The Most Disastrous Human of All Time | Doomsday Mailbag 7

Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most Dangerous mail Bag minisowed number seven. Hello, dear listeners. Together, we've seen an awful lot of ship across time and space, and it's only natural that you would have questions. So here is your chance to have them answered, maybe learn something a little gross, maybe a little interesting. This is my chance to publicly answer some of the friendly, odd and occasionally gross questions that feed in through our various social media channels. On today's episode, we're going to meet the single most volatile organism in Earth's history. Will find out how this one unique individual's creations made people stupider, like literally stupider all around the world, and it nearly sterilized all life off the planet? Was this? I am ad scientist? Who knows? You? Tell me? After this one of a kind, absolutely unforgettable mail bag Unlike any other, we do get an awful lot of questions on this show, and more than I could ever really spend an entire miniso talking about. But screw that, Brandon from Calgary. Rules are made to be broken, and so today we answer the question who is or was the most disastrous person in history? While I could be in a lot of things. It could be subjective. Everyone knows at least one person that they would label as a disaster behind their back. I asked my youngest who he thought the most disastrous human being was, and he immediately came back with a two way tie between Hitler and that guy who rubbed lemon juice all over his face because he believed it would make him invisible to security cameras for a while. When you google New Year's Eve disasters, it would give you clips of Mariah Carey in Times Square. There are plenty of candidates throughout history that could be said to be the most challenged or unlucky of us wouldn't even know really where to begin with that. I think jinxt is another good criteria. You know, people who've experienced multiple disastrous ordeals like Tutsumo Yamaguchi. This guy lived in Japan and he survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, only to evacuate to Nagasaki just in time for it to happen all over again. But I don't think it's simply enough to be exceedingly lucky or unlucky to hold the title. For my money, I'm looking for someone who contributed to the history of disaster and more of a hands on kind of way. Take your Robert Oppenheimer, for example, he a pioneered the atomic bomb, but once he witnessed its power, he immediately regretted his participation and famously referred to a piece of Hindu scripture referring to himself, saying, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, and that's a lot. But I think we can actually do better than that. I'm looking for someone with little or no self reflection. I'm looking for someone who would create something so unwieldy and not stand in judgment of it, but rather look at it and say, Okay, what's next. And I have just the man. Just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sits a small town called Beaver Falls, And in the year eighteen eighty nine, on the eighteenth of May, Hattie and Thomas Midgley spawned a monster, failed its dark arrival, and named him Thomas Thomas Midgeley Junior. He wasn't born a mad scientist per se, but he did come from a long line of inventors. His father before him redesigned the car tire to make them safer, and his grandfather before him reinvented the saw and improved all sorts of other various tools, and Thomas Junior would follow in their footsteps. He would develop over a hundred patents of his own, and after graduating from Cornell, he moved to Dayton, Ohio, which back in the yearly nineteen twenties was kind of the silicon value of its day. And where did he land career wise? While working for a little company called the General Motors Corporation. Back in the day, cars were up a little different. If you remember our Old Knickerbocker episode, Yeah, kind of silly. I mean, engine still worked off internal combustion. You know, gas ignights and throws a piston to drive a shaft and locomotive vehicle. The thing was, it was really awful to listen to old timey combustion engines created wear vibrations and pinging or knocking sounds that were not designed to be ignored. Modern engines burned gas cleanly and they created a nice smooth ride, but back then they sounded and felt more like riding a washing machine full of rocks. If your car did that today, you'd probably looking at thousands of dollars and repairs. But back then it was just the extremely common cost of faster than host technology, so young Thomas was given the task of finding a solution. He started simple. He knew right away that the issue had to be in quality of the fuel combusting. You ever hear of the periodic table, It's something to use in chemistry. It's kind of like a player's journal of all the known chemical elements, and the best way to learn the thing is just to keep a copy in your pocket, which Mitchley was famously known for doing. So he worked through his periodic table looking for elements to turn into fuel additives that would reduce or eliminate the noise in the roughness, and the results were a mixed bag until one day he finally hit on a solution. Lead tetra ethyl lead to be exact. It caused gasoline to burn more evenly, and it proved to