longtermism and externalities

[Noah Sombrero]

Ok, it is the ny times, and therefore suspect. But like julian, I
offer what seems right to me.

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The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes
A century ago, Thomas Midgley Jr. was responsible for two phenomenally
destructive innovations. What can we learn from them today?

By Steven Johnson
Published March 15, 2023

It was said that Thomas Midgley Jr. had the finest lawn in America.
Golf-club chairmen from across the Midwest would visit his estate on
the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, purely to admire the grounds; the
Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley’s lawn on its
letterhead. Midgley cultivated his acres of grass with the same
compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career. He
installed a wind gauge on the roof that would sound an alarm in his
bedroom, alerting him whenever the lawn risked being desiccated by a
breeze. Fifty years before the arrival of smart-home devices, Midgley
wired up the rotary telephone in his bedroom so that a few spins of
the dial would operate the sprinklers.

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

Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. 2, 1944,
when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public was told he had
been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately,
his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he designed had
become the instrument of his death.

Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first
order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he
brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most
important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and
refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr.
Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call
him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the
inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn
in the decades that followed. While The Times praised him as “one of
the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is
best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to
the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed
to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of
the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

Each of these innovations offered a brilliant solution to an urgent
technological problem of the era: making automobiles more efficient,
producing a safer refrigerant. But each turned out to have deadly
secondary effects on a global scale. Indeed, there may be no other
single person in history who did as much damage to human health and
the planet, all with the best of intentions as an inventor.

What should we make of the disquieting career of Thomas Midgley Jr.?
There are material reasons for revisiting his story now, beyond the
one accidental rhyme of history: the centennial of leaded gasoline’s
first appearance on the market in 1923. That might seem like the
distant past, but the truth is we are still living with the
consequences of Midgley’s innovations. This year, the United Nations
released an encouraging study reporting 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.

The arc of Midgley’s life points to a debate that has intensified in
recent years, which can be boiled down to this: As we make decisions
today, how much should we worry about consequences that might take
decades or centuries to emerge? Will seemingly harmless G.M.O.s
(genetically modified organisms) bring about secondary effects that
become visible only to future generations? Will early research into
nanoscale materials ultimately allow terrorists to unleash killer
nanobots in urban centers?

Midgley’s innovations — particularly the chlorofluorocarbons — seemed
like brilliant ideas at the time, but 50 years taught us otherwise.
Pondering Midgley and his legacy forces us to wrestle with the core
questions at the heart of “longtermism,” as the debate over long-term
thinking has come to be called: What is the right time horizon for
anticipating potential threats? Does focusing on speculative futures
distract us from the undeniable needs of the present moment? And
Midgley’s story poses a crucial question for a culture, like ours,
dominated by market-driven invention: How do we best bring new things
into the world when we recognize, by definition, that their long-term
consequences are unknowable?

Invention was in Midgley’s blood. His father was a lifelong tinkerer
who made meaningful contributions to the early design of automobile
tires. In the 1860s, his maternal grandfather, James Emerson, patented
a number of improvements to circular saws and other tools. As a
teenager growing up in Columbus, Midgley showed early promise in
deploying novel chemical compounds for practical ends, using an
extract from the bark of an elm tree as a substitute for human saliva
while throwing spitballs on the baseball field. A high school
chemistry class inaugurated what would prove to be a lifelong
obsession with the periodic table, which then was rapidly being
expanded thanks to early-20th-century discoveries in physics and
chemistry. For most of his professional career, he carried a copy of
the table in his pocket. The spatial arrangement of the elements on
the page would help inspire his two most significant ideas.

After graduating from Cornell in 1911 with a degree in mechanical
engineering, Midgley moved to Dayton, Ohio — arguably the leading
innovation hub in the country at the time. History generally remembers
Dayton for the Wright brothers, who sketched out their plans for the
Kitty Hawk flight there, but the original attraction that drew
inventors to the city was an unlikely one: the cash register, which
for the first time enabled store owners to automate the record of
transactions — and prevent employee theft. By the time Midgley joined
the National Cash Register company in 1911, it had become a
powerhouse, selling hundreds of thousands of machines around the
world. It was there that Midgley first began hearing stories about
Charles Kettering, who devised NCR’s mechanized system for clerks to
run credit checks on customers directly from the sales floor, along
with the first cash register to run on electric power.

Firms like NCR had begun experimenting with a new organizational unit,
the research lab, in the spirit of the polymathic “muckers” whom
Thomas Edison had assembled at his plant in Menlo Park, N.J. A few
years after joining NCR, Kettering turned his attention to the
emerging technology of the automobile, forming his own independent
research lab known as Delco, short for Dayton Engineering Laboratories
Company, in 1909. There he concocted a device that proved crucial in
transforming automobiles from a hobbyist’s pursuit to a mainstream
technology: the electric ignition system. (Before Kettering’s
breakthrough, automobiles had to be started with an unwieldy — and
sometimes dangerous — hand crank, which required significant physical
force to operate.) By 1916, Delco had been acquired by the corporation
that would become General Motors, where Kettering would go on to work
for the rest of his career.

