minutes.
Perhaps that did more damage to the ozone layer than the CFCs released on Earth? Refrigerants such as R12 and R22 are several times DENSER than air and quickly sink to the ground when released, so how CFCs got miles up into the sky to damage the ozone layer without help as you described is beyond me.
If anyone reading this is, like me, confused by the big words, a radiosonde is apparently a device that's suspended by a weather balloon that takes measurements of atmospheric conditions.
That's wild, thanks for sharing. USG of course would never own up to this so I appreciate the honesty. It's the only way to learn from the mistakes of the past.
i think what's the most horrifying part, is how recent this all was. i live in the uk and to think we only decided "hey maybe we shouldnt be breathing lead" only 22 years ago is terrifying, what in the hell
I agree. I’m 24, and only just recently found out I have lead poisoning. Turns out a cup set my mom got just before I was born, which I used from the moment I could drink from glass cups up til about age 21, has lead paint. It was that Disney cup set from McDonald’s, similar to the Garfield ones that also have lead paint. Also, lead poisoning can cause ADHD, which my mom and I both have 🙃 fun times.
Whoever believes in the Lord Jesus Christ shall not perish but have everlasting life he is returning. Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior and believe that he died on the cross for your sins before it’s too late repent he is returning amen….
Nice question. I guess it is a less relevant source, as you are not actively making breathable aerosols out of it, but the powder that comes out of it is likely harmful.
Also, lead is what makes crystal glass so nice and shiny in respect to regular glass. And yes, lead slowly dissolves in water. So grandma's precious crystal glasses might have contributed too.
"In 1786 Benjamin Franklin remarked that Lead had been used for far too long considering its known toxicity." "You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on." That is one hell of a statement! It is going up on the wall in my science classroom tomorrow! Well done! Chris
@@jeanninecathcart627 🤔 msmedia? What is it? No I don't watch it, and the quote looks pretty accurate to me. Why do you doubt it, or are you just a troll🤨
@@Cgraseck I didn't say it was not accurate, but I won't just kneejerk say that it is or is not and put it up on a sign as fact. "LOOKS PRETTY ACCURATE"? OMG how funny. BTW, MSMEDIA= Main stream media. Think CNN, MSNBC, NY TIMES, WAPO, NBC ABC CBS THE ONES THAT PARROT EACH OTHER DAILY , even the same wording.
The disgusting irony of lead being used to maximize profit while now knowing it’s removal saves $2.45 trillion/year (23:03)! Think of how many similar issues (though altogether less significant) exist across industry. That last line is hauntingly accurate. Whatever you do in life please always choose ethics over profit. Thanks for the insightful video.
And this is why ideologies like libertarianism can never work. No single corporation has any incentive to account for the externalities their product causes, whether that be others projects, worldwide health, or the environment. It didn't matter to them that it caused a loss of economic output and millions of deaths, because they were the ones still profiting. In many cases government regulation is essential to account for these externalities, not just red tape
@@shamus731 government needs to act as historically relevant and aware collective knowledge and agreed systems that go beyond the gains of some over others. However, continually neoliberal and individual liberty focused ideologies neglect that this focus is harmful to anyone except those few lucky and in the right time and place to profit over others. Libertarian ideology is ignorant or neglectful or outright indignant to history and the ramifications of living on a finite planet.
@@pneumaniac14 This is exactly it. To corporations it doesn't matter how much something can save on a _global_ scale, it only matter how much they can profit on a personal scale. Removing lead saved a ton of money in industries that weren't fuel manufacturing (such as healthcare), while including lead allowed the fuel industry to profit at their cost. The only thing that can prevent corporations from doing stuff like this is legislation either regulating/banning it or implementing heavy fines that make it economically nonviable because by the time any kind of "free market" alternative or solution can come the harm has already been done.
a stench that is impossible to get off you even by bathing is probably more likely to deter customers than a long term health problem that you will only notice decades down the line
I was actually part of a research group in university that studied lead exposure and it's effects on aggressive behavior in fruit flies, and it was my first presentation I ever gave at a wildlife conference. At least for us, there was a high correlation between levels of lead exposure and aggressive behaviors displayed. Really interesting stuff, but incredibly sobering as well.
@@ZiddersRooFurry thank you! Obviously there's a good amount of overlap between wildlife and humans in regards to exposure to lead, and our study chose fruit flies as a model for many species. It just so happened that the overall group that mine was a part of was more geared towards conservation and impacts of anthropogenic stressors like pollution on wildlife rather than directly looking at effects on humans, but again the model should work for humans just as well.
@@lazyexistentialist4550 there's an answer to that! We observed and documented their behaviors for like a year in a certain situation (two males with a potential mate) and then used that information to determine which behaviors were aggressive. Very tedious, but you'd be surprised by their behavior and how obvious they would be once you knew, such as grabbing, hitting with one or both of their front legs, wing threats. We called it the fly fight club lol
This video taught me a few things that answered questions I've had since I was a child about gas. Why all the gas offered was "unleaded", why every gas station made it a point to advertise unleaded even though no place was selling leaded gas, and what octane means and how the phrase "high-octane" came to mean "intense" (because you need it to prevent knocking which in turn is needed for engines to go really, really fast). Thank you.
@@CABaaL1337 - As long as there's a comparably cheap alternative developed, we're pretty good at abandoning older harmful chemicals especially in the 21st century (ex leaded gas, freon, etc).
@@BillAnt But we invent a lot of new ones. And as you said we keep a lot of the old ones also as long as there is no cheap equivalent. Not quite the same but have to mention that we were very good in ignoring CO2 the last 70 years or so.
@@CABaaL1337 It's the burning of fossil fuels. It heats up the atmosphere and will render earth uninhabitable for human life. Big oil knows that since the 1970s. Please watch the documentary "Big oil vs the world" from BBC.
I'm okay with people making accidental mistakes, even when they cause a lot of harm - as long as they put their efforts into correcting them once they learn about the harm. When you find out about the harm and still continue to do it, and even lie about the harm, you _very_ quickly turn into a monster in my eyes...
@@afraaal-sulaimani9188 Well Kind of. CFC or Chlorofluorocarbons was at the time not known to harm the ozone. Hell they didn't even know the product before it was released (if they did, then the first para is true). This product was less toxic for us.
Literally none of this could've gotten this out of hand without ignorant consumerism. We as humans are to blame for everything we suffer through, and we deserve it. Intelligent minds warn us time and time again, yet the majority of people either don't care, or are too stupid to understand their warnings. So, thanks to careless ignorance of both past, and present masses, we continue to suffer.
@@LordDragox412 if you are making the politicians rich and powerful then you have total immunity, so kick back to them and you can cause genocide without consequences.
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Happy Earth Day! If you want to offset your carbon emissions I will personally cover the first month of your subscription at ve42.co/wren (for the first 100 people to sign up)
Why am I being recommended these videos by YT. Some stoopid guy made an error like really old time ago and we have to learn about it??? Why !!!!!!
PS: I hate earth !!!
3rd comment lol
Do the lead pencils we use have the same lead? ✏️✏️✏️
Bro I am waiting for the new n updated video on electricity
Imagine being the person responsible for making an entire generation dumber on average. That’s a sad legacy to leave behind.
Not one person is behind the legacy media?
And now the younger ones are suffering from it
There seem to be a lot of groups contesting for the title, nowadays.
@Actually, Movies seems like u got high levels of lead in ur bones
have you been on truth social? Patterson's record is being challenged daily.
Let's be honest. Thomas Midgley did not operate in isolation. He had many enablers and was ultimately just an employee of General Motors. By putting the blame on Midgley, it offers a convenient escape from culpability to GM, Standard Oil, DuPont, and many other corporations.
Don't worry, Schwab is killing more people ss we speak.
You have a point.
Absolutely.
thanks for pointing that out. what you said is true but the title says “the man” so it makes sense to stick to that for now
I see you are not a spawn of this disaster, you see the obvious right in front of you. Similar to uranium decaying into lead over a 4+billion year time being taught as a fact, when there is no solid evidence of it. To say you one has scientifically proven such would mean they watched the process over time, no matter if it's true or not its hypothetical yet they teach the dumbed down masses created by this disaster as if it were without question a fact. I'm glad to see there is at least one person affected by it 😛
Clair Patterson was a big part of getting lead out of gasoline. He didn't just do the research, he testified to lawmakers as well. He's one of those true heroes that we shamefully never get told about in school.
@gioyu comi I would say he grossly underestimated how bad they were rather, given he expected 10 times less lead in bones today as opposed to thousands of years ago.
Who can say though if he was trying to be optimistic and ignore "skepticism" from others or were completely ignorant, he's still terrible for knowingly exposing himself to the chemicals just to fool others and make a profit.
I think greed can make many go far even to risk their own life than risk being honest and losing everything, but I'm not sure he might've risked as much if he knew what he know today, especially since he did a lot of the studies himself on lead to find out, whether out of conscience or to save his invention's reputation.
Let the market decide. The government will raise taxes to remove the lead pipes still in use. TAX IS THEFT!
So that's why millions of kids were uninterested in school in the late 50s and 60s
17:10 And we pay tax es., it should be re versed for poi son ing the pub lic !!
@@prinstyrio0 no. You've mixed it up, it was PATTERSON that measured and expected 10 times less, and found his predictions blown out of the water. Rewatch at 16:04
Midgley spent months recovering from lead poisoning in Florida and avoiding his own product. If anyone was to know about the effects of lead first hand it would have been him.
