The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

You missed Thomas Midgley’s 124th
birthday last week. He was an industrial chemist. He held 100 patents and made two big inventions
that changed history.

His first big
invention was made while he worked for a subsidiary of General Motors. It was an additive for gasoline that almost completely eliminated
knocking in car engines. The additive was tetra ethyl lead (TEL) If
you are over 60, you may remember pulling into a service station and being
asked by the attendant “Do you want regular or ethyl?”

General Motors and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now Exxon) formed the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to
sell this product. Unfortunately, they ran into a problem. Lead is a dangerous neurotoxin. Their workers suffered all
kinds of health affects, up to and including death. This was seen at the time
as an inconvenience, as there was money to be made.

Midgley understood that adding lead
to gasoline made car engines perform better. At the time, two things were widely
known by chemists: First, adding grain alcohol to gasoline dramatically
increases octane and performance; and Second, ingesting or sniffing lead leads
to serious injury, brain damage and death.

The problem
was that grain alcohol isn’t cheap and using it couldn’t be patented. As a
result, they searched for a cheaper process that could be protected and that
could open the door for market dominance. If you own the patent on the cheapest
and easiest way to make cars run quieter (and no one notices the brain damage and death
thingy), you can corner the market in a fast-growing profitable industry.

As soon as
lead started being used, people began dying. Factory workers would drop dead in
the plant. Even Midgley contracted lead poisoning. At a press conference
where he tried to demonstrate the safety of the gasoline, he washed his hands
in it and sniffed it, even though he knew it was already killing people. That
brief exposure was sufficient to spend six months away from work to recover his
health. The employees would have been completely exposed to the large amount of lead that they were working with, without so much as a protective mask (such as this N95 Mask you can find online, for example). In today’s factory settings, where some harmful chemicals and compounds are still used, the amount of PPE that is now required normally covers head to toe!

Bill Bryson, in his
book “A Short History of Nearly Everything“
devotes a chapter to Midgley and the Ethyl Corporation. TEL would not be banned
in gasoline until the 1970?s! The company denied that lead was dangerous to
humans until it was banned.

If you were born in the 1900?s,
you have over 600 times more lead concentration in your body than someone who
died before World War I.

The Ethyl Corporation
exists today and they still make the product. They sell it in other countries
and it’s still used in some fuels in the USA.

Midgley wasn’t done. He went on to
invent a way to eliminate the dangerous chemicals used in early air
conditioning systems. He invented a product called dichlorodifluromethane
(CFC).

That is correct, Midgley
invented CFC’s! He had no idea of course that they would not only work well as
a refrigerant, but they were also effective at destroying the Ozone Layer.

Once
again, Midgley’s industry fought hard to maintain the status quo for years after
the damage was widely known.

The hole in the Ozone
Layer still exists, but the Montreal Protocol has banned most CFC’s. The Ozone
hole should begin to close by 2050.

Let’s
think more deeply about Thomas Midgley: His work gave us ubiquitous air
conditioning in the developed world. It gave us cheap-to-use internal
combustion engines that drive tractors, generators, scooters and cars around
the world.

Wikipedia
quotes J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian, saying that Midgley
“had more impact on the
atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”

Not for
the better either.

Some would
say that Midgley was “just doing his job”. He pushed products to
market ?in the case of TEL, products he knew were toxic, so his company could
turn a profit.

Sound
familiar? A company needs the public and their government to ignore what they’re
doing in order to defend their market niche and extract the maximum value from
their assets. They sow seeds of doubt about the science. They remind us of the jobs created, profits made and the money saved.

And we
give them a pass. Because it’s their job, or because it’s our job, or because
our culture has created an artificial distinction between individuals who create
negative impacts and organizations that create them.

People who
might in other circumstances, speak up, decide to quietly stand by, or worse, actively lie as they engage in PR
campaigns aimed at undermining those that are brave enough to
point out just how damaging the status quo is.

It took
sixty years for leaded gas to be banned here and worse, it’s still used in many
places that can ill afford to deal with its effects.

When Midgley
did it again with CFCs, he certainly didn’t know the effects in advance. He died
three decades before the ozone depleting effects of CFCs in the atmosphere
became widely known.

Maybe we
should consider requiring every CEO have a statue of Midgley in their office, as
a reminder that we’re ultimately
responsible for what we make, that spinning to defend the status quo can hurt all
of us, and most of all, that we have to balance the benefits of
progress, innovation and industry with the social costs to all concerned.

Is there a
better person to use as the symbol for vigilance, candor and outspokenness than
Midgley, someone who was none of the above?
 

The happy talk theory of business ethics is: Doing the right
thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better
staff and gives back to the community, the very community that buys from you. The happy talk theory says, do these
things and you’ll make money.

The unhappy talk theory of business ethics
is this:
You have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. To do anything less
than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don’t
have much wiggle room there.

If you believe
in business ethics, the unhappy talk theory is a big problem.

We can only count on people having
ethics, not businesses: Ethics, as in doing the right thing. Pointing to
the numbers (or to the bosses) is easy for those who want to duck an issue,
but you either do work you are proud
of, or you look away and try to make the most money possible. (It would
be nice if those overlapped much of the time, but they do not).

“I
just work here” is the worst sort of excuse, whether it’s from the IRS in Cincinnati,
or from JP Morgan. It is better to work with a company staffed with ethical
people than to try to find an ethical company.

In fact,
companies we believe to be ethical got that way because ethical employees made it
so.