Shortly after the acquisition, Midgley applied for a job in
Kettering’s lab and was hired immediately. He was 27; Kettering was
40. After finishing a minor project that commenced before his arrival,
Midgley walked into Kettering’s office one day and asked, “What do you
want me to do next, Boss?” Kettering wrote after Midgley’s death.
“That simple question and the answer to it turned out to be the
beginning of a great adventure in the life of a most versatile man.”

The technical riddle Kettering tasked Midgley with solving was one of
the few remaining impasses keeping the automobile from mass adoption:
engine knock.

As the name implies, for the automobile passenger, engine knock was
not just a sound but a bodily sensation. “Driving up a hill made
valves rattle, cylinder heads knock, the gearbox vibrate and the
engine suddenly lose power,” Sharon Bertsch McGrayne writes in her
excellent history of modern chemistry, “Prometheans in the Lab.” The
problem was made all the more mysterious by the fact that no one had
any idea what was causing it. (“We don’t even know what makes an
automobile run,” Kettering admitted at one point.) In a sense, the
question that Kettering and Midgley set out to solve was figuring out
whether knock was an inevitable secondary effect of a gas-powered
engine, or whether it could be engineered out of the system.

To investigate the phenomenon, Midgley devised a miniature camera,
optimized for high-speed images. The footage he eventually shot
revealed that fuel inside the cylinders was igniting too abruptly,
creating a surge of pressure. The unpleasant vibrations passengers
were feeling reflected the fundamental fact that energy was being
wasted: rattling the bones of the car’s occupants instead of driving
the pistons.

The footage at least gave the problem some specificity: How do you
make the fuel combust more efficiently? In the early days, Midgley was
groping in the dark; his training was as a mechanical engineer, after
all, not as a chemist. One of his first lines of inquiry came from a
bizarre suggestion from Kettering — that perhaps the color red could
somehow improve the fuel’s combustion. Kettering had long been
impressed by the way that leaves of the trailing arbutus plant could
turn red even when covered by a layer of snow, somehow capturing the
energy of the sun’s rays more effectively than other plants. Perhaps
adding a red dye to the fuel would solve the problem of knock,
Kettering suggested. So Midgley used iodine to dye the fuel red, and
it did seem to have some mild antiknock properties. Ultimately he
realized that it was the iodine itself, not its color, that was the
active agent in subduing the knock. It wasn’t a solution per se, but
it suggested something important nonetheless: that the ultimate
solution would come from chemistry, not from engineering.

The search for that solution would ultimately last five years.
Kettering later said that Midgley and his team tested 33,000 different
compounds. For most of that period, they meandered in a random walk
through the periodic table, adding elements to the fuel to see if they
did anything to mitigate engine knock. “Most of them had no more
effect than spitting in the Great Lakes,” Midgley recalled years
later.

The first material advance came via a newspaper article that Kettering
stumbled across, reporting the discovery of a new “universal solvent”
in the form of the compound selenium oxychloride. When added to the
fuel, the compound produced mixed results: Knock was reduced
considerably, but the new fuel eroded spark plugs almost on contact.
Midgley kept searching, systematically plowing through a new version
of the periodic table that had recently been introduced, identifying
promising clusters of elements, effectively teaching himself
industrial chemistry on the fly. He soon discovered that the further
you moved toward the heavy metals clustered together on the table, the
more the engine knock dissipated. Soon the random walk through the
elements became a beeline to what was, at the time, the heaviest metal
of them all: lead.

In December 1921, Midgley’s team in Dayton concocted enough of the
compound tetraethyl lead to do a test run with a kerosene-powered
engine suffering from a serious case of engine knock. A single
teaspoon of tetraethyl lead silenced the knock completely. Further
tests revealed that you could subdue engine knock with a shockingly
small supplement of lead; they ultimately settled on a
lead-to-gasoline ratio of 1-to-1,300. The effects on engine
performance were profound. Automobiles running on leaded gasoline
could take on steep inclines without hesitation; drivers could
accelerate to overtake a slower vehicle on a two-lane road without
worrying about their engine being seized with knock while in the wrong
lane.