@@prinstyrio0 That skepticism is today known in covid contexts as "anti-vaxxers"... And at the centre of it all, we find once again a very greedy company making huge profits at the cost of millions of people's health.
It’s awful what greed does to people.
Especially those in government positions
WOW are you right ! Liveing in a zoo of sick …
I assume that by "people" you mean the rest of us? Corporate and individual greed continually screw the earth's populace. Over and over.
Gives an entire generation lead poisoning. Rips a hole in the ozone. Refuses to elaborate, gets strangled by his own invention.
Greed is the worst drug known to mankind.
@@dense_and_dull alcohol is a close second
@@dense_and_dull wrong, everybody has a little bit of greed, capitalism that enables this greed by putting profit above any human instead of the other way around is the real problem
In a way though, he was a hero or anti hero as he was instrumental in making the world know the dangers of stuff with lead in it in more depth than they had before. Can't really blame him too much for greed with the refrigerant, as it actually seemed safer and better than the existing alternatives of the time, how was he supposed to know about its effect on the Ozone?
Would make a great film.
you can claim that the damage he caused with CFCs was a accident but leaded gasoline was actually something he knew from the getgo was bad. it wasnt even the best solution to the problem he wanted to solve.
Yeah didn't we have to use weather balloons along with satellites before we realized CFCs were bad?
@@gdheib0430 yes. in the case of leaded gasoline he knew that it was bad. in the case of CFCs he tried to find a good solution to a big problem and peoples overused it wich increased the damage he didnt knew he was doing.
@@Irobert1115HD but still, man was a walking disaster.
Edit: people don't like my comment because of my name. That's annoying. It's the same people who worship racial discrimination.
@@troll2637 in the case of leade gasoline he knew that.
Yeah, Derek said that ethyl alcohol was written off because it was too expensive but any hayseed with a still can make it and it's literally what we put in our gasoline now instead. The problem was that you can't patent a process as simple as distillation, so there was no money to be made from it. Plus oil companies didn't like it because it increased fuel efficiency, so there was outside economic pressure against it as well.
Telling Patterson's story in parallel with Midgley's is such a good choice, really shows that the side effects of leaded gasoline were not something unknown to the generation that implemented it. they just valued easy profit over human life. Though one thing that irks me about the way that science history (and most history for that matter) is presented by stories like these is showing Patterson alone on a boat or in the arctic gathering samples. Scientists work in teams and the research credited to Midgley or Patterson is not the work of one man but a whole bunch and the people who support them.
Midgley, an inventor with some of the best worst inventions 😅
I think this narrative is mentioned in the book the theory of everything. And it is probably the main source of this video.
I mean at the end of the day he has to keep idiots like us interested so.
Thank god they don't value easy profit over human life anymore... Oh wait🤔
Go back to cleaning the lab equipment buddy
this is such a well researched video with so much information that was never taught in school. bravo!
The moment that Midgley pretended that Ethyl wasn't dangerous (especially after HE, HIMSELF, had just recovered from lead poisoning) was the moment that it was no longer an "ACCIDENT" that he poisoned the world.
The amount of times this kind of disregard for human safety has happened disgusts me.
Very interesting....and full of BS. Lead is bad, true. But all the claims about millions of deaths and vastly increased crime and rampant stupidity as a result? That is so absurd as to be laughable. Violent crime rising between the 1960s and the 1990s, and falling thereafter, has numerous causes, most of which are far more direct and obvious than the ridiculously stretched idea presented here. (The lead theory presented here is at least as detached as the one presented in Freakonomics, which is the legalization of abortion.) In fact, when criminal reform took hold, crime took off. When attitudes changed and society cracked down, crime plummeted. And since "defund the police" and rioting in big cities became a thing? Crime rates have shot up. Surprise! Or has there been an increase in lead levels recently?
Violent crime is overwhelmingly committed by poor people in inner cities, the very people who rarely see the inside of a car. And before you say, yes James, but how about all that air they are breathing in? Well, okay, how about the folks tha live a mile or two away? Right next to Harlem is the Upper West Side, and very close to the South Bronx is Riverdale. How is it that neither the UWS nor Riverdale has high crime rates? To the contrary, violent crime is nearly unheard of there.
Okay, so you'll point to lead paint in the antiquated apartment buildings. Here's my question: ALL the apartment buildings had lead paint in the 1920s. Where was all the violent crime in the '30s, '40s, and '50s?
Personally speaking, my father is one of the smartest people I ever knew, and is still accomplishing at age 94. He drove a car that took leaded gas past the point that one could find such things in gas stations. I remember at a very young age when my father would ask for leaded gas until it became increasingly difficult to find stations that sold it, and then became impossible. Yet those supposed intelligence and heart problems apparently forgot to visit my father. Me? I was born during the years that supposedly were the worst ones according this video (something like 1950 - 1980, without going back to check). I grew up in a working class NYC neighborhood, with lead paint in the walls and with unclean air just outside, and traveled in my father's car. And my IQ was measured in the 99th percentile.
Somehow all the stupid people around us have managed to create more inventions in the last 100 years than in all of prior world history combined, including those which have extended life expectancy by decades. Wild, isn't it?
The previous handful of videos I've seen on this channel were interesting, informative, and well-made, as was this one, actually. But now I am doubting everything I ever learned here, or thought I did, having just watched a piece of utter propaganda.
Lastly, if the channel host really wanted to produce a video which lives up to this one's title (save a small change, adding a "wo" in front of "man"), he could tell the world about Rachel Carson's war on pesticides, which has led to the death of more than 50m Africans and counting, with an offsetting gain of nearly or literally nothing. Somehow, though, I doubt that video will be forthcoming. Doesn't fit the narrative.
@@jimwerther quite the monologue just to disagree with literally every scientist in the world saying that lead is dangerous. Your proof being "trust me bro, my dad is smart"
The moment we failed to listen to Ben Franklin was when it stopped being an accident.
In all reality, the companies, banks, and other companies involved would have simply hired someone else to advertise the product anyway. Most likely a worker, I mean - they used the radium girls.
The advertising point was safety, and "nothing says safe better than breathing it!"
It's interesting that the person who caused the harm in this case did so much of it and did it with a huge amount of support. Meanwhile, the person who tried to undo it had to go to great lengths to prove there was a problem and was still seen as extreme at the time.
Its the same with microplastics and phthalates these days. Openly destroying this generation's reproductive health but still used in everything, driven by profit.
Hmm reminds me of Pfizer 🤣
@@StalemateNZ vaccines are not dangerous, grow up.
@@seanhubbard6033 🤣 You mean gene therapy?
People who fight against power structures are always labelled as extreme by those who want to hold on to their power
That is one way to be one of history's most influential inventors.
Thank you for your channel. It's very precious
🤣🤣
Fancy seeing you here. Your channel has been so important to me and my physics education.
but you make tons of money, and when people realized, the problem is no longer yours, ...Lead, Freon, Carbon and many more... the business man repeats the very same trick, ...do you think that Thomas Midley Jr. jailed for thousand years, or confiscated entire of his wealth for that lead poisoning and million of deaths?
Wokeism is the devils.religion. Where truth, love, life and victory. Aren't welcomed.
All souls matter to God from the womb to the tomb.
Jesus loves you cares for you from the womb to the tomb.
The presentation was so great it felt like a crime not to wait to listen to the sponsor pitch at the end.
Unfortunately the sponsor is just another example of placing the responsibility of climate change reversal on the individual, instead of corporate and legislative bodies. It's literally an identical situation to Clair Patterson, he didn't vow to never drive a lead gasoline powered car ever again, he made congress force the corporations to change.
the fact that this isnt taught in school ought to scare the hell out of everyone that watches this. i have a chemical physics degree and knew of the science, but not the industrial economic and social dimensions. awesome video.
There are a lot of things not taught in school that we should know about. Especially things we apparently should know about but if we don't we could go to jail. Taxes, basic law, property, waste disposal, how much reproduction has an impact on not only your life but the world... Education needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
I was taught this in the Netherlands.
That's because lead is perfectly safe for consumption. The only reason you think it's toxic is the government told you that. I can assure you they'll want to steal your money to remove our lead pipes is through more taxes. There's no way someone would've ignored this with the free market in play, or else a competitor would've stolen their business. The only thing that makes sense is the government lied to keep us dumb.
Agreed 💯
It WAS taught in school, but being a kid you didn’t pay attention
.
"We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective" Kurt Vonnegut
Except that we won't go down in history, history will go down with us!
It is true to say that the Human animal is so inefficient due to it not living long enough to show a return on investment.
I don't want to be THAT guy but cost/benefit analysis is more than capable of accounting for negative externalities including apocalyptic events. It's just rarely done and only when the situation is really really bad. So technically humanity will save itself only when the price for not doing so is high enough in the short term.
a thing to note the heptane was rapidly become a useless and abunduint waste product with out a octaine booster. At the time the suplus heptane was just dumped in the river. the addition of lead was to convert that waste product from oil refining in to something usefull . when he said we will make 200mill it was because he prevented all that waste , and ironitlly pollution. Had they continued to dump extra the heptane in the rivers, what would that disaster look like ? in refining oil you get more heptaine than octaine, before lead the rivers next to refinerys would literally burn for months on end do to all the excess heptane being dumped. compared to that the lead probably seemed like a win win.
