The brilliant inventor who made two of history's biggest mistakes

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Thomas Midgley Jr. was said to have the best lawn in America. Golf club presidents from across the Midwest would visit his estate on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, just to admire the course; the Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley Lawn on its header. Midgley has cultivated his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that has characterized his entire career. He installed an anemometer on the roof that would set off an alarm in his bedroom, warning him whenever the lawn was in danger of being dried out by a breeze. Fifty years before smart home devices arrived, Midgley wired her bedroom rotary phone for a few turns of the dial to turn on the sprinklers.

In the In the fall of 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, and the dashing and charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first, he embraced his disability with the same ingenuity he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a new solution - in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to climb into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had represented in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly insoluble challenge and found a way around it.

< p class="css -at9mc1 evys1bk0">Or at least it was like that until the morning of November 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public learned that he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he had designed had become the instrument of his death.

Midgley was buried as a brilliant American maverick first class. Newspapers published eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought to the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the time: the automobile and refrigeration. "The world has lost a truly great citizen in the death of Mr. Midgley," said Orville Wright. "I was proud to call him friend." But the dark story of the disappearance of Midgley - the inventor killed by his own invention! – would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. While the Times hailed him as "one of the country's outstanding chemists" in its obituary, Midgley is today best known for the terrible consequences of this chemistry, thanks to the span of his career from 1922 to 1928. , during which he succeeded in inventing leaded gasoline and also developing the first commercial use of chlorofluorocarbons which would create a hole in the ozone layer.

Each of these innovations offered a brilliant solution to a pressing technological problem of the time: making automobiles more efficient, producing a safer refrigerant. But each has been found to have deadly side effects on a global scale. Indeed, there is perhaps no other person in history who has caused so much damage to human health and the planet, all with the best intentions of an inventor.

What should we do with the worrying career of Thomas Midgley Jr.? There are material reasons to revisit its history now, beyond the single accidental rhyme in the story: the centenary of the first appearance of leaded gasoline on the market in 1923. That may seem like a distant past, but the truth is that we always live with the consequences. innovations from Midgley. This year, the United Nations released an encouraging study indicating that the ozone layer was indeed on track to fully recover from the damage caused by Midgley's chlorofluorocarbons, but not for another 40 years.

Midgley's life arc points to a debate that has intensified in recent years, which may...