Kettering branded the new fuel Ethyl, and in February 1923 it was
first offered for sale at a gas station in downtown Dayton. By 1924,
General Motors, the DuPont Corporation and Standard Oil had started a
joint venture called the Ethyl Corporation to produce the gasoline at
scale, with Kettering and Midgley appointed as executives. Henry
Ford’s assembly-line production of the original Model T in 1908 is
usually credited as the point of origin for the American love affair
with the automobile, but the introduction of high-octane Ethyl
gasoline was instrumental as well. Over the course of the 1920s, the
number of registered vehicles in the United States tripled. By the end
of the decade, Americans owned close to 80 percent of all the
automobiles in the world, increasingly powered by the miraculous new
fuel that Thomas Midgley concocted in his lab.

A few years after the triumph of Ethyl, Kettering and Midgley turned
to another revolutionary technology, soon to be as ubiquitous in
American culture as the automobile: electric refrigeration. Generating
heat through artificial means had a long and illustrious history, from
the mastery of fire to the steam engine to the electric stove. But no
one had approached the problem of keeping things cold with
technological solutions until the late 1800s. For most of the 19th
century, if you wanted to refrigerate something, you bought ice that
had been carved out of a frozen lake in a northern latitude during the
winter and shipped to some warmer part of the world. (Ice was a major
export item for American commerce during that period, with frozen lake
ice from New England shipped as far as Brazil and India.) But by the
end of the century, scientists and entrepreneurs began to experiment
with artificial cold. Willis Carrier designed the first
air-conditioning system for a printing house in Brooklyn in 1902; the
first electric-powered home refrigerators appeared a decade later. In
1918, two years after Midgley started working for Kettering, General
Motors acquired a home-refrigerator start-up and gave it a brand name
that lives on to this day: Frigidaire.

But as with the automobile in the engine-knock era, the new consumer
technology of refrigeration was being held back by what was
effectively a problem of chemistry. Creating artificial cold required
some kind of gas to be used as a refrigerant, but all the available
compounds in use were prone to catastrophic failure. During the 1893
World’s Fair in Chicago, an industrial-scale ice-manufacturing plant
exploded, killing 16 people, when the ammonia it was using as a
refrigerant ignited. Another popular refrigerant, methyl chloride, had
been implicated in dozens of deaths around the country, the victims of
accidental leaks. Frigidaire’s products relied on sulfur dioxide, a
toxic gas that could cause nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and damage
to the lungs.

With newspaper headlines denouncing the “death gas ice boxes” and a
growing number of legislators exploring the idea of banning home
refrigerators outright, Kettering turned to Midgley to come up with a
solution. One day in 1928, as Midgley later recalled, “I was in the
laboratory and called Kettering in Detroit about something of minor
importance. After we’d finished this discussion, he said: ‘Midge, the
refrigeration industry needs a new refrigerant if they ever expect to
get anywhere.’” Kettering announced that he was dispatching a
Frigidaire engineer to visit Midge in the lab the next day to brief
him on the challenge.

Once again, Midgley turned to his nonstandard periodic table, this
time using a technique he had come to call the “fox hunt,” which
proved to be far more efficient than the random walk he employed in
the engine-knock investigation. He began with the observation that
most elements that remained gaseous at low temperatures — a key for
refrigeration — were located on the right side of the table, including
elements like sulfur and chlorine that were already in use. That first
step narrowed the search considerably. Midgley then eliminated a
number of neighboring elements out of hand for either being too
volatile or having a suboptimal boiling point.

Then he found the one element not yet being used in commercial
refrigerants: fluorine. Midgley knew that fluorine on its own was
highly toxic — its primary industrial use was as an insecticide — but
he hoped to combine the gas with some other element to make it safer.
Within a matter of hours, Midgley and his team hit upon the idea of
mixing fluorine with chlorine and carbon, developing a class of
compound that would come to be called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs for
short. Subsequent tests revealed — as Kettering would put it years
later in his eulogy for Midgley — that their compound was “highly
stable, noninflammable and altogether without harmful effects on man
or animals.” Shortly after, General Motors entered into a partnership
with DuPont to manufacture the compound at scale. By 1932 they had
registered a new trademark for the miracle gas: Freon.

Freon arrived just in the nick of time for the refrigeration industry.
In July 1929, a methyl-chloride leak of “ice machine gas” in Chicago
killed 15 people, raising even more concerns about the safety of
existing refrigerants. Ever the showman, Midgley performed an act
worthy of a vaudeville magician onstage at the national meeting of the
American Chemical Society in 1930, inhaling a cloud of the gas and
then exhaling to blow out a candle — thus demonstrating Freon’s
nontoxicity and its nonflammability. Frigidaire leaned hard into the
safety angle in the advertising for its new Freon-powered refrigerator
line, announcing that the “Pursuit of Health and Safety Led to the
Discovery of Freon.” By 1935, eight million refrigerators using Freon
had been sold, and Willis Carrier had employed the gas to create a new
home air-conditioning unit called the “atmospheric cabinet.”
Artificial cold was well on its way to becoming a central part of the
American dream.