@@Randrew Yes, and when we die back to sustainability, most of history, along with our technology, will be lost. We will enter the "Trash Age" where we live off of our ancestors trash and whatever else we can scrounge.
If it's a story about chemistry hurting people, you can bet DuPont is going to be mentioned at least once.
Nah, they sponsored the video.
No I won’t
DuPont is the second Horseman of the (waterbased) Apocalypse. Nestlé steals your water, DuPont poisons it and gets away from it.
@@SerunaXI you're right.
DuPont's aren't accidental, just collateral damage.
😂
"You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist, before it is generally received, and practiced on."
What a hard line to end such an amazing video on. I can't believe I haven't seen this video yet, this was a great watch!
It's amazing how often damage to people and our environment are caused by corporate greed, and even more amazing how many times that corporation has been DuPont.
This isn't mentioned in the video, but Clair Patterson was blacklisted for speaking out against lead in gasoline. When the government finally formed a National Research Council panel to investigate it eight years after Patterson raised the alarm, he was excluded despite being the world's leading expert on the subject. Before publishing his paper in 1963, his work was largely funded by oil companies to the tune of around $20k per year. That funding was immediately rescinded, and he also lost a contract with the Public Health Service. The oil industry asked the Atomic Energy Commission to stop funding his work, and members of the board at Caltech tried to have him silenced. He spent most of his life in relative obscurity because of the efforts to blacklist him. Some of that has changed in the past decade or so, and these days, a lot of people know who he is.
I don't know the details about Patterson's employment, but I do know that anti-science conservatives are opposing academic tenure now; no doubt it such a loss of academic freedom would be leveraged to silence all sorts of inconvenient science. They're also usually the first to decry government funding of the arts and sciences.
Nothing has changed, our lives are still in the hands of lobbyists and corrupt politicians. In a few years or decades we'll be looking back at the scientists that are being silenced right now and wish we listened to them.
If you know, you know
Sounds very familiar.
Never heard of him until today. This is such a sobering video.
It was mentioned in the second version of Cosmos when Neil Tyson took over.
The irony of him poisoning himself, poisoning others, then dying from his own contraption. This guy was the grim reaper.
Yea, he definitely sounds like someone who deserves more of our hate
For years, I have referred to him in my classes as Dr. Frankenstein; everything he created, turned evil.
Karl Marx has him beat easily.
@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368 no the people who butchered his ideas and implemented a shitty version deserve it
He was definitely cursed.
His death was kind of a reflection of his life.
He tried to engineer solutions to problems only for them to backfire to create an even bigger one.
Rather poetic.
Mankind in general really ,well industrial countries anyways
I'm just sad the bed was only able to strangle him to death once for what he did. Somehow he is far more evil than ppl who killed because they believe they did the right thing. This guy was not mentally ill, he know 100% what he did, he caused huge damage and all of it because he just wanted to get rich. That's so mundane and pathetic.
Don't go chasing waterfalls stay with the rivers and lakes you know.
who else can claim to have created more than just one environmental disaster in a single lifetime
is this real?? or a n attempt to shift focus from off the other evil men we think of..;; " Shitler AKA Hitler Stalins and what ever that Gengivits Kahns...
Very well directed. This was great.
I feel like "accidentally" only applies to the second time that man caused a global environmental catastrophe, the one with the lead seemed like willful ignorance. It's honestly crazy how much damage to the earth a single man was able to do in his pursuit of short-term gain.
Not willful ignorance... Its was criminal behavior
@@krustysurfer You're right, "feigned ignorance" is probably more accurate. He knew, but decided to do it anyway, downplaying the dangers every step of the way
okay, so now you watched this video and you are sooooo smart
I prefer to say a single generation because he definitely couldn’t have done it all alone.
@@peterkiss501 You're not making a great case for your own "smartness" right now, what's your point?
The FAA has been dragging their feet on approving unleaded aviation fuel for years even though a fleet-wide replacement (G100UL) has passed all of the necessary certification tests multiple times. Naturally, approving it would create economic winners and losers, so I guess that's the holdup?
The timing of infrastructure changes always coincides with keeping money in the same pockets.
Peer reviewed data proves that decay is accelerated by other materials.
At least the aviation version is "low lead" (100LL). I think that's about half of the normal lead level.
sadlife. but in order to solve this we have brilliant ad. xD makes us 20 times smarter by watching yt tutorials
you mean AVgas yes, but only for piston engines. Jet engines, which are responsible for 90% of the emissions, use JetA.
This man just managed to cover history, psychology, physics, chemistry, math, biology, geology, astronomy, economics, and philosophy.
Edit: I added a bunch of stuff that was requested and fixed the Chem science thing
Honestly I got really mad because at first he moved between so many subjects, but boy this is the most amazing video ever imo
…and animation!
A true renaissance man.
Textbook pessimism. The statement is true, in part, but is definitely not the whole story and is presented in a selective manner that disregards this fact.
And geology!
Thanks for bringing this up
I think "accidental" is more than a little generous. They knew it was poison. They just chose to ignore it because of the opportunity for profit.
I think they mean accidental as in it wasn't the intent, but I do agree with you.
Funny think is without people there is no profit so.
They are completely blinded and we let them continue they will only wake up when it will be too late and out planet just burns up(literally).
Which is all the more ironic when you consider that the original intent was to solve the safety issue caused by the cranks. They wanted less people to die, but killed more people instead.
What about the freons? It wasnt mentioned if he knew the dangers it would have on the ozone. Not trying to sympathise with him, just saying that maybe that one was an actual accident.
@@velocirapper8862 that one actually does seem like an accident to me. It is after all very stable and safe to be around. It's not like he would have known that widespread use would have resulted in the gas ending up in the upper atmosphere where it could be chemically altered. That said, someone really should have taught him the precautionary principle of science. Assume that something is dangerous until proven safe.
“We do not feel justified in giving up what has come to the industry like a gift from heaven on the possibility that a hazard may be involved in it”
That’s the sort of things a cliche villain from a sci-fi movie would say.
That guy must have been so proud when he spoke those words. Must have felt like the most righteous and smartest person alive.
@@francodegasperi3814 >implying rich people care about anything at all except making more money. lol
Perfect crime and he even felt good about it.
It often strikes us just how dumb are the people who rule our world.
It's what a Capitalist would say. So basically, the same thing.
BROO! The animation goes HARDD!!!. So much production value, effort, and love went into this one video. Hey, Thank you, man.
A lady's car breaking down, leading to a man's immediate death, leading to a development of a really loud car, leading to the development of leaded gasoline, and finally leading to the poisoning of an entire generation.
Moral of this story:
Everytime you men decide to help a stranded woman who's having a car breaking down on the road side, don't forget to say this to her "Ma'am, you probably can be a person who might change a course of a history of invention and destruction at the same time."
So.. capture and enslave all women?
@@damarsasongko20 speeds past a stranded driver “no way ecoterrorist, i won’t fall for your tricks!”
Think about how many people were brought out of poverty, how high the human life expectancy went up, how high human population got and the advancement of modern medicine over the same period.
Another example of why women shouldn't drive. /s
Considering he spent a year recovering from lead toxicity, claiming he "accidentally" killed the most people in history seems a bit generous.
You never truly recover from Lead Poisoning...your brain is damaged beyond repair.
Yeah, it really does. He prioritized profits over public health, just like major corporations do today
Yeah, lead was known to be harmful.
I think a good contender for "person who accidentally killed the most people" might be Mao Zedong killing off the sparrows to protect crops, which were then decimated by insects whose population exploded without predators. This triggered one of the worse famines in history.
RUclips title optimization
I think Derek deliberately used this term just to artificially drive up our engagement by complaining about it. He’s admitted openly that he engages in these sorts of tricks. It kind of annoys me, and I’m close to unsubscribing from him as a result.
"Accidentally" is a bit generous considering he knew the dangers and intentionally covered them up
I find the word "accidentally" used consistently for the conscious anemic.
I came here to say this but also add "he had a much safer alternative but refused to use it because it wasn't chemically unique enough to get a patent for it."
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say he didn't fully intend for all those people to get lead poisoning
Most people don't intend to kill others as well when doing irresponsibly dangerous things, like driving much faster than allowed. I still want them to go into jail if that happens.
Of course, he wasn't the only one who went on that road while knowing it, but the excuse "If I could get away with it, but give it up, then others will get away with doing it anyway" was and is the cause of a lot of the most terrible things done by humans.
@@dogfellow3848 he took a vacation in Miami after accidentally poisoning himself (specifically to give his lungs a break). He had to start his own company because Dupont was tired of the product killing his employees and for that company he repeatedly had to start new factories because his employees kept dying/going mad/etc.
"Radioactive rocks are effectively clocks." what a great rhyme
Being able to correlate historical events related to human civilization like the rise and fall of empires and the Black Death by observing lead levels in the ice cores in Greenland is so crazy.
@@cewla3348 it was both the poles and greenland
Earth is a closed system 🤷♂️
Stream Young Loud. 😈
@@user-lp7tx1fe6t It is not, it gets sun energy
@@BHBalast Earth is a closed system, but not an Isolated system. Closed systems absorb/release energy with outside, but isolated systems do not.
Can't call it "by accident" if he activly tries to keep the truth about the toxicity away from the public. He and his boss are surely in the top ten of worst human being ever lived on this planet.
It does not matter if it was intentional or not. The damage he had done is irredeemable.