be a breakthrough that would propel the entire future of the global automotive industry. Not bad. The only hitch was that Lad had a habit of building up his deposits inside the engine. So he hit the chart again, and after a while he figured out that by adding ethylene bromide to the mix, all traces of lead in the engine were purely combusted and blown out with the exhaust. The thing was, of course, and this was no big secret, but lead was poisonous no one those who discovered it, and people have been using it for over six thousand years. I mean, it melts easy, it's easy to work with, it doesn't really corrode, and it's pretty durable stuff. Of course, the other side of that coin is that people plus lead can equal brain damage. So the good people at General Motors worked around the clock to solve the public's concern. This is the part of the movie where we see a montage of lab workers setting to work, all hard, diligently, with the clock spinning in the background and all set to nineteen twenties jazz music. But in the end, what they actually did was just take a perfectly ordinary number two lead pencil, took the words tetra ethel lead and shortened it to ethel robin solved. Well, not so much for the plan workers who punched the clock that one final time exposure to lad had caused them to suffer from brain damage and nervous system damage, leading to hallucinations followed by a visit to the hospital or the great hereafter. What they needed was a P. T. Barnum style pr coup to counteract negative press, and in nineteen twenty four, GM held a press conference where TMJ himself took to the stage and went all out before the eyes of the world to prove that his creation was safe. He began his demonstration by pouring tetra ethyl lead all over his hands and finished by puffing directly from the bottle. The press kind of lazily took it at face value, and by now the public was more worried about engine knock than their oughts of convulsing into a coma. So before you know it, leaded gas was adopted across America and then around the planet. It was a massive breakthrough for a fledgling industry, and it made Midgley's career, which he all but immediately was forced to step down from for medical reasons. I mean, after all, he did poison himself quite badly during the press junket. All the headaches, confusion and memory loss, joint and muscle and abdominable pain was driving him crazy. So he headed to Florida to get some fresh air and a little sun and I just wait to see if he was going to meet his maker. It wouldn't be until the nineteen sixties and seventies that scientists began to record just how much environmental lead had concentrated around the world. Lead has always been a problem going way back. You could find it in water pipes, paint, food can spices, cosmetics, you name it. Midgley just found a way to arisolize it and then fog it out of the back of every vehicle in the world like a ground level chemtrails designed to create a global layer of toxic but invisible stupefication gas. They also started to study just how bad it was for the development of young children, including but not limited to the aforementioned brain damage. The more concentrated lad appeared in the blood, the more the brain suffered for it, and one study found that decades of exposure to car exhaust had shaved a whopping eight hundred and twenty four million IQ points off the American public alone. There's absolutely no way to know how much damage the addition of lead to gas did to billions and billions around the world. World and all this changed history in ways we'll just never know, although I do strongly suspect it's why we don't have our flying cars and jet packs by now. All that brain damage probably also explains why they didn't begin phasing it out until the nineteen eighties, and you could still find the stuff as late as the year two thousand. So what happened to Midgley? Did they desecrate his corpse and catapulted into the sun. Well, I'm afraid not. Thomas Midgeley Junior survived his poisoning. Death wouldn't take him and the gators wouldn't need him, So he got back to work. Must arose to his feet like some kind of brain damaged nosferatu, and they welcomed him with arms wide open. After all, federal alive, he was a bit of a hero, and upon his return he was given a new problem to solve, refrigeration. Before mass refrigeration, food was literally kept in holes in the ground or a seller. It's spoiled and it became diseased pretty quickly and easily, and early mechanical or chemical refrigeration came with risks of poisoning or explosions, which was not exactly the look that they were going for with home models. So if they could just find a way to safely refrigerate food and medicine. This would revolutionize the health and welfare of the world as they knew it. Imagine never having held an ice cube before. So Midgeley pulled out his beloved periodic table of elements and got to work. And when he got down to the FS, he realized that fluorine might have some potential as a refrigerant. But the only problem with fluorine is it's highly toxic. So he fussed with it, adding chlorine and carbon, making it super toxic. I'm just kidding. What he actually did was arguably way worse. What he created were chlorofluorocarbons, we'll call them CFCs. CFCs had great refrigerative properties, including not exploding or really just