Soon, Midgley’s miracle gas would find a new use in consumer goods —
one that ultimately became even more dangerous to the environment than
its use as a refrigerant. In 1941, two chemists at the Department of
Agriculture, one of whom formerly worked for DuPont, invented a device
to disperse insecticide in a fine mist, using a variation of Midgley’s
original concoction called Freon-12 as the aerosol propellant. After
malaria deaths contributed to the fall of the Philippines in 1942, the
U.S. military ramped up production of “bug bombs” to protect troops
from insect-borne diseases, ultimately giving birth to an entire
aerosol industry, which used Freon to disperse everything from DDT to
hair spray. The new utility seemed, at the time, to be yet another
example of “better living through chemistry,” as DuPont’s corporate
slogan put it. “A double delight is dichlorodifluoromethane, with its
thirteen consonants and ten vowels,” The Times wrote. “It brings death
to disease-carrying insects and provides cool comfort to man when July
and August suns bake city pavements. This wonder gas is popularly
known as Freon 12.”

Two innovations — Ethyl and Freon, conjured by one man presiding over
a single laboratory during a span of roughly 10 years. Combined, the
two products generated billions of dollars in revenue for the
companies that manufactured them and provided countless ordinary
consumers with new technology that improved the quality of their
lives. In the case of Freon, the gas enabled another technology
(refrigeration) that offered meaningful improvements to consumers in
the form of food safety. And yet each product, in the end, turned out
to be dangerous on an almost unimaginable scale.

The history of any major technological or industrial advance is
inevitably shadowed by a less predictable history of unintended
consequences and secondary effects — what economists sometimes call
“externalities.” Sometimes those consequences are innocuous ones, or
even beneficial. Gutenberg invents the printing press, and literacy
rates rise, which causes a significant part of the reading public to
require spectacles for the first time, which creates a surge of
investment in lens-making across Europe, which leads to the invention
of the telescope and the microscope. Oftentimes the secondary effects
seem to belong to an entirely different sphere of society. When Willis
Carrier hit upon the idea of air-conditioning, the technology was
primarily intended for industrial use: ensuring cool, dry air for
factories that required low-humidity environments. But once
air-conditioning entered the home — thanks in part to Freon’s radical
leap forward in safety — it touched off one of the largest migrations
in the history of the United States, enabling the rise of metropolitan
areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas that barely existed when Carrier
first started tinkering with the idea in the early 1900s.

Sometimes the unintended consequence comes about when consumers use an
invention in a surprising way. Edison famously thought his phonograph,
which he sometimes called “the talking machine,” would primarily be
used to take dictation, allowing the masses to send albums of recorded
letters through the postal system; that is, he thought he was
disrupting mail, not music. But then later innovators, like the Pathé
brothers in France and Emile Berliner in the United States, discovered
a much larger audience willing to pay for musical recordings made on
descendants of Edison’s original invention. In other cases, the
original innovation comes into the world disguised as a plaything,
smuggling in some captivating new idea in the service of fun that
spawns a host of imitators in more upscale fields, the way the
animatronic dolls of the mid-1700s inspired Jacquard to invent the
first “programmable” loom and Charles Babbage to invent the first
machine that fit the modern definition of a computer, setting the
stage for the revolution in programmable technology that would
transform the 21st century in countless ways.

We live under the gathering storm of modern history’s most momentous
unintended consequence, one that Midgley and Kettering also had a hand
in: carbon-based climate change. Imagine the vast sweep of inventors
whose ideas started the Industrial Revolution, all the entrepreneurs
and scientists and hobbyists who had a hand in bringing it about. Line
up a thousand of them and ask them all what they had been hoping to do
with their work. Not one would say that their intent had been to
deposit enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect
that trapped heat at the surface of the planet. And yet here we are.

Ethyl and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary
effect: innovations whose unintended consequences stem from some kind
of waste byproduct that they emit. But the potential health threats of
Ethyl were visible in the 1920s, unlike, say, the long-term effects of
atmospheric carbon buildup in the early days of the Industrial
Revolution. The dark truth about Ethyl is that everyone involved in
its creation had seen incontrovertible evidence that tetraethyl lead
was shockingly harmful to humans. Midgley himself experienced
firsthand the dangers of lead poisoning, thanks to his work in Dayton
developing Ethyl in the lab. In early 1923, Midgley cited health
reasons in declining an invitation to a gathering of the American
Chemical Society, where he was supposed to receive an honor for his
latest discovery. “After about a year’s work in organic lead,” he
wrote to the organization, “I find that my lungs have been affected
and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of
fresh air.” In a jaunty note to a friend at the time, Midgley wrote:
“The cure for said ailment is not only extremely simple but quite
delightful. It means to pack up, climb a train and search for a
suitable golf course in the state named Florida.”