@@peepeepoopoo5932 Hitler purposefully had people marched out of their homes, left to die from the elements, shot and suffocated and starved to death--and he purposefully targeted people he considered to be worth less than the "superior" race, including people with disabilities. I think this is an unfair comparison. But I would compare the man who put lead in gasoline to heads of food corporations today who deny how much sugar is harming people's health and shortening their lives because sugar helps them make a better profit.
I could also add MSGs, GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and other artificial things in common USA foods that are wreaking havoc on our bodies
@@meganj2799 hormones? GMOS? Wha
@@meganj2799 lmao
@Peepee Poopoo He said they were in the top ten, not that they were first and second.
Every time this guy made a “non toxic” product, it proved to kill the most people ever
You gotta respect the sheer courage of the person asking the guy who made all children dumb and violent to be in charge of making yet another "safe" chemical compound.
@@paulelderson934 respect+++++
*cough* covid vaccines *cough*
@@gwho shh the fbi's coming to get u
Very interesting....and full of BS. Lead is bad, true. But all the claims about millions of deaths and vastly increased crime and rampant stupidity as a result? That is so absurd as to be laughable. Violent crime rising between the 1960s and the 1990s, and falling thereafter, has numerous causes, most of which are far more direct and obvious than the ridiculously stretched idea presented here. (The lead theory presented here is at least as detached as the one presented in Freakonomics, which is the legalization of abortion.) In fact, when criminal reform took hold, crime took off. When attitudes changed and society cracked down, crime plummeted. And since "defund the police" and rioting in big cities became a thing? Crime rates have shot up. Surprise! Or has there been an increase in lead levels recently?
Violent crime is overwhelmingly committed by poor people in inner cities, the very people who rarely see the inside of a car. And before you say, yes James, but how about all that air they are breathing in? Well, okay, how about the folks tha live a mile or two away? Right next to Harlem is the Upper West Side, and very close to the South Bronx is Riverdale. How is it that neither the UWS nor Riverdale has high crime rates? To the contrary, violent crime is nearly unheard of there.
Okay, so you'll point to lead paint in the antiquated apartment buildings. Here's my question: ALL the apartment buildings had lead paint in the 1920s. Where was all the violent crime in the '30s, '40s, and '50s?
Personally speaking, my father is one of the smartest people I ever knew, and is still accomplishing at age 94. He drove a car that took leaded gas past the point that one could find such things in gas stations. I remember at a very young age when my father would ask for leaded gas until it became increasingly difficult to find stations that sold it, and then became impossible. Yet those supposed intelligence and heart problems apparently forgot to visit my father. Me? I was born during the years that supposedly were the worst ones according this video (something like 1950 - 1980, without going back to check). I grew up in a working class NYC neighborhood, with lead paint in the walls and with unclean air just outside, and traveled in my father's car. And my IQ was measured in the 99th percentile.
Somehow all the stupid people around us have managed to create more inventions in the last 100 years than in all of prior world history combined, including those which have extended life expectancy by decades. Wild, isn't it?
The previous handful of videos I've seen on this channel were interesting, informative, and well-made, as was this one, actually. But now I am doubting everything I ever learned here, or thought I did, having just watched a piece of utter propaganda.
Lastly, if the channel host really wanted to produce a video which lives up to this one's title (save a small change, adding a "wo" in front of "man"), he could tell the world about Rachel Carson's war on pesticides, which has led to the death of more than 50m Africans and counting, with an offsetting gain of nearly or literally nothing. Somehow, though, I doubt that video will be forthcoming. Doesn't fit the narrative.
It’s common for people to think scientists are immune to things like greed and pride.
I've spent 20 years on this earth, and this is the first time anybody has meaningfully explained octane rating of fuel to me. Thank you very much.
What can i say.. modern education
Seriously, the same impression I had, and I am of roughly same age
same
@@karlmarx7037 You are a close second for making people less intelligent. Thank you advertising for the conservative social movement. Lol
did u goto public school ?
I worked as an apprentice in a lead smelter back in the early 90’s, blood tests for lead contamination were carried out monthly, you would be removed from the smelter if the contamination was about 30ppm, my usual levels were around 11-15ppm.
The smelter was based in a small mining town in a rural and remote part of Australia and we were sent to one of the capital cities for 6 weeks for college component required as part of our training for the apprenticeship. My accomodation was in a block of flats situated on a main road in the city, with constant traffic, this was in the early 90’s and lead additives to fuel hadn’t yet been phased out.
At the completion of that block of college, and on returning to work, my first day back coincided with the blood test for lead, and it came back higher than I’d ever had, only a couple of ppm lower than the allowable threshold. I put it down to the lead additives in the fuel from the city traffic, it’s bizarre to think that it’s safer to work in a lead smelter than it was to live beside a high traffic area.
Horrifying. Thank you for sharing, really puts this issue into perspective.
Nice to hear an Aussie perspective on the issue too.
How ironic..
@@clumeroo a small town called Mount Isa have the highest lead concentration in Australia
Makes sense though. When you melt lead now one is very carefully not to reach the temperature at which it vaporized, so you can't breath it in. Not true with leaded gasoline.
And now think that the current Liberal National Coalition government has refused to put in place emissions regulations and fuel economy regulations for cars (unlike the EU, UK, US, Canada, Japan, India and China). As a result, Australia is becoming a dumping ground for extremely dirty vehicles which are undoubtedly causing more air pollution (not to mention climate change) than is necessary.
Pretty insane if you keep in mind that a very similar problem nowadays has come up with plastic. And people don’t want to get rid of it due to the same reasons - cost effective, practical, flexible in use.
Yes but you don't get poisoned to death when touching/licking plastic, unlike lead.
@@Sergmanny46 They discovered we have plastic particles in our lungs. No one knows how that will affect us long term.
@@Kamitube We have particles of literally anything and everything in our bodies, from the pans and pots you use to cook, to the cutlery and knives you use to eat your food, to the glass and plastic cups you use to drink your stuff.
So let's not nitpick here, at this point it's just a matter of what thing will kill us first. At least nothing will be worse than lead.
@@Sergmanny46 plastic's shrinking our dicks
@Elina
Well then, now what?
I think was one of, if not your best videos, mate. You absolutely nailed it
These sets are absolutely incredible! It’s insane how far veritasium has come!
Hypocrisy of this guy thinks he is clever and we are stoopid. He is here to educate us?
no
@@MrUssy101 unless you have a PhD in physics, yes... he's going to educate you
@@MrUssy101 You do seem stupid. As Forrest Gump succinctly put it: "Stupid is as stupid does"
@@MrUssy101 yo what lmao
Make no mistake Midgley was 100% aware of the effects his inventions would cause in fact there were throughly researched articles about it which were buried by him and the company that he was working for so that they could make an epic amount of money. Greed really knows no bounds.
Quite right. Midgley knew exactly what he was doing. At one point he made a PR stunt of playing with lead for the media to supposedly demonstrate its "safety", while knowing full-well that the concern wasn't acute exposure but chronic. He was counting on the public being too ignorant to know the difference.
Don't give bad-faith actors the benefit of the doubt. They've already shown they'll abuse it, and in continuing to give it to them anyway, you've deliberately made yourself complicit in their malfeasance. People tend to do it anyway because they're desperate to pretend the problem is one of ignorance instead of deliberate ignorance, as you can teach your way out of the first but must fight your way clear of the second. MLK called such people who place their privileged comfort over the rights of others "white moderates", and rightly labeled them a bigger threat to civil rights than the outspoken bigots.
welp hes in yea..
He had a stroke
Varitesium was 100000% aware of it.
I would maybe go so far to compare corporations like this to sex trafficking operations. It’s really all for money in the end. Everything is now. It’s gross. But 🤷🏼♀️ literally what can we do about any of it? it’s their world, we’re just living in it. Maybe it’s the lead poisoning talking, but honestly I life everyday wondering if anyone even cares about the earth, or other human lives. But in the end it’s true, nobody cares more about money than the millionaires/billionaires. SMH
I remember being in class at school, when I was young and we were learning a brief history of Romans, and the teacher talked about how their downfall came to many factors, invasion, internal strife, and the fact that they used lead as their plumbing and many people in Rome were being slowly poisoned. And as someone who worships history, I never forgot one kid who said: People in the past were so stupid, how could they not realise they were poisoning themselves.
And the teacher said: Well we today might be using materials that in the future they will learn are actually poisonous to us.
Like, say, microplastics?
Lead poisoning from lead pipes was probably not the cause of lead poisoning bc the mineral deposit effectively kept the water from coming into to contact with the lead pipes. It would have most likely came from the ruling class of Romans and elites drinking and dining with pewter cups and plates.
Upper class Romans used lead to sweeten wine.
If the pH stays relatively high (for drinking water) and the pipes have calcium scale, Pb levels will stay low.
I am not advocating using lead pipes, but the lead levels can be minimized by monitoring and acting on the chemistry.
Yeah thanks for mentioning this there were things that mitigated lead poisoning. Also this is a great way of illustrating how humans need the scientific method to process info. Simply observing things in everyday life isn’t going to give you the answer.
Like, say, the internet?
While we sit around watching RUclips, Google and the other big tech companies are using their profits to build AI robots that will have a catastrophic effect on humanity.
By merely acting as consumers (just like the people who had to use leaded petrol to get to work) we're culpable in messing up the world for future generations. Have a nice day.
