Reflecting on Foreseeable Risks

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That's odoo d. com slash iheart radio Thomas Smidgeley junior was born on College Hill in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, may eighteenth, eighteen eighty nine His father, Thomas Midgeley, Sr., was a prolific inventor in a variety of fields. But notably that of automobile type. A eulogy for an inventor The hero of industrial science Change the world and who died tragically young agged just fifty five Thomas Midgeley Junr. studied mechanical engineering, but he was just as fascinated by chemistry As a young researcher, employed by General Motors, Midgeley took to carrying a copy of the periodic table around in his pocket to inform his quest for new ideas. By the end of his life Midley had accumulated over a hundred patents We're going to hear about three of his inventions In nineteen sixteen, Mitchley became a member of our research staff He began then his long association with me and his remarkably productive career in research The eulogist is Charles Boss Kettering himself an inventor of some renown Kettering was Thomas Midly's boss in the General Motors reesearch deepartment He went on to become a lifelong friend, mentor and business associate, as the two men built lucrative careers with General Motors and the Duont Corporation What do you want me to do next, boss 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 Vversatile indeed The brainchildren of Thomas Midgeley touched many areas of life pudgy, bespectacled inventor seemed to personify the mid twentieth century ideal of progress as summed up by DuPont in their famous nineteen thirties advertising slogan. Better Th for Better liivving Chemistry In his eulogy boss Kattering runs through Midley's long list of accomplishments president of the American Chemical Society winner of the Nichols Medal Perkin Medal Priestly metal the Willard Gibbs Medal the long strep medal honorary doctorates from the College of Worcester and the Ohio State University Settering quotes the citation from Ohio State Midley contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living He has made science a liberator, and we rejoice with him in the satisfactions that must be his in seeing the fruits of his labor Posterity will acknowledge their permanent value. austerity. was not as kind to Midgeley as his many admirers had expected, But they were absolutely right to say that he would change the world He did He made it much, much. worse I'm Tim Harford. and you're listening. Portionary tales What do you want me to do next, boss? One day, when Thomas Midley asked that question of Charles Kettering, If the boss had a problem he wanted Midgeley to solve, problem to do with refrigeration Time People didn't have fridges at home It was too dangerous The chemicals you needed for the cooling coils were either toxic or flammable So refrigeration was mainly used in industrial settings by trained personnel Even then Accidents were common Kattering wanted Mitchley to invent a way to cool things safely. Midgeley took the periodic table out of his pocket. He soon zeroed in on fluorine as a promising element for creating a compound that might have the right properties, as Kettering's eulogy recalls He and his helpers prepared such a compound Dichloridey flluorometethane it proved to have just the properties required. It is highly stable, non inflammable, and altogether without harmful effects on man or animals. Dichloro diluuromethane. did seem to be altogether without harmful effects Midgeley tested this by replacing all the nitrogen in air. Dichloro diluoromethane and seeing what happened to animals who breathed it in ly for the animals. They were completely fine. Midley wasn't just an inventor He was a showman presented his new product in a dramatic lecture to the American Chemical Society Midgeley lights a candle He produces a container of de chlorode flluuromethane He sucks it in along deep Filling his lungs sllowly gently He breathes out over the candle Flame goes out It's a Bravura performance Dichloroifluuromethane belongs to a class of chemicals called CFCs. choro flluorocarbons Under Midley's guidance General Motors and the DuPont Corporation start to produce a whole range of CFCs They give them the trade name. Tone Thanks to these new non hazardous coolants, people soon had refrigerators in their own homes That was a game changer. Food stayed fresh. Housewives of America could spend less time endlessly shopping for groceries poisoning was easier to avoid And it wasn't just fridges air conditioners too. Even better, it soon turned out that CFCs had uses beyond cooling ideal for making aerosol sprays Insect repellents, air fresheners, hairspray. deodorants Just like DuPont said, Better things, for better living through chemistry In the summer of nineteen seventy three Nearly three decades after Thomas Midley's untimely death. A chemistry professor named Sherwood Rowand welcomes a new postdoctoral researcher to his team at the University of California, Irvine Mario Melina is from Mexico He's thirty years old. He needs Professor Roland to give him a project to work on Roland recalls something