Midgley did in fact recover from his bout with lead poisoning, but
other early participants in the Ethyl business were not so lucky. Days
after the first mass-production site for tetraethyl lead opened at
DuPont’s Deepwater facility in New Jersey, Midgley and Kettering found
themselves responsible for one of the most horrifying chapters in the
history of industrial-age atrocities. On the eastern banks of the
Delaware River, not far from DuPont’s headquarters in Wilmington, the
Deepwater facility already had a long history of industrial accidents,
including a series of deadly explosions in its original operational
role of manufacturing gunpowder. But as soon as it began producing
Ethyl at scale, the factory turned into a madhouse. “Eight workers in
the DuPont tetraethyl gas plant at Deep Water, near Penns Grove, N.J.,
have died in delirium from tetraethyl lead poisoning in 18 months and
300 others have been stricken,” The Times would later write in an
investigative report. “One of the early symptoms is a hallucination of
winged insects. The victim pauses, perhaps while at work or in a
rational conversation, gazes intently at space and snatches at
something not there.” Eventually, the victims would descend into
violent, self-destructive insanity. One worker threw himself off a
ferry in a suicide attempt; another jumped from a hospital window.
Many had to be placed in straitjackets or strapped to their beds as
they convulsed in abject terror. Before work was halted at the plant,
the hallucinations of swarming insects became so widespread that the
five-story building where Ethyl was produced was called the “house of
butterflies.”

Perhaps the most damning evidence against Midgley and Kettering lies
in the fact that both men were well aware that at least one potential
alternative to tetraethyl lead existed: ethanol, which had many of the
same antiknock properties as lead. But as Jamie Lincoln Kitman notes
in “The Secret History of Lead”: “GM couldn’t dictate an
infrastructure that could supply ethanol in the volumes that might be
required. Equally troubling, any idiot with a still could make it at
home, and in those days, many did.” On the face of it, ethyl alcohol
would have seemed the far safer option, given what was known about
lead as a poison and the unfolding tragedies at Deepwater and other
plants. But you couldn’t patent alcohol.

In May 1925, the surgeon general formed a committee to investigate the
health hazards of Ethyl, and a public hearing was held. Kettering and
other industry figures spoke, squaring off against a cadre of
physicians and scholars. The following January, the committee
officially found that there was no conclusive evidence of risk to the
general public in the use of leaded gasoline. Within weeks, the
factories were back online, and within a decade, Ethyl was included in
90 percent of all gasoline sold in America.

The first real clue of leaded gasoline’s true environmental impact
came out of one of the 20th century’s most fabled accidental
discoveries. In the late 1940s, the geochemist Clair Patterson
embarked on an ambitious project with colleagues at the University of
Chicago to establish a more accurate account of Earth’s true age,
which at that point was generally considered to be just over three
billion years. Patterson’s approach analyzed the small amounts of
uranium contained in the mineral zircon. Zircon in its initial state
is free of lead, but uranium produces lead at a steady rate as it
decays. Patterson assumed that measuring the ratios of various lead
isotopes in a given sample of zircon would give him a precise age for
the zircon, an important first step in his quest to calculate the true
age of Earth itself. But Patterson quickly found that the measurements
were almost impossible to make — because there was far too much
ambient lead in the atmosphere to get an accurate reading.

Eventually, after a move to the California Institute of Technology
several years later, Patterson built an elaborate “clean room,” where
he was able to make enough uncontaminated measurements to prove that
Earth was a billion years older than previously thought. But his
battle with lead contamination in the lab also sent him on a parallel
journey, to document the enormous quantities of lead that had settled
over every corner of the planet in the modern era. Analyzing ice-core
samples from Greenland, he found that lead concentration had increased
fourfold over the first two centuries of industrialization. The
short-term trends were even more alarming: In the 35 years that had
passed since Ethyl gasoline became the standard, lead concentrations
in polar ice cores had risen by 350 percent. Other investigators, like
the Philadelphia doctor Herbert Needleman, published studies in the
1970s suggesting that even low levels of lead exposure could cause
significant cognitive defects in young children, including lowered
I.Q. scores and behavioral disorders.

Patterson and Needleman were pilloried for their findings by the
automobile and lead industries, but as the scientific evidence began
to pile up, a consensus finally emerged that leaded gasoline had
turned out to be one of the most harmful pollutants of the 20th
century, one that proved to be especially concentrated in urban areas.
Globally, the phaseout of leaded gasoline that began in the 1970s is
estimated to have saved 1.2 million lives a year. As Achim Steiner of
the United Nations noted, “The elimination of leaded petrol is an
immense achievement on par with the global elimination of major deadly
diseases.”

