Interesting case, the formatting of the article is a little foreshadowing of where my research into this led me. The scenario with the state taking credit for the decline in crime based on their policing rather than as is very convincingly demonstrated, lead poisoning.
Lead poisoning has been a well known and understood phenomenon for a very long period of time, people understood even at the time of the discovery of leaded petrol that it was liable to lead to health issues of the exact kind outlined in the article. It was hardly some huge mystery that was only discovered in the last decade or so, more like rigorously suppressed well known facts that under active examination by government organisations were simply swept under the rug.
Clearly, G.M. switched gears sometime in 1923 or 1924. When controversy broke out about the public health impacts of leaded gasoline in 1924, Midgley and Kettering told the media, fellow scientists and the government that no alternatives existed. “So far as science knows at the present time,” Midgley told a meeting of scientists, “tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard exists in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified.”110 And at a Public Health Service conference on leaded gasoline in 1925, Kettering said: “We could produce certain [antiknock] results and with the higher gravity gasolines, the aromatic series of compounds, alcohols, etc… [to] get the high compression without the knock, but in the great volume of fuel of the paraffin series [petroleum] we could not do that.”111 Even though experts like Alice Hamilton of Harvard University insisted that alternatives to leaded gasoline were available,112 the Public Health Service allowed leaded gasoline to remain on the market in 1926. (Leaded gasoline was banned in 1986 in the US for the same public health concerns that had been expressed 60 years earlier).
The government of the time was well aware of the risks and did practically nothing to stop the negative effects. There were several competing options available, but the politically best connected corporations who basically guided government policy in this area used their leverage to suppress knowledge and use of these options.
They even prepared for the possibility that the government would actually take effective regulatory action against them despite their attempts to push them in the other direction;
Interestingly, Kettering and Midgley came up with another fuel called “Synthol” in the summer of 1925, at a time when the fate of leaded gasoline was in doubt. Synthol was made from alcohol, benzene and a metallic additive — either tetraethyl lead or iron carbonyl. Used in combination with a new high compression engine much smaller than ordinary engines, Synthol would “revolutionize transportation.”113 When Ethyl leaded gasoline was permitted to return to the market in 1926, Kettering and Midgley dropped the Synthol idea.
Of course, They had no need. The state was not only plain old negligent in the addressing of this threat, they used their power to suppress dissent by legal and regulatory channels;
By the mid-1930s, the alliance between General Motors, DuPont Corp. and Standard Oil to produce Ethyl leaded gasoline succeeded beyond all expectations: 90 percent of all gasoline contained lead. Public health crusaders who found this troubling still spoke out in political forums, but competitors were not allowed to criticize leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. In a restraining order forbidding such criticism, the Federal Trade Commission said Ethyl gasoline “is entirely safe to the health of [motorists] and to the public in general when used as a motor fuel, and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public.”114
Direct comparison between leaded gasoline and alcohol blends proved so controversial in the 1920s and 1930s that government studies were kept quiet or not published. For instance, a Commerce Department report dated May 15, 1925 detailed dozens of instances of alcohol fuel use worldwide.115 The report was printed only five days before the Surgeon General’s hearing on Ethyl leaded gasoline. Yet it was never mentioned in the news media of the time, or in extensive bibliographies on alcohol fuel by Iowa State University researchers compiled in the 1930s. Another instance of a “buried” government report was that of USDA and Navy engine tests, conducted at the engineering experiment station in Annapolis. Researchers found that Ethyl leaded gasoline and 20 percent ethyl alcohol blends in gasoline were almost exactly equivalent in terms of brake horsepower and useful compression ratios. The 1933 report was never published.116
Couple their state shepherding with typical shady commercial practices that are eerie early echoes of the windows OEM contract preferences microsoft has frequently been accused of engaging in;
Also in the 1930s, as Ethyl’s marketing power grew, the company began to enforce what it considered to be “business ethics” on the market. Ethyl refused to grant dealer contracts to certain gasoline wholesalers, and often provided no formal explanation for their actions. The exclusion of “unethical” businessmen was especially aimed at those who cut prices, but it was a means of excluding from the entire fuel market any wholesaler who adopted practices which the oil industry disliked. Since wholesalers had to carry a wide range of products to survive, and since advertising had created enormous consumer demand for Ethyl, to be denied an Ethyl contract was in effect to be forced out of business. Most wholesalers could not or would not tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation why Ethyl would consider them unethical, but at least one wholesaler, the Earl Coryell company of Lincoln, Nebraska, blended ethyl alcohol about the same time that it could not get an Ethyl license.158 Pressure to stick with Ethyl leaded gasoline exclusively rather than try alcohol fuel blends would have been quite strong with this enforcement mechanism at the oil industry’s disposal, but it is difficult to estimate how many gasoline dealers wanted to use alcohol instead of lead. In 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an anti-trust verdict against Ethyl, 159 but by then, the Midwestern alcohol fuel movement had disintegrated.
And note the result of the belated slap on the wrist to ethyl being basically similar to the result of the MS / Netscape antitrust trial, it was so far after the action had already played out in the marketplace as to be basically meaningless.
Damage done.
That people here swallow this without doing further research and parrot the state as white knight line is somewhat disappointing. If anything on close analysis, this shows exactly the opposite and is just another data point on an extremely long line of evidence indicating that the state and its politics are capable of very little other than taking credit, and they don't let a little thing like being on the wrong side of the argument to begin with get in their way doing so.
I believe I read this in Bill Bryson's `A Brief History of Nearly Everything', which is a great book if anyone is interested in the history of how scientific discoveries are made and how credit is taken for them.