he heard over coffee at a conference the previous year about a precise new way of measuring trace gases in the atmosphere Gases like dichloroifluurometethane It turns out that CFCs are present in the air around us at two hundred and thirty parts per trillion That's like detecting a drop of gin. in a swimming pool of tonic Roland is intrigued to hear that, not because the amount sounds so small to him. Because it sounds so big He knows that it's only a few decades since CFCs started to be manufactured on an industrial scale much more than that dropfulall can ever have been produced Roland is a radiochemist He studies how particles react and decay Most chemicals break down in the environment sooner or later CFCs seemed to be hanging around He makes a suggestion to mario Melina. Why don't you look into CFCs Melina recalls We thought it would be a nice, interesting academic exercise We both knew that these CFCs were rather stable, so there was nothing obvious that would damage them soon after they'd be released. aboutb as much as I knew at the time If CFCs aren't interacting much with anything in the atmosphere close to Earth, Melina reasoned. They'll eventually drift upwards to the stratosphere, where the air is thinner take decades, but they'd get there did They'd encounter more ultraviolet B waves from the sun And maybe that would cause the CFCs to break down because UVB waves are pretty destructive They're the main reason why too much sunshine can give you skin cancer In fact, if the Earth had no protection from UVB radiation Life on land might not be possible does protect the ath The ozone layer Ozone is a gas made from oxygen atoms Up in the stratosphere, a thin layer of ozone blocks most of the Sun's UVB radiation Mario Melina sat down to work out what would happen to a CFC molecule when it drifts up to the stratosphere by a wave of UVB radiation That would knock off a tooring atem chlorine atom would soon meet an ozone molecule it did, it would split the ozone apart and form oxygen and chlorine monoxide instead. That's not the end of the story, because Chlorine monoxide isn't stable, it breaks down quickly That frees up the chlorine atom again to take out another ozone molecule And the cycle repeats. chlorine atoms pinballing around the stratosphere, hoping ozone as they go Melina was intrigued by this, but not alarmed After all There weren't that many CFC molecules in the atmosphere. It was a drop in a swimming pool They couldn't possibly destroy enough of the ozone layer to cause a problem Melina got the data showing how much CFC gas had been produced He sat down with a pencil paper And a calculator I did the sums C't be right He checked them Check them again and again He checked them a dozen times. That night, when he got home, Melina's wife asked how his day had been The work's going well. Melina said, But it looks like the end of the world Cutionary talailes In a moment If you run a business and need to get your message to your next customers fast, nothing is faster than audio with iHard Let us help you reach the audience you need to grow your business at the speed of sound at iheartadvertising. com When you own your own business, you own every decision. Now own the card that rewards you for it The Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business Card brings the best Sapphire Reserve benefits to business owners who expect hard working rewards. 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If your business runs on five different apps, twelve browser tabs, and one spreadsheet that everyone's afraid to touch It's probably time for Odu OdU is an all in one business management software that connects every part of your business into one powerful, easy to use platform. So instead of wasting time switching between disconnected systems, your entire business works together in real time Your team moves faster, your data stays accurate And you can actually focus on growing your business Let one unified system run your entire business From the first opportunity to the final payment, everything works together in one place Whether you're a small business or managing a large operation Odoo gives you one flexible platform built to grow with you Try for free today at odoo. com slash iheart radio. O dOo d. com slash iheart radio At the University of California Irvine, Maro Melina tracks down Sherwood Rowand. I may have found something important Roland checks Melina's suumms checks them again, that can't be right But it was The CFC is drifting slowly up towards the stratosphere. Ticking time bomb Barely forty years had passed since DuPont started to manufacture their CFCs under the Freon brand on an industrial scale That wasn't long enough to expect any obvious impacts yet. but more and more CFCs were being produced every year If that continued, What might it mean by, say, the middle of the twenty first century Melina and Roland calculated that up to half the ozone layer disappear As Melina had put it It looked like The end of the world The two scientists wrote up their research. They published it in Nature in the summer of nineteen seventy four and hardly anyone noticed. A few reporters got in touch from local