The realization that CFCs were harming the environment began the same
way the understanding of lead’s impact began: with a new technology
for measurement, namely a contraption known as an electron-capture
detector. Invented in the late 1950s by James Lovelock — a British
scientist who would gain fame more than a decade later by formulating
the “Gaia hypothesis” — this device could measure minute
concentrations of gases in the atmosphere with far more precision than
had yet been possible. In some of his early observations with the
device, Lovelock discovered a surprisingly large quantity of CFCs,
with more of them circulating in the atmosphere above the Northern
Hemisphere than above the Southern.

Lovelock’s findings piqued the interest of the chemists Sherwood
Rowland and Mario Molina, who made two alarming discoveries in the
mid-1970s: first, the fact that CFCs had no natural “sinks” on Earth
where the chemical could be dissolved, which meant that all CFCs
emitted through human activity would eventually settle in the upper
atmosphere; and second, the fact that at those high altitudes, the
intense ultraviolet light from the sun would cause them to finally
break down, releasing chlorine that did substantial damage to the
ozone layer. Shortly after Rowland and Molina published their work,
evidence emerged that ozone levels were depleted in the stratosphere
above the South Pole; a daring high-altitude flight overseen by the
atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon eventually proved that the “hole” in
the ozone layer had been caused by the human-created CFCs that Thomas
Midgley concocted in his lab more than 50 years earlier.

As with the fight over leaded gasoline, the industries involved in CFC
production resisted efforts to reduce the presence of the gas in the
atmosphere, but by the late 1980s, the evidence of potential harm had
grown undeniable. (Unlike in the current debate over global warming,
no mainstream political constituency emerged to challenge this
consensus, other than the industry players who had a financial stake
in continued CFC production.) In September 1987, representatives of 24
nations signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the
Ozone Layer, establishing a timetable for the world to phase out
production and consumption of CFCs, almost 60 years after Kettering
told Midgley to figure out a solution to the refrigerant problem. It
took a small team just a few days in a lab to address Kettering’s
problem, but it took a global collaboration of scientists,
corporations and politicians to repair the damage that their creation
inadvertently unleashed on the world.

Based on Rowland’s original research in the 1970s, the National
Academy of Sciences estimated that continued CFC production at the
same rate would destroy 50 percent of the ozone layer by 2050. About a
decade ago, an international team of climate scientists created a
computer model to simulate what would have happened if the Montreal
Protocol had not been put into effect. The results were even more
disturbing than previously forecast: By 2065, nearly two-thirds of the
ozone layer would have disappeared. In mid-latitude cities like
Washington and Paris, just five minutes of exposure to the sun would
have been enough to give you sunburn. Skin-cancer rates would have
skyrocketed. A 2021 study by scientists at Lancaster University looked
at the impact that continued CFC production would have had on plant
life. The additional UV radiation would have greatly diminished the
absorption of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, creating an
additional 0.8 degrees Celsius of global warming, on top of the
increased temperature caused by fossil-fuel use.

In his 2020 book on existential risk, “The Precipice,” the Oxford
philosopher Toby Ord tells the story of a concern, initially raised by
the physicist Edward Teller in the months leading up to the first
detonation of a nuclear device, that the fission reaction in the bomb
might also ignite a fusion reaction in the surrounding nitrogen in
Earth’s atmosphere, thus “engulfing the Earth in flame … and
[destroying] not just humanity, but all complex life on Earth.”
Teller’s concerns touched off a vigorous debate among the Manhattan
Project scientists about the likelihood of an unintended atmospheric
chain reaction. Ultimately, they decided that the world-engulfing
firestorm was not likely to happen, and the Trinity Test went ahead as
planned at 5:29 a.m. local time on the morning of July 16, 1945.
Teller’s fears proved to be unfounded, and in the hundreds of nuclear
detonations since, no apocalyptic atmospheric chain reactions have
been unleashed. “Physicists with a greater understanding of nuclear
fusion and with computers to aid their calculations have confirmed
that it is indeed impossible,” Ord writes. “And yet, there had been a
kind of risk.”

Ord dates the genesis of what he calls the Precipice — the age of
existential risk — to that July morning in 1945. But you could make
the argument that a better origin point might well be that afternoon
in 1928, when Thomas Midgley Jr. and his team fox-hunted their way
across the periodic table to the development of chlorofluorocarbons.
Teller, after all, was wrong about his imagined chain-reaction
apocalypse. But CFCs actually did produce a chain reaction in the
atmosphere, one that left unabated might well have transformed life on
Earth as we know it. Whether Freon was “altogether without harmful
effects on man or animals,” as Kettering once claimed, depended on the
time scale you used. On the scale of years and decades, it most likely
saved many lives: keeping food from spoiling, allowing vaccines to be
stored and transported safely, reducing malaria deaths. On the scale
of a century, though, it posed a significant threat to humanity
itself.