being outwardly dangerous to human life. It was a huge breakthrough, and they patent it under the name of free On, but it was Thomas Midgeley, so of course he had to explain himself, which he happily did before a meeting of the American Chemical Society in nineteen thirty. He began this demonstration by inhaling freon, holding it in his lungs, then blowing out a candle with it. Brilliant, and he completed his act by saying that ah, while remaining upright and conscious, and just like tetrathe led before it. Freeon went on to become a household name that promised to improve human life to degrees never before seen. Every home and individual appliance around the planet were converted to free on use. Literally more people use free on than deodorant. And on that note, it was around the same time that they also discovered that freon could also be used as a really excellent propellant for aerosol cans of all kinds, and within a few years, free On was squirting from literally billions of aerosols and appliances around the world. Thomas Midgeley Junior was heralded for creating two of the most high profile inventions of the twentieth century, lighted fuel and safe refriger His inventions save lives, they improved world economies, and they made humanity mobile in a way never before believe possible. This would seem to have secured Midgeley's place in history, and that's why there are so many statues in schools named after him. Right well about that in nineteen seventy four, scientists discovered that CFCs have been drifting into the upper atmosphere and lingering. We'll not lingering so much as actively destroying ozone. Ozone, Yep, we have a protective layer of it which surrounds the planet. Radiations constantly hitting us from space, but ozone filters it and it protects us. DNA barely holds its shape under enough solar radiation, so if it wasn't for ozone, humanity would never have even been born. At first. Of course, the scientists weren't believed until a British Antarctic survey confirmed that the ozone layer was indeed thinning out and degrading over the Antarctic, which created a separate problem. See my background is in marketing communications, which means I know there's always a right and a wrong way to explain things to people. Instead of climate change, they introduced the concept as global warming, which was a huge mistake because it immediately invited argument, well, why is the winter still cold then? And yeah, they did the same thing with the ozone crisis. That kind of made it sound more like an opportunity to better your tan and people were actively spraying aerosols at the sky, but the Sun's raised, don't just tan skin. We could scramble your DNA, like I said, and it can turn that skin into cancer. But who would have time to worry about your human pelt being turned into a kind of cancer as sheet Once crops began to fail and the food chains that we all know and love just went away? Oh who could care about not being able to eat when you couldn't spend more than a few minutes outside of building and lived to tell the tale. And yeah, I know it all sounds extreme, but without those protective layers letting in just the right amount of radiation, life could never have existed on this planet. CFCs were destroying a delicate balance that worked just fine for millions of years without us. World leaders eventually agreed to make change. The nineteen eighty seven Montreal Protocol was created to phase out and replace chemicals that contributed to the depleting ozone layer. And as someone who remembers living through this time, you can believe me when I say there was absolutely no reason to think that the people in charge were ever going to be able to get it together and do the right thing. Maybe it was because of all that led and by this time Thomas Midgley Junior would have been an old man and most likely forced to defend his property from hordes of endless protesters in some kind of carcinogenic battle armor that he invented. I don't know why it have to be carcinogenic. It just kind of feels on brand for the guy, except for the part where none of that happened. Now, I promise you what happened to him was way, way weirder. By the nineteen forties, Thomas Midgley Junior had fallen ill. I know so many reasons to fall ill, but Mitchley was suffering from polio. In case you were born after the fifties and don't know anything about it, It's a contagious virus that attacks the spinal cord and results in paralysis. Polio, as a global pandemic, was effectively cured by Jonas Salk, but sadly vaccinations didn't begin until nineteen fifty five, which was much too late for Midgley. He lost the use of his legs, but he was not one to be deterred. Thomas Midgeley, like we said, had come from a long line of prodigiously inventive minds, and all great inventions start by identifying a problem and then fixing it. So Midgley invented a number of mechanical hoist and pulley systems for making getting in and out of his bread and wheelchair easier. It gave him the ability to continue his work regardless of what became of his body, because his mind had the power and the will to overcome anything. It gave him back a feeling of independence, and on the evening in November first, nineteen forty four, his invention gave him a feeling of strangulation. It was as if Karma had finally said no more. He was found the next