newspapers That was nice, but This wasn't really a local story An executive from DuPont phoned Sherwood Rolland I read your paper Thanks for getting in touch It is appalling. Throughout your paper you talk about Freon Don't you know that Freons's a Dupont's registered brand name? You need to refer to CFCs generically, not Freons specifically. I have to tell you, we take this very seriously Oh, Okay Roland and Melina were dispirited They' discovered the end of the world Nobody cared. They looked for another opportunity to get attention The annual meeting of the American Chemical Society was coming up The very same event that Thomas Mitchey had wowed forty four years earlier filling his lungs with di chloroi fllurometethane and softly extinguishing a candle Roland and Melina submitted their paper to the annual meeting Lots of papers get submitted, so it's the job of the American Chemical Society's news manager to decide which papers to publicize Ser name Dorothy Smith She decided to go big much to the displeasure. Dupont Hello I've just seen your press release. You're making a big thing of this paper on CFCs and Ozone Yes, it seems important We think it's an insignificant story. A lot of people are interested Dorothy Smith stood her ground Roland and Melina on stage at a press conference And finally their work started to gain some traction Environmental activists called for a ban on CFCs a few politicians took up the cause, industry fought back The scientific theory seemed sound, but that's all it was theory No ozone depletion has ever been detected despite the most sophisticated analysis All ozone depletion figures to date are computer projections based on a series of uncertain assumptions the initial burst of attention slowly began to fade Roland and Melina kept speaking out but fewer and fewer people were bothering to listen Progress towards banning CFCs ground to a halt It was clear that only one thing might reboot the interest of the world's governments. Hard evidence Damage to the ozone layer decades for CFCs to drift up to the stratosphere. The first ones to be manufactured just be making it there evidence come in time to avert disaster. pick up the story of CFCs and the ozone layer. But I promised you three inventions by Thomas Midley. As we'll see Those three inventions have a theme theme Unanticipated consequences I mentioned that Thomas Midgeley died young How did he die exactly Boss Kettering's eulogy tiptoed around that delicate question In the early fall of nineteen forty, Midley was struck by an acute attack of poliomyelitis deprived him of the use of his legs and made him a semi invalid Mitchellie died unexpectedly on november second, nineteen forty four, at the age of fifty five. confined to his bed by Pio. Midgeley had applied his inventive mind to devising a series of pulleys and ropes by which he could move himself around He died unexpectedly when a rope in this device wrapped around his neck and strangled him So One of Midler's inventions had ended up killing him And another was going to destroy the ozone layer and fry the planet It's fair to say that unanticipated consequences is the right description for both these inventions The phrase unanticipated consequences was coined a few years before Midler's death In a much cited article by the great American sociologist Robert K. Merton That article was called unanticipated consequences of purposive social action. Throughout history, Merton argued Philosophers have grappled with the idea of unanticipated consequences using various different words to describe it. But nobody had thought systematically about how unanticipated consequences come about Merton set himself the task of categorizing all the possible ways in which our actions might backfire Simple error is one way we might get unanticipated consequences We think we know what will happen But we're wrong Another is what Merton called the imperious immediacy of interest Roughly speaking We're so keen to solve some pressing problem that we don't much care what else might happen down the line And then there's ignorance when we don't have the knowledge that would be necessary to anticipate what might happen In some cases That might be because we haven't put in the time and energy that would be necessary to get that knowledge. Or maybe the situation is so novel, we can't imagine what we might need to know That's a good description of what happened with CFCs Midgeley had tried to get some knowledge about potential risks by making animals breathe in dichlorodiflurometethane. But the interaction with Ozone came completely out of the blue phrase of Robert K. Merton unanticipated consequences As a twist to find out what it is We need to turn to the third of Thomas Midley's disastrous brainwaves Arguably the worst of all It came again. Fateful question What do you want me to do next, boss This time problem Charles Kattering wanted Midgeley to solve was Engine knock When you rev your car, and it sounds like you're firing a machine gun It's not a common sound nowadays, but it blighted the lives of early motorists General Motors wanted to invent a product that would stop it Nobody even understood why it happened Thomas