(Re-Runs) The Legacy of the House of Butterflies

Thomas Midgley, Charles Kettering, and the story of how a few greedy men poisoned the entire human race for generations.

This is a re-run of an old article that didn’t get a whole lot of attention back when I posted it, but is one of my better ones. In the meanwhile, I continue my Leap of Faith into start-up land, and despite the financial catastrophe being imposed upon the world, we’re building up enormous momentum. I’ve had people joining us from Substack and elsewhere, coming on board as developers, designers, and advisors. We’re on to something special, we can all feel it. Next stop: funding. Wish us luck :)

Now, on to the show!

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Note from the Author: I'd like to personally thank Prof Bill Kovarik, who is also a subscriber, for his work on this subject. He and a small band of like-minded individuals have produced the vast majority of authoritative scientific accounts, data, and research on Leaded Petrol exposure, and have been on a lonely mission to inform the world of the damage that has been done to so many by the greed of so few. Most of this post is based on their work. I hope my small contribution is of some assistance to them in their mission; the world needs to know.

Every single reader is a gift to me. Especially you. Thank you.

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Looney Gas

The men in the mixing room were apparently normal when they started work. Within a few days, they began to show signs of slowness and confusion.

Internal memo, Standard Oil, 1923.

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October 23rd 1924, in the new section of Standard Oil's refinery in New Jersey, mysterious things were happening. A plant worker named Ernest Oelgert—one of 45 employed in this new part of the facility—was losing his grip on reality. He and his colleagues had for some time been seeing "winged insects" covering their bodies while working, and could often be seen swiping at them and shooing them. The thing is, the insects weren't real. They were hallucinations.

This wasn't exactly a brand-new phenomenon either; workers at other plants around New Jersey—all of whom worked on producing the new Tetraethyl Lead (TEL) gasoline on behalf of Thomas A Midgley and Charles Kettering at GM and Standard Oil—had been experiencing similar things since the very beginning. These psychological symptoms ranged from hallucinations, to major mood swings, changes in personality.

Right now, Ernest seemed to be falling into a dark spiral of paranoia.

He had begun telling his colleagues that people were following him around, watching him. He started to fear that he was being watched constantly, around the clock, even sensing malice in his own co-workers.

TEL already had a nickname by this time: the "looney gas". Facilities that produced the stuff also had a common nickname: "house of butterflies". Despite the seeming light-heartedness of these names, the legacy it was leaving behind was anything but.

TEL had been in production for a little less than a year—only since 1923—but already, 9 people had died horrific, painful, slow deaths, and many dozens more had been hospitalised, often going completely psychotic and falling into the life-long grip of chronic illnesses, both physical and mental.

Ernest had been told by doctors who worked for the plant that he would be safe, "...that working in the laboratory [making TEL] wouldn't hurt him." They said he'd "have to get used to it", or quit.

The next day, a Friday, Ernest was witnessed racing around in a panic at the plant, screaming that there were "three coming to get me at once!" Saturday, throughout fits and violent convulsions, he had to be placed in a straight-jacket whereupon he was transported to a hospital in New York City. His continued shrieking and terror must have severely perturbed his colleagues, several of whom were themselves beginning their own descent. By the following day, Sunday, Erneset was dead, and 4 of his colleagues were spiralling out of control.

Then one by one they went: Walter Dymock dove out of his second-story bedroom window. William McSweeny turned up at home feeling ill, and the next morning was thrashing around so much he was also straight-jacketed. He and William Kresge—another colleague—would all end up in hospital, with William having lost a ton of weight in a short few weeks.

Now, at yet another plant, things suddenly escalated. Workers began writhing, their muscles convulsing out of control. With their gums turning blue, their skin turning black from deep bruising, they became violent and sometimes suicidal. Though they were forcibly put into straight-jackets to stop their own bodies beating them to within an inch of their very lives, nothing could be done to stop the destruction happening at a cellular level, and it was all being caused by humanity's oldest known toxin: lead.

It was enough to alarm the medical examiners: people who have seen it all, specialists exposed to the often gruesome aftermath of the very worst industrial and chemical accidents; they were not easily impressed, but this incident had concerned them to the point where they felt the alarm must be raised.

And raised, it was. Now, on this cool October Monday, it was a front-page story in newspapers all over the world.

The New York Times article on Monday's edition read "ODD GAS KILLS ONE, MAKES FOUR INSANE".

The "Odd Gas" was Tetraethyl Lead. It quoted a Dr Archibald Sinson, saying: "These are the first cases of this sort that ever admitted to the hospital. ... It is a form of ethyl chloride which will penetrate the kind of gas masks I understand they use at the plant. It is poisonous and appears to affect the rational judgement, causing hallucinations."