I love your video! Just subscribed. Thank you for creating this. It was very interesting.
"Accidentally"
*talks about how he nearly died from lead poisoning, got others killed, and proceeded to tell people that it wasn't actually a problem*
Hey at least he made more money before he inevitably died
🔥🔥🔥“This is fine!”🔥🔥🔥
Thank god he contracted polio. God only knows how many other horrors he would have unleashed on the world.
Accidental has nothing to do with the person, but the whole sequence of events and their timings. None of this would have happened if the lady's car didn't break down or someone else came up with a less toxic additive or a different design for combustion engine etc. No matter what his real intentions were there was no way he could have known the extent of damage his actions brought.
@Darius Bostic 🙏🏽🙏🏽
I cannot believe that the SAME GUY was responsible for both leaded gasoline and CFCs. What a small world. A small, dangerously delicate world.
Not really delicate at all. Might become worse for humans or other life but the world will always adapt and survive
Not too surprising. As bad as his inventions were, he was a brilliant chemist.
The world may be small but can kick our ass anytime
the danger of ingeniuity. The real question though is where would society be now if not for what he did? Hard to say. The butterfly effect can take reality to strange places.
@@Jormungadrhumans are very very delicate! Everything we invent can kill us! We take a beautiful opium plant and kill ourselves with it by making it illegal whilst make ethanol and sell it in shops when it's pure poison
After knowing that he "spent a long time recovering from lead poisoning and wouldn't go anywhere near the product", calling the deaths accidental is not appropriate, it's at least gross negligence and at worst mass murder.
Anyway, great video! I am in awe.
There are many chemicals that are poisonous in large quantities, but okay in small amounts. Like salt, sugar, and various vitamins
.
@@electrictroy2010 There is no safe level of lead.
@@electrictroy2010 yeah, it's when you mix in the greed of capitalism that it poisons people.
@@electrictroy2010 But lead is not OK in any quantity. The more you have, the more poisoned you are - who knows how much smarter you and I would be if folks had used a little more common sense back then?
@gioyu comi so many scientists went out of their way to combat corporate greed. They are forgotten because of paid smear campaigns and are never given the recognition they deserved. They were heroes that saved lives.
Lovely channel, I learned a lot and your narration is pleasant
Man, this episode has it all! A hero, a villain, a tragic back story, a shocking plot twist. It's got my vote on Sundance.
I want a movie about these events.
And clickbait in the title.
I apologize for this comment but I am not really patient, however I am really curious to hear what the man did.
Could someone (who spent 25 minutes watching this video) recap it for me?
@@roby4504 Made fuel out of lead (causing lead pollution - lead is extremely dangerous), and also made a chemical that destroyed the ozone layer
@@jasongronn6764 Thanks man, I appreciate it.
The fact that ice is literally a physical time capsule for humanity (and the Earth) is absolutely fascinating, the fact that you can see the rise and fall of nations and major events in the ice is mind blowing, thanks for sharing!
Indeed, I was also fascinated by it!
@@OxygenOS your username deserves a like,
PS : you can use RUclips Vanced
@@shashwatsharma2596 now you cant
Be wary. I have heard of some people dispute the accuracy of ice coring. And to be transparent, I do not know the level of truthfulness of this as...tertiary sourced information. But it is a thought I think wise to keep in mind. Just like the quote I just heard him say around 23:00 minutes.
@@shashwatsharma2596 it already baned.... which means you are not using and telling others to use:)
You can use pipewire....
The worst part? His chemistry is extremely sound, and even today anti-knocking agents that can compete with tetraethyl lead are hard to come by. Also, Freon is an incredibly efficient gas to use as a refrigerant. A similar thing happens in gold refining, where cyanide and mercury are STILL the undefeated kings of efficient chemical refining of gold as they can pick up NANOGRAMS of gold in solution efficiently, and many alternative processes struggle to reach this level of recovery.
Just goes to show that sometimes the most ideal chemical solutions have the worst side effects.
Indeed. Midgley had a team of scientists working under Kettering. They were the one's who actually found and isolated Tetraethyllead after going through the periodic table
The discovery was made when midgley was on a break seeing his father.
CFC discovery was made by Albert Leon Henne and Robert McNary, Midgley. They observed that the refrigerants then in use comprised relatively few chemical elements, many of which were clustered in an intersecting row and column of the periodic table of elements. The element at the intersection was fluorine, known to be toxic by itself. Midgley and his collaborators felt, however, that compounds containing fluorine could be both nontoxic and nonflammable.
@@jeddaniels2283 yeah the Freon thing was especially unfortunate because that was before a lot was understood about radical chemistry. If CFCs didn’t have such a detrimental effect due to radical generation, they’d actually be a perfect inert chemical solution to a lot of refrigerant problems.
@@spiderdude2099 Without knowing the detrimental effect. The three of them must of thought they had found a near perfect solution to the problem. I wonder if there were any awards handed out to the trio.
Thankfully the Ozone layer has a natural cycle triggered via the Chapman cycle. With high energy UV lb protection via the Hartley cycle.
Don’t forget asbestos insulation.
They spent so much time wondering whether or not they could that they forgot to ask if they should
This is an OUTSTANDING production. Bravo!
I'll accept that the Freon thing was probably accidental. Given the sequence of events that would need it to be broken apart to react with ozone, it's probably something one could easily overlook. But using lead in a compound that is being intentionally converted into a gas? Lead, a heavy metal that was discovered to be highly dangerous to humans almost two centuries earlier? Nah, that's no accident. That's despicable greed. Everything done by the Ethyl company was nothing more than a poor cover-up for the truth.
This is the correct take. All about money.
Academic research in Europe at the same time already knew that CFCs in the upper atmosphere would degrade ozone, however there was no way an industrialist in the US would easily come across that research.
Ya the lead part was entirely intentional. It was a money decision.
Yeah I kept waiting for there to be a surprise second person mentioned who actually killed people on accident thrown in at the end.
It is not a stretch to assume that BOTH were entirely accidental, and if we are honest, then the mere notion that Freons might NOT have been would mark one as someone whose tin foil hat has been on way too tight for way to long.
Keep in mind the dates. These inventions were effectively riding the coat tails of the later days of the industrial revolution. Science as a whole had simply not advanced enough. Remember Dr. Harvey Wiley and his work to eliminate poisonous chemicals from american Foodstuffs. Those chemicals had not been put in there for shits and giggles or because greedy American industrialists wanted to kill consumers. They had been put in there becuase they worked and because a cursory examination had deemed them safe.
Again, it was not like the people mentioned in THIS video DIDN'T do any safety testing. The inhalation of Freons and Ethyl is CLEARLY mentioned. They THOUGHT it was safe at first, and it simply took DECADES for any evidence to the contrary to come along.
No one had as of yet imagined that regulations like the one we have today might be necessary. Something was either toxic or it wasn't, and if the former, you would feel consequences in a short timeframe. You would die, or your teeth would fall out, or your bones would rot (all real things that happened in early industrialization, look up "Phossy Jaw" if you want to traumatize yourself...).
Studies on long term exposures to dangerous chemicals were just beginning to emerge. The very concept of such stringent rules as we now know to be necessary would have seemed needlessly alarmist to EVERYONE. People simply did not know better yet.
If anything, this highlights how incredibly important agencies like the FDA are (again, see Dr Wiley), to prevent something like this getting into common use in the first place.
I love how whenever some horrible chemical is introduced that screws with humanity, dupont always has a hand in it.
EXACTLY
[sarcasm alert]
Saginaw bay and surrounding despoiled lands and people loves the Dupont family.....
Ever see the csb videos Dupont is there lmao
@@anmweather8668 csb full form
@@Bxndo14 Dude you have some of the most generic content in the world you even have a "Don't click this video" video
The day I learned that the same dude who gave us leaded gasoline also shares partial credit in the development of CFCs was the day I learned that one person really can change the world.
Career goals
So long as they're changing it for a shitton of money, and aren't interested in any other consequences.
Was that the day Putin invaded Ukraine?
Following that thought, then if one person changed the world for the worst. Then someone can change the world for the better
@@lonelyalchemist9865 Very true!
Thank you a lot and everyone who worked on this video ❤
“He knew the dangers, avoided his product as much as possible, and couldn’t do interviews/talks because he was literally experiencing the effects of his own poison”
And then he turned around, covered it all up, and explicitly lied that it was safe for personal profit.
That right there is a mass murderer.
*Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson has left the chat*
It's the exact same industry saying that climate change isn't real and if it is, its not influenced by people.
Well put Spectre. I disagree with accident part of the title of this video
@@dylanb2086 yeah it wasn’t an accident he knew very well it was killing people and how bad it was but chose to do it anyway because of greed
@@mike-cc3dd the vaccines have saved millions of lives. By not getting the vaccine you could be responsible for someone else's death. So shut up
Why are you even on a science related channel if you don't believe in science?
I was a kid in the 70's and 80's. I remember my parents saying to never pick roadside blackberries because they were full of lead from the car exhaust. They must have heard about this on the news.
This is one of those things where future people think past people were more ignorant than they actually were. We knew.
I remember parents saying not to eat paint chips too, how much of 'disparity in IQ' that they try to blame on lead exposure also came from inattentive parents.
@@poopsmith6853 They could only do so much though, it was in the sea water and air from cars all around the world..