Midgeley worked it out. In an internal combustion engine, a piston in a cylinder compresses a mixture of air and fuel until a spark plug ignites it Engine knock happens when the mixture explodes before the piston has compressed it fully It's not just an unpleasant noise, it can damage the engine Where would you even start to look for a solution? Ketooing and Midley talked it over We thought that maybe if the fuel were colored red, it would absorb more radiant heat and evaporate more completely preventing the rough combustion. This theory came to us then because we both happen to know that the leaves of the trailing arrbdhas are red on the back and that they grow and bloom under the snow Midgeley went to a chemists shop and brought iodine the iodine in some fuel which turned it red. And he ran the engine No knock Mitchley and Kettering were astonished, but was it really the color red that was stopping the knock Midley tried other ways of dying fuel with no success Apparently it wasn't the red color. But something else about the iodine The leaves of the trailing ar Buttus had been A red herring Midgeley then tried ethyl iodide which has iodine But no color It stopped the knock just as well Unfortunately, it also corroded the engine Undeterred, Midley pulled the periodic table from his pocket and began to work his way through it Many anti NC agents were discovered along the way. compomounds of iodine, of nitrogen of phosphorus, of arsenate of anntimony seelenium of Telirium Everyone had some limitation or shortcoming which prevented it from being used in a practical way Eventually Thomas Midgeley's perseverance paid off He discovered something that he could add to gasoline would stop, engine knock out. damaging the engine Ehile lead. Thomas Midgeley had invented leaded gasoline Because of Midlit's invention I'm about five IQ points stupider than I would otherwise have been And so are you if you're around my age or older, because you too will have spent your childhood inhaling fumes of leaded gasoline from car exhausts Air pollution messed up brain development for whole generations of kids And it caused cancers and heart disease and strokes. It's estimated that leaded gasoline Hastened tens of millions of deaths Leaded gasoline completes an astonishing trifector. Thomas Midgeley invented a rope and pulley device that killed him an additive for fuel that killed lots of other people and a refrigerant It was on cause to wipe out life on Earth altogether. How unlucky. One man be Luck Isn't the whole story If you've ever marketed a product or business, you know how much attention it takes to break through But our nation's two hundred fiftieth is a rare moment that cuts through the noise. And with seventy seven percent of Americans saying it's an appropriate time to celebrate, your business has a green light to show up for our nation's big birthday party Don't miss your chance to do it with IAart and reach local listeners when they're ready to take action. Call eight four four eight four four IHard today to get started That's eight four four, eight four four, IHart. When you own your own business, you own every decision. Now own the card that rewards you for it Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business Card brings the best Sapphire Reserve benefits to business owners who expect hard working rewards. Designed to meet the needs of business owners at scale, this pay andful card elevates your travel experience and offers premium benefits and value toward business services that will take your business to the next level Fuel your business and maximize rewards with eight X points on all purchases through chase travel, three X points on social media and search engine advertising, annual partnership credits, and more every journey more rewarding with a three hundred dollars annual travel credit and access to a network of airport lounges, whether you're looking for pre flight productivity or time to rest and recharge J Sapphire Reserve for businessiness. It's the card that gives back all you put in Learn more at chase d. com forward slash reserve business. Chase for business. Make more of what's yours accounts subject to credit approval, restrictions and limitations apply Cards are issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, NA, member FDIC It's Jacob Goldstein from Business History. In our new series, American Genius, we tell the stories of three great writers who changed the way business works in America. Our first episode is about Benjamin Franklin Among many other things, was a best selling business writer takeake a listen He's writing this much later in his life. consonsciously creating this image of himself I do want to emphasize how unusual this model is at the time, this self made man myth. because you don't want to be self made. It's low class to be self made. You know, this idea that we have today is the opposite, right? And it comes from Franklin. todayoday. there is the derisive term neepo baiting. Well, exactly right. And these days, if you are a billionaire, you had better have a Benjamin Franklin story about starting in a garage, coming up with the idea from nothing. And here is Benjamin Franklin