A Scary Halloween Story…
…while my dinner’s in the oven.
I was chatting last night with one of the ladies from the Vintage about a philosophy course she’s in and a class debate about obligation toward future generations. That brought to mind a bit I read in Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything”.
I’ve taken a little creative license, but it’s a more or less faithful retelling, so here’s a scary little story of mad scientist and how their own creations always seem to be their undoing.
Once upon a time (in 1921) there was an engineer named Thomas Midgley. One day he decided to go all mad scientist and turned to industrial applications of chemistry. Sure it doesn’t sound very mad scientist like, but like most things, you get out of it what you put into it.
His first big success as an Evil Genius was in using Lead Tetraethyl to reduced engine knock in the increasingly popular automobile contraptions that everyone was so interested in.
Even though Lead was a well known neurotoxin a.k.a. a really bad thing for the villagers to be in contact with, it was used in all sorts of stuff. Get too much lead in your system and you’re on your own personal roller coaster ride of horribly entertaining side effects, like brain damage, blindness, cancer, convulsions, and terrifying hallucinations…until you die that is.
Lead …a known neurotoxin was used to line water tanks. It protected fruit from nasty bugs as pesticide spray. It even kept your tooth paste safe. What could go wrong? ..and it was crazy profitable, so that balances out right?
In 1923 Mad Doc Midgley’s Lead Tetraethyl gas additive gave three big corporations a big idea, they formed a little company called Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, later shortened to Ethyl Corp because it was easier for the villagers to pronounce and sounded friendlier I expect.
They began to mass produce the newly dubbed Ethyol as an additive for gas. This was good all around, Ethyl Corp was making lots of money, and engines made less noise, which seemed like a good deal.
Unfortunately people working to produce the additive were getting sick and dropping like flies. But Ethyl Corp pulled a Jedi mind trick and denied any connection. “..this additive is not the one you are looking for …these guys probably went nuts and died from working too hard …nothing to see here, move along”.
Even the best Jedi can’t keep that up for long, and as the villagers began to get restless Midgley went total dark side. In and effort either show how bad ass he was or that Ethyl was safe, Darth Midgley held a demonstration where he washed his hands in it and inhaled it, insisting that “you could do that every day ..no problemo”.
Mad Darth Midgley knew all too well the true dangers, having gotten seriously ill from exposure once before, and had avoided going near the stuff ever since.
Intermission… and obligatory pic. It’s a day late, but here’s a Halloween sketch. More doodling on cocktail napkins. I spent a little longer on this one than I probably should have, but still got it done in about three hours.
Back to the story… Like all good evil scientist, Midgley moved on to top his previous work by inventing Chlorofluorocarbons, that’s CFC’s for the typing challenged (me) or the environmentally minded. CFC’s, the dreaded scourge of the ozone layer were used even more widely than Ethyl. It wasn’t until much later that the destructive genius of CFC’s became as obvious as a pink elephant standing in your living room.
Midgley wasn’t around by the time the uber nastiness of his CFC’s were realized, having been strangled to death by a mechanical contraption he designed to control his bed after being crippled by polo. …Ta Da!
What’s the moral of the story? ..you don’t know what you don’t know? The dark side works in mysterious ways? Take your pick. My personal favorite is, Don’t bite into a fresh made donut 30 seconds out of the fryer, it’s too damn hot!