morning suspended above his bed, strangled to death by the straps of his own creation. I'm not making that up. Thomas Midgley, Junior Dead A fifty five. Environmental historian J. R. Mc neill explain how Midgley had more of an adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history. He'd been hailed as a brilliant inventor during his lifetime, but was he evil? Well, let's look at the scales. Lad poisoning alone was said to have killed over one hundred million people and caused untold levels a brain damage globally, and if not for the voluntary pullback of Sea of C's, the Earth would have been utterly uninhabitable by twenty fifty. As it stands, were really just hoping it'll recover by about twenty seventy. Oh what about the flip side. I'm sure although solar irradiated lead odol idiots would be happy to note that their involuntary sacrifice did not interfere with the economic benefit, and to this day lead remains everywhere. It's probably easier and quicker to start making a list of things that it's not found in. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that even in twenty fifteen, half of the US adult population had blood levels at or above the safe threshold for exposure. So long story short, lead exposure will remain a birthright of every American with no foreseeable ending in sight. And the sad fact is lead poisoning is and was one hundred percent preventable. In fact, the safety tips are as simple as anything you've ever heard. Check this out. Hey, you live in a world that got soaked in lead for decades and decades and decades without your consent. Here's the thought. Wash your hands and wash your food, and go ahead and look at your pipes weird. You don't know when they were installed. If you're going to be running water for cooking or coffee or whatever, run it cold from your taps instead of hot, as they say that warm water can loosen any lead that might appear in your pipes. And all of that goes double for kids. Plus don't let them chew on painted surfaces and don't let them eat soil. I mean, this doesn't sound like shocking advice, but an environmental lead can be anywhere. In fact, if you're renovating your place, stripping down walls or paint wear am ask. The honest truth is you have no idea how many homes high layers of leaded paint. You do not want to inhale it. And if you have any reason to think that maybe you've ever been exposed at any point, your doctor can run a pretty simple blood test to find out for sure. That's usually the kind of advice they give to pregnant women, but it works for everyone. So Brandon from Calgary, I hope that answered your question. It is true that Thomas Mitchley Junior's inventions saved countless lives. They allowed the storage of food, the safe transportation of medicine, and the ability to move it globally with outgoing deaf or developing spinal issues. And although he didn't live long enough to realize the awful long term consequences of his inventions, after his death he became truly the destroyer of worlds. There was no single inventor who has done more damage to human life and or environment at the same time, which begs a question that no one has ever asked before. How do you redeem a man like that? Save up your urine and rode trip to his gravesite? No, that's not how redemption works. And you know it. I thought long and hard about it, and here's what I came up with. If Thomas Mitchley Junior had not contracted polio and invented his mobility assisted suicide machine, even though it's pretty clear that he should technically be pressing license plates in a prison somewhere, he was born with a brilliant ability to craft solutions, and although they universally backfired, I have to say I would actually want his mind working on these problems. His stands to reason, he'd probably be pretty horrified to learn of his legacy. Unless that was his plan all along. All he wanted to do was help, And unless that was also just a cleverly crafted cover story. I don't know. I just I would have wanted his unique mind to reverse engineer a solution using his bandy periodic table, unless his solution turned us all nocturnal or turned all the drinking water into plasma, in which case find that guy. So that was unbelievable. I remember hearing about this guy years ago and thinking he was either secretly evil or cursed, or maybe he was some kind of demonic puppet or something. I mean, no one is that bad at their job. I also wanted to point out at the end that I defended this man's honor, and that is not something you're going to find elsewhere on the internet, even though I told him to fuck himself at the end. All our older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. If you care to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at patreon dot com, slash funeral Gazoo, or find mea coffee dot com slash doomsday. If you have questions that you would like answered, feel absolutely free to reach out on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook to Doomsday Podcast, or just fire me an email to doomsday pod at gmail dot com. We'll be back before you know it with an all new full length episode. We are traveling to Mexico and it is going to stink so good. There will also be bonus crossover episodes with the tennis podcast Andy Old Crime popping up too. It's good to be back. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.