inventing it right before our eyes This has been brought to you by Odoo To listen to more of our American Genius series, listen to business history New episodes release every Wednesday on the IiHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast In early nineteen eighties, the radiochemist Sherwward Rolland and his colleague Mario Melina on talking about the danger of CFCs to the ozone layer Nobody wanted to listen Rowand became more and more exasperated. What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if In the end All we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true predictions, however were all too easy for the industry to dismiss Remember the line from Duont All ozone depletion figures to date computer projections based on a series of uncertain assumptions. Only actual evidence of damage to the ozone layer would get CFCs back on the agenda The evidence would be hard to come by The first CFCs to be produced decades earlier would only just have reached the stratosphere If they were starting to reduce the levels of ozone be hard to see for a couple of reasons First, ozone levels fluctuate naturally Second There are different ways to measure ozone ground from satellites, from special instruments tied to helium balloons, which were most accurate No one was entirely sure Pantalizing hints of evidence began to emerge Some Japanese researchers sent balloons to the stratosphere Ozone readings came back Worryingly low You really needed a long term series of data points to establish there was a trend The Japanese team didn't have that Someone else did For twenty five years, an obscure organization called the British Antarctic Survey had been toiling away on a shoestring budget seending researchers to a remote outpost in Antarctica too measure all sorts of things They weren't looking for anything in particular just like to collect data. in case it ever happened to show anything interesting For twenty five years. never had Now in the early nineteen eighties D. Ozone measurements were all over the place. The researchers suspected that their instruments had gone haywire They send new ones to Antarctica data came back the same But first, It seemed random But when the researchers looked more closely, they realized there was a pattern to the unusually low readings pattern related to the seasons. Pattern. that reactions with chlorine could plausibly explain NASA's satellites had also picked up some surprisingly low readings over the Antarctic Sol lo, the computers had initially thrown them out as obvious anomalies Now it was clear that something was happening. There was still room to doubt why Really a chemical reaction caused by chloropfluorocarbons? or was it solar activities or wind There was only one way to be sure NASA rushed to put together a team of scientists and flew them to Antarctica In charge of the mission was thirty year old Dror Susan Solomon. atmospheric chemist Solomon had never been to Antarctica before. and she didn't have the right equipment. Her team had brought instruments to analyze light from the moon But they hadn't had time to build a tracking device to focus the Mon's rays instead. someone had to sit on the laboratory roof at night holding a mirror at just the right angle That the first time Solomon took the roof shift. She squinted to direct the mirror's reflection found that her eye Frozen shot The results of the experiments pointed only in one direction October twentieth, nineteen eighty six Journalists gathered in Washington, DC to hear Solomon relay her team's preliminary findings over a crackily satellite link from Antarctica Soloman was right More experiments confirmed it. The world's leaders acted with commendable speed In nineteen eighty seven They agreed the Montreal protocol Phase out CFCs Sherwood Rowland and Mario Melina shared a Nobel prize End of the world was averted By now, the impacts of leaded gasoline on human health were equally plain to see Governments around the world were banning that too albeit more slowly. As for Thomas Midgeley with hindsight Boss Kettering's eulogy sounds a little different Mitchley contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living. So he did. saafe refrigerators, aerosoles smmoothly running gas engines Pleasant and efficient just Dadly too Seventy years after Ketering's eulogy, the new scientist looked back on Midly's life meemorably describing him as a one man environmental disaster Far from the epitome of industrial progress He starts to look more like a by word for that phrase coined by the great sociologist, Robert K. Murton. Unanticipated consequences And yet, unanticipated consequences isn't a phrase you hear much anymore It's given way to unintended consequences Merton himself switched from using one phrase to the other They might sound like synonyms, but they're not professor of political science named Frank Dzart points out that this shift in language obscures a whole category of impacts. ones that you don't intend but you might nonetheless anticipate. Think of a doctor prescribing a drug that often has side effects She doesn't want you to suffer the side effects, but she does foresee the possibility, or at least