@@VenerhiaStellarvore and it was in every water pipe since about 2500 years ago until a few decades ago. This videos creator had some overzealous, and at times simply incorrect sources. Burned lead is absolutely a danger, so is directly consuming it like kids with paint chips, lead pipes are only a danger when the fluid going through them is acidic as sediment buildup prevents the denser lead from leaching into the fluid.
Lead exposure is used as an excuse to handwave away genetic disparity in IQ, videos like this serve to protect chemical companies who could have lobbied to use ethanol as it's not at all expensive but was illegal at the time, and to have a non genetic reason for repeatable and proven IQ disparities. My family were farmers, probably exposed to as much burning fuel as urban kids, yet if there's any lowered IQ from it that's measurable (the 10 points the video talks about is actually within a standard deviation of 15 and therefore not measurable as a real reduction), it would only make the genetic disparity larger.
@@poopsmith6853 Even if it's not as iq impacting as he claims it, my point still stands there's only little parents could do back then to save their kids from any kind of pollution like that. It wasn't removed from all these products for nothing yknow, maybe it didnt made boomers go dumb per say but it definitly hasnt helped them.
Lead poisoning is no joke, I work in the metal recycling industry and have been exposed to large amount of lead, my last lead blood test was 26.7μg/dL with the lab results saying levels should be
i hope you get better soon, lead poisoning is awful.
That's terrible! Would you leave the industry to avoid further exposure? 😥
I know how it feels, I live where the groundwater(drinking water) are polluted with lead and many other chemicals since the industries basically have no oversight and dump everything everywhere they can. Especially the river, I have hard time remembering anything, hands always jittery, and many other health problems. And sadly, even today, nothing is done to prevent this pollutions. Eventually profits are always more important than lives.
I'm sorry to hear about the issues you have and hope you're able to alleviate the effects they have on you. The answer to your question is money. In the end it's always money.
I worked at a smelter. Cadmium and the like tis no joke. Wear and clean your respirator properly.
Fantastic explanation and very educational. Many thanks to the Veritasium team.
My lead story: I am went from being an extremely skilled student in middle school to getting less and less able to focus on work in high school until I eked by with low grades in my senior year. I'm still considered a very "smart" person by those who know me, but my mental disability has kept me from finishing college or finding work, because I just can't focus for long periods of time and my working memory ranges from amazingly good in areas I'm interested in to staggeringly poor when I'm less motivated. I'm now 26. It turned out that my high school's water supply was extremely lead-poisoned, worse than Flint, Michigan. Some of the worst lead levels were in the water pipes for the gym, where I'd be super active and get very very thirsty. If I had a time machine and could send a message back saying "please please please don't drink the water at school!"... thinking about it makes my heart hurt.
I am extremely sorry
Are you not able to collect money from the school?
Bless your heart! I'm so sorry! I was brilliant in school also but when they threw me into all Advanced classes in High School I began flunking them, but I think it was because I hadn't learned to study when everything before had come so easily to me, you know? My father was a brilliant man and I inherited his IQ. Like you, I HAVE to be interested in something to pursue it and that makes perfect sense! If only schools and especially COLLEGES would pay attention to that! Thank you for your comment and the reminder of how that all went down when I was a teen. I dearly hope you're doing better now.
who cares. move on. other people got it worse like harlequin syndrome. you're not special.
@@Runescape. This isn't a contest of who is the most miserable. Only because someone has it worse, doesn't mean his problem isn't relevant to at least him.
My best friend died due to lead poisoning. It took doctors six years to figure it out. David was an electronics engineer who spent years in an electronics lab intermittently bent over bread boards soldering connections. David inadvertently ended up breathing the lead in the solder in very small quantities, and the build up in his body finally caught up to him.
Sorry for your loss.
While I am sorry your friend suffered and died he was partly to blame. I solder everyday and use a HEPA fume extractor to pull the solder fumes away. In addition, I wash my hands frequently to reduce the amount of lead absorbed. Part of my education was how to work safely with solder.
@@tomp7835 "David inadvertently ended up breathing the lead in the solder in very small quantities, " From above. What makes you think that Anthony's best friend didn't do the same precautions as you do? Nowhere does it say that he didn't.
@@nephthysbastet4809 because I see it everyday, many people know what they should do, but don't. Many have the attitude that it won't hurt them; others just don't care. Much like the inventors of leaded gas.
@@nephthysbastet4809 by the way, one doesn't inadvertently breathe the solder fumes.
He did NOT "accidentally" kill the most people in history, he had PLENTY of chances to make things better at ANY point.
Indeed. Willfully downplaying and ignoring the hazards, real and potential, can hardly be called accidental. All in the name of making money. Unfortunately that time period in particular has many examples of that kind of behavior, the consequences and results of which the world continues to deal with today. And don't forget industrial lobbying.
Wait until you see the aftermath of Bill Gates and his 'safe & effective' shot....
Would've been hard for him to undo all of that. Sad, because he was a great scientist and even helped find the age of the Earth and helped nuclear technology, but one innovation had more problems than he could've ever imagined.
The title is just as much of an "accident"
Yeah, he KNEW from the very beginning that his product was harmful and he chose greed and self-interest over the good of his fellow man, that's just plain evil, smh.
I cant tell how much i rewatched this video. its such an interesting tidbit in human history. About one man, motivated by profit, poisoined and endangered the entire world.
I seriously wish there's a docu series about this. If there is, lemme know 😭
Wow! That whole octane explanation was the best one I've ever seen. Just so easy to understand.
But, failed to say what is in the fuel today to help lubricate the engine parts instead of using lead.
Happy Earth Day! The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Why not get a few and plant them now ?
@@billythekid5628 that's for u to figure out next. does everything has to be spoonfed?
@@billythekid5628 the engine parts have changed. No need to be lubed by fuel.
@@ls6jay true, though it's part lubrication, partly cushioning the valves when they closed. Modern components can withstand those stresses, old engines either needed a change of valves and seats or have leaded fuel.
But, confounding the story is another source of lead that remains a problem today, lead paint.
Ironically, there's still another source and one that's two feet away from me, lead solder for electronic circuits. Now, modern solders use greater amounts of silver and tin, which then introduces tin whiskers into the mess...
"Accidentally" sure is a generous qualifier for someone who knew exactly what he was doing.
Reminds me of a virus called covid that "accidentally " was leaked.
True
Exactly
Lol 😆
19:25
This guy is basically Dr. Catastrophe. Absolutely everything he did went wrong, remarkable.
I dunno, for a beautiful moment in time he created a lot of value for shareholders.
@@orterves rofl... almost as beautiful as the moment when you epic-ly reflected on it. sighh
Well he is also responsible for today success too. Without him your ears would have been rapture.
@@junarshfago We have a blend of E85, which is the ethanol solution to the knock problem. Without his input, we'd probably be in the same place today, minus some of the damage
@@alexipestov7002 and when exactly this happen
I am a pilot, a general aviation pilot, we work with 100LL on the daily. I was never told about the dangers of lead, I am feeling extremely ignorant and naturally concerned, not to even mention that the lineman in my particular college are not trained properly and have no safety equipment. I have heard of some of them ingesting by accident 100LL. And most of us, including myself, when having to check the fuel we constantly enter in contact with it and inhale it. I am outraged I was never told about this, and how little care is being put into our safety.
if history has taught me anything, it's that you can never underestimate how easily people would doom others for a quick buck; and the wealthier and/or more powerful the person, the more this holds true
Not true about more wealth = more evil. If anything thats the opposite of reality. You think Elon Musk is the most evil person in the world, but a penniless serial killer isn't?
This lead pollution is the reason why the boomers and Xers have so many crazy people. You see a divide in politics from people above 40 and below. The above 40s that vote for hateful people are literally brain damaged by lead.
Elon Musk is going to be the next biggest catastrophy.
Its the other way around. The people that do this get wealthier/powerfuller.
@@Currywurst4444 Yeah, just look at Biden. He didn't get houses across the country by selling a book or his congress paycheck.
Big respect for Patterson. He went above and beyond for what was right.
jea man was looking for that comment nobody mentions him xD
@@riseofduckente9868 That's the tale of the good man, irelevance but a reward of inner peace.
Gotta say the guy’s death is pretty poetic. He spends his whole life making inventions that kill millions of people knowing how harmful they are. With his last invention it’s dangerous like all his others but with this one he doesn’t know it similar to the people who death’s he caused. Being brutally strangled by his own invention is also fittingly gruesome
@Air I appreciate that you used the quote in an appropriate situation. But the saying goes the other way around!
I love this perception of it all.
Plot twist: he did it intentionally
Gotta say I don’t really believe in capitol punishment, but in this very specific case I wouldn’t be that upset if someone tortured him for like 10 years. Feels so much eviler to do it for a bit of cash and not some awful mental illness.
I cannot agree much more here boss. Nailed it. Karma's real. Real talk.
Excellent, highly informative, seriously interesting and very well produced indeed.
This documentary omits the story of how, when first reports of lead poisoning started to occur on Standard Oil factories, they went ahead and measured blood concentration of lead in all of their workers. They found that even those that didn't have symptoms had 80ppm of lead in their blood. From that, they claimed that 80ppm was the 'normal' and 'safe' 'acceptable' concentration, and they bullied their way for that number to be written into the OSHA and EPA standards. It took Patterson more than a decade of battling against the ridicule from both the scientific community and malicious harassment from the lead industry before that 'standard' was questioned and finally overturned.
That's nightmarish.