The executives over at Standard Oil could not have been happy to see a story they had worked so hard to keep buried erupt like a volcano onto the public consciousness in such spectacular fashion. When approached for comment, they gave nothing officially. One famous quote however was plucked from one of the plant supervisors dismissing the incident, saying the victims “Probably Worked Too Hard.”

Knocking at fortune’s door

In 1916, Europe was tearing itself apart in The Great War. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the new world, a young graduate of Cornell University by the name of Thomas A. Midgley working at General Motors, asked his boss—Charles Kettering—to give him a new project to work on. He was getting bored and restless, keen to be put to work on something useful and interesting. So, he was assigned to work on something called the "anti-knock" problem.

Combustion engines run by creating a series of precisely timed explosions, triggered by the spark plug which ignites the air/fuel mixture in the chamber at the exact moment in time when the piston is in position. The pressure waves from these explosions then push the piston, which turns a wheel, which drives a crankshaft, which can then be used to turn the wheels of a motor vehicle, or the propeller of an aeroplane, etc.

The thing is, each explosion needs to be timed precisely, lining up with the state of the piston so that it is ready to go. Explosions that happen outside this precise timing cycle—either before the spark plug fires (pre-ignition) or after (engine knock)—can slow the pistons down, or push them too hard or too fast, or even cause the whole engine to blow apart. The higher the compression factor of the air/fuel mixture, the more likely it is for these unintended combustion events to occur. However, higher compression also allowed for dramatic increases in engine performance and power, fuel efficiency and economy, so you could get more from less fuel, allowing it to last longer. The ability for a fuel to withstand this compression and achieve the aforementioned benefits was given a metric: the Octane rating.

The higher the Octane rating of a fuel, the more efficiently it can be used.

In the early 20th century, their reasons for wanting better fuel economy weren't motivated by concerns about climate change, or pollution, or making it more affordable for the common good. They were driven primarily by the belief that at current rates of extraction, global oil reserves might only last another 20 years. Unless some vast new sources were discovered, the clock was ticking. Alternative fuels and power sources would be needed. This made Petroleum essentially a stop-gap until something renewable was widely and cheaply available. Work was already well under way, with a number of alternative fuels available in the market made from various things.

Somehow, a way had to be found to cheaply and reliably boost the octane rating in the petrol manufacturing process. Well, one such answer, as Midgley discovered after some 7 years of investigation, was to add lead.

When added to gasoline, lead turned out to be a remarkably effective anti-knock agent, and it was cheap, abundant, and only a relatively small amount of it was needed per gallon of oil. There's just one small problem: lead is universally toxic to all forms of complex life, as well as being radically neurotoxic in particular.

Amnesia

In 1923, the mixture Midgley and colleagues came up with was Tetraethyl Lead, or TEL, though they often dropped the "lead" off the end, to "avoid scaring consumers".

Despite the tremendous usefulness of lead for many things, humans have known about the acute neurological effects of lead poisoning for several thousand years at least. The Romans knew about it. The ancient Greeks wrote about it. We humans, however, have a strange kind of amnesia about things like this.

Lead has effects on just about every system in the body—blood cells, immune system, heart, lungs, kidneys—but the very worst damage happens to the brain. The brain is the most sensitive organ to lead exposure, which easily slips through the blood-brain barrier, sucked up by the pumps which normally transport calcium ions. Once there, it wreaks havoc, producing abundant free-radicals, which react with the organic matter of neurons, structural proteins, cell walls, even DNA.

It produces so many free-radicals and Reactive Oxygen Species, the antioxidants stored in the body are quickly depleted, leaving you defenceless. Children are the worst affected, disrupting the very formation of synapses between neurons in the cerebral cortex, stripping neurons of the protective myelin sheath, corrupting chemical signalling, and stunting neuronal growth. The damage is accumulative and irreversible.

While most adults can recover from some peripheral effects after exposure ceases, children never recover.

Curiously, however, there were already other known non-toxic anti-knock formulas which did not require lead at all. Midgley and Kettering both knew of them and corresponded with each other about them, Alcohol blends being most prominent, and were just as effective (if not more so). Unfortunately, they also required more per unit of oil than Lead, and cost more, moderating the total profit margins they could achieve. So, of course, when the reports started coming in during the first test trials of a manufacturing process for TEL of plant workers getting acute lead poisoning and several of them dying, GM and Standard Oil had already done the math: the profits from TEL were projected to be mind-boggling.