Indeed, it is reasonable to see CFCs as a forerunner of the kind of
threat we will most likely face in the coming decades, as it becomes
increasingly possible for individuals or small groups to create new
scientific advances — through chemistry or biotechnology or materials
science — setting off unintended consequences that reverberate on a
global scale. The dominant models of technological apocalypse in the
20th century were variations on the Manhattan Project:
industrial-scale, government-controlled weapons of mass destruction,
designed from the outset to kill in large numbers. But in the 21st
century, the existential threats may well come from innovators working
in Midgley’s mode, creating new dangers through the seemingly
innocuous act of addressing consumer needs, only this time using
CRISPR, or nanobots, or some new breakthrough no one has thought of
yet.

All of which makes it essential to ask the question: Was it possible
for Midgley (and Kettering) to have swerved away from the precipice
and not have unleashed such destructive forces into the world? And
have we built new defenses since then that are sufficient to prevent
some 21st-century Midgley from inflicting equivalent damage on the
planet, or worse? The answers to those questions turn out to be very
different, depending on whether the innovation in question is Ethyl or
Freon. Leaded gasoline, which in the end did far more harm to human
health than CFCs, was actually a more manageable and preventable class
of threat. What should keep us up at night is the modern-day
equivalent of CFCs.

In the end, leaded gasoline was a mistake of epic proportions, but it
was also a preventable mistake. The rise of Ethyl was an old story: a
private company’s reaping profits from a new innovation while
socializing the costs of its unintended consequences and overriding
the objections at the time through sheer commercial might. It was well
established that lead was a health hazard; that the manufacture of
Ethyl itself could have devastating effects on the human body and
brain; that automobiles running on Ethyl were emitting some trace of
lead into the atmosphere. The only question was whether those trace
amounts could cause health problems on their own.

Since the surgeon general’s hearing in 1926, we have invented a vast
array of tools and institutions to explore precisely these kinds of
questions before a new compound goes on the market. We have produced
remarkably sophisticated systems to model and anticipate the long-term
consequences of chemical compounds on both the environment and
individual health. We have devised analytic and statistical tools —
like randomized controlled trials — that can detect subtle causal
connections between a potential pollutant or toxic chemical and
adverse health outcomes. We have created institutions, like the
Environmental Protection Agency, that try to keep 21st-century Ethyls
out of the marketplace. We have laws like the Toxic Substances Control
Act of 1976 that are supposed to ensure that new compounds undergo
testing and risk assessment before they can be brought to market.
Despite their limitations, all of these things — the regulatory
institutions, the risk-management tools — should be understood as
innovations in their own right, ones that are rarely celebrated the
way consumer breakthroughs like Ethyl or Freon are. There are no ad
campaigns promising “better living through deliberation and
oversight,” even though that is precisely what better laws and
institutions can bring us.

The story of Freon offers a more troubling lesson, though. Scientists
had observed by the late 19th century that there seemed to be a
puzzling cutoff in the spectrum of radiation hitting Earth’s surface,
and soon they suspected that ozone gas was somehow responsible for
that “missing” radiation. The British meteorologist G.M.B. Dobson
undertook the first large-scale measurements of the ozone layer in
1926, just a few years before Kettering and Midgley started exploring
the problem of stable refrigerants. Dobson’s investigations took
decades to evolve into a comprehensive understanding. (Dobson did all
his work from ground-level observations. No human had even visited the
upper atmosphere before the Swiss scientist and balloonist Auguste
Piccard and his assistant ascended to 52,000 feet in a sealed gondola
in 1931.) The full scientific understanding of the ozone layer itself
wouldn’t emerge until the 1970s. Unlike with Ethyl, where there was a
clear adverse relationship on the table between lead and human health,
no one even considered that there might be a link between what was
happening in the coils of your kitchen fridge and what was happening
100,000 feet above the South Pole. CFCs began inflicting their harm
almost immediately after Freon hit the market, but the science capable
of understanding the subtle atmospheric chain reactions behind that
harm was still 40 years in the future.

Is it possible that we are doing something today whose long-term
unintended consequences will not be understandable to science until
2063? That there are far fewer blank spots on the map of understanding
is unquestionable. But the blank spots that remain are the ones
capturing all the attention. We have already made some daring bets at
the edges of our understanding. While building particle accelerators
like the Large Hadron Collider, scientists seriously debated the
possibility that activating the accelerator would trigger the creation
of tiny black holes that would engulf the entire planet in seconds. It
didn’t happen, and there was substantial evidence that it would not
happen before they flipped the switch. But still.