That seems a perfectly reasonable, as well as convenient, approach 😉
@@Shendue You should have objected
Very interesting 🤔
This always seems to happen. Yes sayers are equally responsible.
A few years ago, on a talk show, Stephen Fry gave a clue to the other guests; "This man is considered to be the worst polluter in the history of mankind". The guests couldn't understand how a man could be a worse polluter than a country or a corporation. I knew who he was referring to.
Ah, I figured it was a Blue Whale
@@ccubsfan94 mmm salty oceans
I think I learned this from a Citation Needed episode (Tom Scott)
@@Dauthdart Heard about him both from Citation Needed as well as "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
he certainly couldn't've done it without the help of corporations
This sounds like a perpetrated crime against not just humanity but all life on earth rather than just an 'accident'. A crime perpetrated by corporations, not one man.
Instead of demonizing the corporations, we need to figure out a way to create a hybridized capitalist system, because the as a whole, free markets have brought us things like the internet, and iPhones, global shipping and has reduced suffering, but on the same token has caused countless deaths even outside of the relatively narrow scope of leaded gas. Think of the deaths, and extinctions that unleaded fuels are causing today. And that's not to mention coal etc. and consumerism in general. To quote Woodhouse from the TV series Archer:
"The mind fairly boggles..."
Yeah he didn't "accidentally" kill the most people in history, it was intentional.
@@One.Zero.One101 he said a crime perpetrated by corporations, not one man. HE didn't intentionally poison the planet, corporations willfully ignored the science and continued denying it.
No.Just greed and stupidity.
@@guruofendtimes819 They werent stupid they were willingly malicious
Thank you very much for this video as someone who has been greatly affected by lead poisoning at a very,young age. My family experiences a lot of the negative hardships that you have stated everything from cataract and other eye problems to Neurodiverse learning challenges, such as ADHD and dyslexia and lots of complications with cardiac issues. All of this is very prominent in my families health history and it’s also very prominent in my personal health history. Thank you for this. I feel seen.
I wouldn’t exactly say he killed the most people accidentally. He knew the dangers, he poisoned himself, yet he went along with the production anyway. Instead of being rewarded by the scientific community, he should have been discredited and shunned. This like so many things in our society were done with a single goal in mind, to solve a problem and make money and who cares who it hurts.
His death was a valuable lesson because if he didn't die. You probably would.
Edit: Or you would probably be incredibly dumb and weird and racist and a lot of other things.
I assume "accidently killed" was better for the lawyers than "greedily murdered for massive profit."
reminds me of some experimental cough injection cough given to billions, only very recently in fact. cough.
totally agree with you
@@skillcoiler calm ya pants, don't forget that Americans still using lead pipes.
No I don't think every death they caused was accidental... negligent at best.
Incredible story by the way, thank you for another amazing video.
First in a verified ytber comment lol
The reason people attribute Mao’s famine deaths of the to him was because of the war on sparrows he declared.
Thomas Midgley was more a direct mass murderer then Mao, because Mao was unaware that killing the sparrows would lead to famine, Thomas Midgley sold out the planet, Humanity, and his life, all so he could be rich.
There is no way a man could be more disgusting then Thomas Midgley.
Patterson never purposefully caused these deaths, though.
@@captain-chair keywords : liberty and individual rights. People who has no respect for those two are very very far away from "unaware of killing people". Get your 'never truly tried system' apologist somewhere else.
@@captain-chair Schizo posting
One person single handedly decreased the average intelligence, increased crime rates, made a hole in the ozone layer, killed millions of people (himself included), and made people worldwide help him AND pay.
Not necessarily. There were other sources of lead than just the gasoline back then. Lead paint, lead pipes, etc. To blame all the lead poisoning on one guy is a false narrative
@@HelenaOfDetroit But not necessarily a wrong one. Leaded fuel played a huge chunk of the problem.
@@rightsideup6304
Me: "To blame all the lead poisoning on one guy is a false narrative."
You: "But not necessarily a wrong one."
I can see you understand lead poisoning from first hand experience.
@@HelenaOfDetroit Goddamn Helena
@@HelenaOfDetroit bruhhh💀💀💀 good one though
Best video Ive seen in ages. Thank you
Clair Patterson is a hero that fought big companies in Congress and reduced lead intake by the average American by 80%
He's like, an american saint.
@@flintironstag7722 probably not true because all the lead leaching parts of the potable water isn't reported. They make leaded parts just for the water meters and when local groups get active and make it illegal. The corporations just make new meters for the area involved and sell their left over existing meters to the neighboring state, or nation, who's people might be unaware. Like in the case of California and Oregon.
@@flintironstag7722 I thought you said 'more like' and I was gonna be like 'but a saint is basically a hero'.
I couldn't agree more. Now his kind are silenced by congress.
@@flintironstag7722 I’m just trying to keep my kidneys from shutting down due to exposure from flint Michigan water back in 2015.
In this episode:
0:30 who was Patterson,
1:20 uranium decay to lead,
2:25 zircon & Earth age measuring,
3:00 crankless Cadilac story,
3:45 Kettering &
4:27 engine knocking, fuel efficiency,
5:30 octane number
5:55 98octane-diesel comparison,
7:10 ethanol & (tetraethyl lead) leaded gasoline,
10:25 lead poisoning,
13:20 Earth age (4,55 bil)
14:40 lead concentration caused by people only
15:43 lead pollution diagram
Question:
What do you do for a living?
Seem like such a helpful person !
thanks
@@Asgro He is Thomas Midgley reincarnated! He is now doomed in this life to make up for what he did in the previous one...
@@DiogoMauriMusic Lmao
👍🏻
The amount of info this man has packed in just under 25 min video is phenomenal!
And a lot of entropy 😝
Way better than documentaries on TV/streaming services nowadays. They often have stunning cinematography, sure, but are not often nearly so information dense!
Its called hitting the bulletin points 😂
Just came across this. In my youth we were still using leaded gas before unleaded came out. After the switch. They had an additive for unleaded gas being used in leaded engines. If I remember correctly. It was to prevent damage to the valves. Also I worked at AutoZone when R12 was started being phased out and R134 starting in new vehicles. I believe R12 use to sell for 99 cents a can. Interesting video.
you can actually convert a leaded engine to unleaded, just need to change the valvetrain. i have a 2 stroke vespa here thats from 1978, a time when leaded fuel was still a thing in germany, yet it runs fine on modern unleaded or even e10 fuel. the engine is all original. totally fine. that engine is insanely inefficient, you can literally smell the unburnt fuel going out the exhaust, but it runs on just about any petrol there is.
Imagine if that one guy had said "No, I can't responsibly go on developing leaded gasoline when I know how unhealthy it is. Even with that profit-margin it's just not worth it," noted a failure in his research paper and abandoned that line of research to instead keep on looking for other additives.
No one would know his name, but he'd be a hero: discrediting lead as an additive and preventing it from being used in the future.
...or someone will notice his paper and continue the research for profit.
what and not become wildly rich? hahaha i believe so little in humanity that I don't for one moment think any single person on this planet would choose any different than this guy did.
Mate when you've discovered a way to get what would be 3 billion dollars today, you wouldn't care about the consequences of that method on others.
"Thanks for the research. Now we know how effective leaded gas is, and how dangerous it is."
"Since you are not interested in using it, we will now proceed without you."
I always loved this channel, but man... I had no ideia how deep you was going on others subjects. This one, lead toxicity, was my area of study for the entire college and master degree, and I am totally impressed by how well you explained it! I really appreciate your dedication to bring very good quality knowledge here on RUclips! Keep up the good work, greetings from Brazil 😄
é br? 👽
uiui me parece que sim
@@seniorararo sim!! Hahahaha
In Brazil, they use ethanol or an ethanol fuel mix correct? Ethanol functions as lead, but was required at least 10% of the fuel mixture as stated in the video, but at the time it was expensive?
@@Mickeycuatropatas Ethanol is not very expensive, but it doesn't have the same combustion power that gasoline has, the cars we have today can utilize gasoline, pure ethanol or mix of the two at any proportion. (Our gasoline comes with 27% ethanol, if I not mistaken). Today it costs R$7 per liter (around 1,5 US dollars 😭). Ethanol price ends by been almost the same, since we need a bit more to get the same travel distance than gasoline.
Back in the 70s and 80s, I was a meteorologist in the US Army, responsible for sending up weather balloon flights. The radiosonde at the bottom of the balloon recorded temperature, humidity, and pressure. The pressure was measured by a commutator bar which was a bar with alternating conductors and insulators, and a bellows with a needle running across it would detect the pressure. This was inaccurate since the conductors were only about 1/100th of an inch across. So, to increase the accuracy, hypsometers were added to the radiosondes. A hypsometer is a tube filled with liquid trichloromonofluoromethane (modified Freon) with a thermistor measuring the temperature of the boiling point of the liquid. The higher the altitude, the lower the pressure, and the lower the boiling point. This worked well until the mid 1970s when scientists realized that Freon was messing up the ozone in the stratosphere. Steps were immediately taken (and orders given to us meteorologists) to eliminate hypsometers since they were delivering a critical dose of Freon (about 1 1/2 to 2 oz) directly into the stratosphere (and sometimes the mesosphere), enough to nearly eliminate the ozone in the vicinity of the radiosonde flight. What took Freon years to do from the ground, a hypsometer could do in minutes.
Hmm, I had to read that twice before "it took".