I'll go a step further and say its a great book. My wife has little interest in the history of scientific discovery, and she loved it. The audio book sent our baby to sleep every day for months - play count is just over 100 from memory. Even when heard for the 100th time it is still interesting.
Edit: I think a reason that people find science to be a bit dry is that it is often associated with dull library racks of journals on complex subjects with a razor focus. The story behind a particular paper is often far more interesting than the paper would leave you to believe. Something in the publishing process removes the highs and lows of each step and the background to what occurred.
Lead poisoning has been a well known and understood phenomenon for a very long period of time, people understood even at the time of the discovery of leaded petrol that it was liable to lead to health issues of the exact kind outlined in the article. It was hardly some huge mystery that was only discovered in the last decade or so, more like rigorously suppressed well known facts that under active examination by government organisations were simply swept under the rug.
http://www.environmentalhistory.org/billkovarik/research/hen...
Specifically;
Clearly, G.M. switched gears sometime in 1923 or 1924. When controversy broke out about the public health impacts of leaded gasoline in 1924, Midgley and Kettering told the media, fellow scientists and the government that no alternatives existed. “So far as science knows at the present time,” Midgley told a meeting of scientists, “tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard exists in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified.”110 And at a Public Health Service conference on leaded gasoline in 1925, Kettering said: “We could produce certain [antiknock] results and with the higher gravity gasolines, the aromatic series of compounds, alcohols, etc… [to] get the high compression without the knock, but in the great volume of fuel of the paraffin series [petroleum] we could not do that.”111 Even though experts like Alice Hamilton of Harvard University insisted that alternatives to leaded gasoline were available,112 the Public Health Service allowed leaded gasoline to remain on the market in 1926. (Leaded gasoline was banned in 1986 in the US for the same public health concerns that had been expressed 60 years earlier).
The government of the time was well aware of the risks and did practically nothing to stop the negative effects. There were several competing options available, but the politically best connected corporations who basically guided government policy in this area used their leverage to suppress knowledge and use of these options.
They even prepared for the possibility that the government would actually take effective regulatory action against them despite their attempts to push them in the other direction;
Interestingly, Kettering and Midgley came up with another fuel called “Synthol” in the summer of 1925, at a time when the fate of leaded gasoline was in doubt. Synthol was made from alcohol, benzene and a metallic additive — either tetraethyl lead or iron carbonyl. Used in combination with a new high compression engine much smaller than ordinary engines, Synthol would “revolutionize transportation.”113 When Ethyl leaded gasoline was permitted to return to the market in 1926, Kettering and Midgley dropped the Synthol idea.
Of course, They had no need. The state was not only plain old negligent in the addressing of this threat, they used their power to suppress dissent by legal and regulatory channels;
By the mid-1930s, the alliance between General Motors, DuPont Corp. and Standard Oil to produce Ethyl leaded gasoline succeeded beyond all expectations: 90 percent of all gasoline contained lead. Public health crusaders who found this troubling still spoke out in political forums, but competitors were not allowed to criticize leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. In a restraining order forbidding such criticism, the Federal Trade Commission said Ethyl gasoline “is entirely safe to the health of [motorists] and to the public in general when used as a motor fuel, and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public.”114
Direct comparison between leaded gasoline and alcohol blends proved so controversial in the 1920s and 1930s that government studies were kept quiet or not published. For instance, a Commerce Department report dated May 15, 1925 detailed dozens of instances of alcohol fuel use worldwide.115 The report was printed only five days before the Surgeon General’s hearing on Ethyl leaded gasoline. Yet it was never mentioned in the news media of the time, or in extensive bibliographies on alcohol fuel by Iowa State University researchers compiled in the 1930s. Another instance of a “buried” government report was that of USDA and Navy engine tests, conducted at the engineering experiment station in Annapolis. Researchers found that Ethyl leaded gasoline and 20 percent ethyl alcohol blends in gasoline were almost exactly equivalent in terms of brake horsepower and useful compression ratios. The 1933 report was never published.116
Couple their state shepherding with typical shady commercial practices that are eerie early echoes of the windows OEM contract preferences microsoft has frequently been accused of engaging in;
Also in the 1930s, as Ethyl’s marketing power grew, the company began to enforce what it considered to be “business ethics” on the market. Ethyl refused to grant dealer contracts to certain gasoline wholesalers, and often provided no formal explanation for their actions. The exclusion of “unethical” businessmen was especially aimed at those who cut prices, but it was a means of excluding from the entire fuel market any wholesaler who adopted practices which the oil industry disliked. Since wholesalers had to carry a wide range of products to survive, and since advertising had created enormous consumer demand for Ethyl, to be denied an Ethyl contract was in effect to be forced out of business. Most wholesalers could not or would not tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation why Ethyl would consider them unethical, but at least one wholesaler, the Earl Coryell company of Lincoln, Nebraska, blended ethyl alcohol about the same time that it could not get an Ethyl license.158 Pressure to stick with Ethyl leaded gasoline exclusively rather than try alcohol fuel blends would have been quite strong with this enforcement mechanism at the oil industry’s disposal, but it is difficult to estimate how many gasoline dealers wanted to use alcohol instead of lead. In 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an anti-trust verdict against Ethyl, 159 but by then, the Midwestern alcohol fuel movement had disintegrated.
And note the result of the belated slap on the wrist to ethyl being basically similar to the result of the MS / Netscape antitrust trial, it was so far after the action had already played out in the marketplace as to be basically meaningless.
Damage done.
That people here swallow this without doing further research and parrot the state as white knight line is somewhat disappointing. If anything on close analysis, this shows exactly the opposite and is just another data point on an extremely long line of evidence indicating that the state and its politics are capable of very little other than taking credit, and they don't let a little thing like being on the wrong side of the argument to begin with get in their way doing so.