With dollar-signs in their eyes, they decided to do everything they could to ensure the continued production of TEL. They would willingly sacrifice any number of lives to defend their projected profits, and they did. A deliberate campaign of obfuscation and misinformation was begun. "They did not realise what they were working with." said GM President Charles Kettering of the tragedy, blaming the workers themselves for somehow being careless.

It was not the workers who were careless. The manufacturing process developed by Standard Oil was an open one, fully exposing the toxic materials which saturated the air with fumes. Du Pont had tried to insist on a fully-closed system, along with adequate ventilation, in which workers would have no exposure at all to the chemicals; they were turned down, in favour of the cheaper option.

So what if a few plant workers got sick and died? Full steam ahead!

High-Octane Greed

They [Standard Oil] put up a plant that lasted two months and killed five people and practically wiped out the rest of the plant. The disaster was so bad that the state of New Jersey entered the picture and issued an order that Standard could never go back into the manufacture of this material without the permission of the state of New Jersey.

A Du Pont Attorney, 1952

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The fact is, no one at General Motors or Standard Oil was actively trying to poison anyone. They were blinded by the pursuit of profit, overcome by their own greed, and they cared nothing for the riff-raff employed to make this stuff for them. They might shed a tear at the funeral of a close friend or immediate family member, because that was one of their own. Otherwise, it wasn't their problem.

Many, many more tragic deaths and poisonings were to occur during those first few years of TEL's manufacture, beginning in 1923.

One particularly remarkable instance was at the opening of a new plant in New Jersey: 17 extreme cases of lead poisoning resulting in major psychosis, and 5 deaths in quick succession. It was so bad, not only was the plant shut down by the state government after only 2 months of operation; Standard Oil was also forbidden by law from manufacturing TEL anywhere in the State of New Jersey, something which was unprecedented anywhere in the country.

Standard Oil of New Jersey would eventually be renamed in the 1970s, becoming Exxon.

An explosive rise in demand for motor vehicles all over the world—particularly following the second world war—meant demand for petrol to run them was near insatiable. Vast and untold riches poured in to oil companies, and TEL was the dominant formula for decades and decades, up to the turn of the 21st century. Where there were cars, there was leaded petrol.

It seems, however, the damage did not end simply with improved manufacturing processes. Merely being exposed to the open air, fumes from TEL would spew lead into the lungs of anyone nearby—whether at a refinery, at a petrol pump, or in a motor vehicle. The millions upon millions of cars traversing roads all over the developed world filled the atmosphere with leaded exhaust fumes. It was chronic, it was prolific, it was near-inescapable.

Recently though, large amounts of long-overdue research was done looking at the history and impact of environmental lead exposure—primarily from leaded petrol—and what they've been finding is devastating. Previous studies have noted how lead poisoning can cause violence, paranoia, and reduced impulse control, along with a significant reduction in IQ. Other studies correlated a significant rise and dramatic fall in violent crime with the use and availability of leaded petrol—rising as its adoption and use did, and falling as bans were put in place.

Then, in 2022, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research article was published, looking at numerous recent studies on lead exposure in the United States, which showed that adults who grew up during the peak era of leaded petrol in the US—between the 1950s and 1970s—likely suffered permanent life-long damage, not only neurologically, but also physiologically, literally altering their physical development and changing the entire trajectory of their lives, putting a great big measurable dent in overall IQ, and driving an epidemic in violence and chronic illness.

That's an entire generation of people in the Western World still suffering from the consequences, to this day, with a range of chronic illnesses and cognitive deficits, all thanks to the astonishing greed of oil and automotive companies.

It has been speculated that Thomas Midgley himself might have contributed more to atmospheric and environmental contamination than any other single organism in history; with his relentless drive to push for his lead formula, he was making bank while simultaneously poisoning a large proportion of the human population of our planet over decades.

Just think about that for a minute. Internal memos show that Midgley knew the real score. He knew—and had raised a number of times in the very early days of his research—about the profound toxicity of lead. He even experienced lead poisoning himself from his time in the lab developing the mixture. As soon as he saw those dollar signs—maybe he even hallucinated them—he made a choice to side with the money, at the expense of humanity; leaving the rest of us to cover the bill.

Midgley, Kettering, and all of their collaborators, trampled upon humanity to win their fortunes.

As far as I'm aware, to date, no one has ever been held to account.

No one has ever admitted complicity.

And no one has ever apologised.

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Thank you so much for reading, and once again a massive thank you to Prof Kovarik and the other dedicated scientists and researchers who have spent so many years trying to inform the world about the brutal effects that leaded petrol has had on humanity.

You can find more of his work on this and other subjects at his website: https://billkovarik.com/bio/