Very interesting and a little scary also.
Perhaps that did more damage to the ozone layer than the CFCs released on Earth? Refrigerants such as R12 and R22 are several times DENSER than air and quickly sink to the ground when released, so how CFCs got miles up into the sky to damage the ozone layer without help as you described is beyond me.
If anyone reading this is, like me, confused by the big words, a radiosonde is apparently a device that's suspended by a weather balloon that takes measurements of atmospheric conditions.
That's wild, thanks for sharing. USG of course would never own up to this so I appreciate the honesty. It's the only way to learn from the mistakes of the past.
Esto es sobrecogedor, gracias por la información, compañero de la tierra.
Wow man, thank you for this education. I think you counteracted my leaded dumbness a bit with intellectual truth. I subscribed. Keep it coming!
i think what's the most horrifying part, is how recent this all was. i live in the uk and to think we only decided "hey maybe we shouldnt be breathing lead" only 22 years ago is terrifying, what in the hell
I agree. I’m 24, and only just recently found out I have lead poisoning. Turns out a cup set my mom got just before I was born, which I used from the moment I could drink from glass cups up til about age 21, has lead paint. It was that Disney cup set from McDonald’s, similar to the Garfield ones that also have lead paint.
Also, lead poisoning can cause ADHD, which my mom and I both have 🙃 fun times.
Whoever believes in the Lord Jesus Christ shall not perish but have everlasting life he is returning. Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior and believe that he died on the cross for your sins before it’s too late repent he is returning amen….
@@quandilustenbinguslorsodo1501 amen 🙏🏾
just recently we doscovered that we shouldn't eat tide pods
@@quandilustenbinguslorsodo1501 appreciate the sentiment but… what does god have to do with huffing lead?
I wonder how much "lead in paint" also contributed to these problems. Wasn't this an issue in house paint until the 80's.... (and houses built before)
Nice question. I guess it is a less relevant source, as you are not actively making breathable aerosols out of it, but the powder that comes out of it is likely harmful.
Also, lead is what makes crystal glass so nice and shiny in respect to regular glass. And yes, lead slowly dissolves in water. So grandma's precious crystal glasses might have contributed too.
It was kids eating chips of paint containing lead in ghetto environments. (lead tastes sweet)
Lead in its solid form is not the problem. Parents who don't feed their children is the problem.
@Internet Guidance lead was heavily used to make water pipes in the past. Having old lead pipes still in place today is beyond unacceptable.
"In 1786 Benjamin Franklin remarked that Lead had been used for far too long considering its known toxicity." "You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on." That is one hell of a statement! It is going up on the wall in my science classroom tomorrow!
Well done!
Chris
Seriously, very powerful - and for a variety of reasons!
How do U know that quote is authentic? Snap judgement on your part. Do you watch msmedia?
@@jeanninecathcart627 Yes it is correct I just read it from Ben Franklin's letter on lead poision that he sent to Benjamin Vaughan in July 31, 1786.
@@jeanninecathcart627 🤔 msmedia? What is it? No I don't watch it, and the quote looks pretty accurate to me. Why do you doubt it, or are you just a troll🤨
@@Cgraseck I didn't say it was not accurate, but I won't just kneejerk say that it is or is not and put it up on a sign as fact. "LOOKS PRETTY ACCURATE"? OMG how funny. BTW, MSMEDIA= Main stream media. Think CNN, MSNBC, NY TIMES, WAPO, NBC ABC CBS THE ONES THAT PARROT EACH OTHER DAILY , even the same wording.
Finally, now I know what's wrong with me. I worked at a gas station from 1972-1974
The disgusting irony of lead being used to maximize profit while now knowing it’s removal saves $2.45 trillion/year (23:03)! Think of how many similar issues (though altogether less significant) exist across industry. That last line is hauntingly accurate. Whatever you do in life please always choose ethics over profit. Thanks for the insightful video.
And this is why ideologies like libertarianism can never work. No single corporation has any incentive to account for the externalities their product causes, whether that be others projects, worldwide health, or the environment. It didn't matter to them that it caused a loss of economic output and millions of deaths, because they were the ones still profiting. In many cases government regulation is essential to account for these externalities, not just red tape
what's a loss of 2.45 trillion yearly to society when I get 50 billion for myself?
@@shamus731 government needs to act as historically relevant and aware collective knowledge and agreed systems that go beyond the gains of some over others. However, continually neoliberal and individual liberty focused ideologies neglect that this focus is harmful to anyone except those few lucky and in the right time and place to profit over others. Libertarian ideology is ignorant or neglectful or outright indignant to history and the ramifications of living on a finite planet.
Welcome to capitalism
@@pneumaniac14 This is exactly it. To corporations it doesn't matter how much something can save on a _global_ scale, it only matter how much they can profit on a personal scale. Removing lead saved a ton of money in industries that weren't fuel manufacturing (such as healthcare), while including lead allowed the fuel industry to profit at their cost. The only thing that can prevent corporations from doing stuff like this is legislation either regulating/banning it or implementing heavy fines that make it economically nonviable because by the time any kind of "free market" alternative or solution can come the harm has already been done.
"This fuel is perfect"
"Yeah but it's a bit stanky"
"This one is very deadly"
"YES"
a stench that is impossible to get off you even by bathing is probably more likely to deter customers than a long term health problem that you will only notice decades down the line
"It... STINKS!" -- John Loveitz
Tellurium is toxic too.
I can't imagine the one that stunk was much healthier or better for the environment...
@@maxschon7709 yeah but you can’t tell that by purchasing it
I was actually part of a research group in university that studied lead exposure and it's effects on aggressive behavior in fruit flies, and it was my first presentation I ever gave at a wildlife conference. At least for us, there was a high correlation between levels of lead exposure and aggressive behaviors displayed.
Really interesting stuff, but incredibly sobering as well.
Thanks for helping raise awareness of the subject (and for helping animals).
@@ZiddersRooFurry thank you! Obviously there's a good amount of overlap between wildlife and humans in regards to exposure to lead, and our study chose fruit flies as a model for many species. It just so happened that the overall group that mine was a part of was more geared towards conservation and impacts of anthropogenic stressors like pollution on wildlife rather than directly looking at effects on humans, but again the model should work for humans just as well.
@@MelancholicBodhisattva that is fascinating! I wonder how you can measure if a fruit fly is aggressive, I’d never be able to tell.
✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
@@lazyexistentialist4550 there's an answer to that! We observed and documented their behaviors for like a year in a certain situation (two males with a potential mate) and then used that information to determine which behaviors were aggressive. Very tedious, but you'd be surprised by their behavior and how obvious they would be once you knew, such as grabbing, hitting with one or both of their front legs, wing threats.
We called it the fly fight club lol
It's not "Accidentally Killed", he was an scientist and knew how dangerous it was.
This video taught me a few things that answered questions I've had since I was a child about gas. Why all the gas offered was "unleaded", why every gas station made it a point to advertise unleaded even though no place was selling leaded gas, and what octane means and how the phrase "high-octane" came to mean "intense" (because you need it to prevent knocking which in turn is needed for engines to go really, really fast). Thank you.
And don't forget, profit > everything, makes me wonder what's the current poison we're ignoring.
@@CABaaL1337 probably micro plastic
@@CABaaL1337 - As long as there's a comparably cheap alternative developed, we're pretty good at abandoning older harmful chemicals especially in the 21st century (ex leaded gas, freon, etc).
@@BillAnt But we invent a lot of new ones. And as you said we keep a lot of the old ones also as long as there is no cheap equivalent. Not quite the same but have to mention that we were very good in ignoring CO2 the last 70 years or so.
@@CABaaL1337 It's the burning of fossil fuels. It heats up the atmosphere and will render earth uninhabitable for human life. Big oil knows that since the 1970s. Please watch the documentary "Big oil vs the world" from BBC.
I'm okay with people making accidental mistakes, even when they cause a lot of harm - as long as they put their efforts into correcting them once they learn about the harm. When you find out about the harm and still continue to do it, and even lie about the harm, you _very_ quickly turn into a monster in my eyes...
Exactly. This isn’t an accident. Video mistitled
@@Brian-dh9lp
Like Hydrochloriquine or Ivermectin or bleach?
@@afraaal-sulaimani9188 Well Kind of. CFC or Chlorofluorocarbons was at the time not known to harm the ozone. Hell they didn't even know the product before it was released (if they did, then the first para is true). This product was less toxic for us.
Literally none of this could've gotten this out of hand without ignorant consumerism. We as humans are to blame for everything we suffer through, and we deserve it. Intelligent minds warn us time and time again, yet the majority of people either don't care, or are too stupid to understand their warnings. So, thanks to careless ignorance of both past, and present masses, we continue to suffer.
Looking around there are many of them leading major corps.
He didn’t “accidentally” kill anyone. That was criminal negligence. He knew the dangers and went ahead with it anyway.
✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
No no no, you see, when you're rich, it's an accident. It would be criminal negligence if he was poor.
@@LordDragox412 if you are making the politicians rich and powerful then you have total immunity, so kick back to them and you can cause genocide without consequences.
Aye, this is classical "For profit" killing more than accidental deaths. They used lead, well knowing it's poisonous because it's cheap.
Derek knows, this is a way to boost engagement and the algorithm by getting comments like yours.
This is the paradox of science ! This man was the archetype of a mad scientist. Just because you can do something , doesn't mean you should do it.