As the scenario planners put it, the question of leaded gasoline’s
health risks to the general public was a known unknown. We knew there
was a legitimate question that needed answering, but big industry just
steamrollered over the whole investigation for almost half a century.
The health risk posed by Freon was a more mercurial beast: an unknown
unknown. There was no way of answering the question — are CFCs bad for
the health of the planet? — in 1928, and no real hint that it was even
a question worth asking. Have we gotten better at imagining those
unimaginable threats? It seems possible, maybe even likely, that we
have, thanks to a loose network of developments: science fiction,
scenario planning, environmental movements and, recently, the
so-called longtermists, among them Toby Ord. But blank spots on the
map of understanding are blank spots. It’s hard to see past them.

This is where the time-horizon question becomes essential. The
longtermists get a lot of grief for focusing on distant sci-fi futures
— and ignoring our present-day suffering — but from a certain angle,
you can interpret the Midgley story as rebuttal to those critics.
Saturating our inner cities with toxic levels of ambient lead for more
than half a century was a terrible idea, and if we had been thinking
about that decades-long time horizon back in 1923, we might have been
able to make another choice — perhaps embracing ethanol instead of
Ethyl. And the results of that longtermism would have had a clear
progressive bias. The positive impact on low-income, marginalized
communities would have been far greater than the impact on affluent
entrepreneurs tending to their lawns in the suburbs. If you gave a
present-day environmental activist a time machine and granted them one
change to the 20th century, it’s hard to imagine a more consequential
intervention than shutting down Thomas Midgley’s lab in 1920.

But the Freon story suggests a different argument. There was no use
expanding our time horizon in evaluating the potential impact of CFCs,
because we simply didn’t have the conceptual tools to do those
calculations. Given the acceleration of technology since Midgley’s
day, it’s a waste of resources to try to imagine where we will be 50
years from now, much less 100. The future is simply too unpredictable,
or it involves variables that are not yet visible to us. You can have
the best of intentions, running your long-term scenarios, trying to
imagine all the unintended secondary effects. But on some level,
you’ve doomed yourself to chasing ghosts.

The acceleration of technology casts another ominous shadow on
Midgley’s legacy. Much has been made of his status as a “one-man
environmental disaster,” as The New Scientist has called him. But in
actuality, his ideas needed an enormous support system — industrial
corporations, the United States military — to amplify them into
world-changing forces. Kettering and Midgley were operating in a world
governed by linear processes. You had to do a lot of work to produce
your innovation at scale, if you were lucky enough to invent something
worth scaling. But much of the industrial science now exploring the
boundaries of those blank spots — synthetic biology, nanotech, gene
editing — involves a different kind of technology: things that make
copies of themselves. Today the cutting-edge science of fighting
malaria is not aerosol spray cans; it’s “gene drive” technology that
uses CRISPR to alter the genetics of mosquitoes, allowing
human-engineered gene sequences to spread through the population —
either reducing the insects’ ability to spread malaria or driving them
into extinction. The giant industrial plants of Midgley’s age are
giving way to nanofactories and biotech labs where the new
breakthroughs are not so much manufactured as they are grown. A recent
essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated that there
are probably more than 100 people now with the skills and technology
to single-handedly reconstruct an organism like the smallpox virus,
Variola major, perhaps the greatest killer in human history.

It is telling that the two moments when we stood on the very edge of
Toby Ord’s “precipice” in the 20th century involved chain reactions:
the fusion reaction set off by the Trinity Test and the chain reaction
set off by CFCs in the ozone layer. But self-replicating organisms (or
technologies) pose a different order of risk — exponential risk, not
linear — whether they are viruses engineered by gain-of-function
research to be more lethal, venturing into the wild through a lab leak
or a deliberate act of terrorism, or a runaway nanofactory producing
microscopic machines for some admirable purpose that escapes the
control of its creator.

In his 2015 book, “A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology From
Slipping Beyond Our Control,” Wendell Wallach talks about the class of
unsettling near-term technologies that generally fit under the
umbrella of “playing God”: cloning, gene editing, “curing” death,
creating synthetic life-forms. There is something unnervingly godlike
in the sheer scale of the impact that Thomas Midgley Jr. had on our
environment, but the truth is that his innovations required immense
infrastructure, all those Ethyl and Freon factories and gas stations
and aerosol cans, to actually bring about that long-term destruction.
But today, in an age of artificial replicators, it is much easier to
imagine a next-generation Midgley playing God in the lab — with good
or evil intent — and dispatching his creations with that most ancient
of commands: Go forth, and multiply.

Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of “Extra Life: A Short
History of Living Longer.” He also writes the newsletter Adjacent
Possible. Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and a designer in
Portugal. She is known for her retro-inspired collages.


--
Noah Sombrero