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Report #5084. Found in Folder #286. Author: Douglas Palaschak.
See other related reports in Palaschak's Letter Index.
Contents:
Summary of this report: Brian's and James's symptoms printed in red below are consistent with lead poisoning. 2
Tentative Plan: Prioritized list starts with lead bromide 2
Here is why the lead separates. It is a liquid at 1400 degrees! 2
Did they make a mistake; Remediation methods for fuel spills are bioventing - not thermal oxidation. Hmm. Site after site describes bioventing as the remediation method. Maybe Ulf is a little to eager to get some mileage out of his machine. 2
Time spent on this report #5084. 2
Summary - Burning tetraethyl lead 2
Common symptoms of lead poisoning in adults (Brian, this reads like the combined medical chart
of you and James)
3
Hidden History of Leaded Gasoline Reveals Industry Conspiracy to Conceal Dangers 9
End of report 28
Summary of this report: Brian's and James's symptoms are consistent with lead poisoning.
Tentative Plan: Prioritized list starts with lead bromide
We must find out what gasoline additives were in the "Humble" gasoline that was sold here. And what else was dumped here? We must formulate a list of suspect toxins. So far that list is Lead bromide. It is the paradigm low melting point salt with a melting point of 367 degrees centigrade. It is this low melting point which keeps the lead fluid until it gets out of the engine. Then is solidifies into a white crystalline powder.
Here is why the lead separates. It is a liquid at 1400 degrees!
Boiling point of lead bromide is 916 degrees centigrade which is 1780 degrees farenheit which means that it is liquid coming out of the stack - and a heavy liquid at that - and not a gas - and therefore would fall to the ground much quicker than a gas. Incidentally there are only 2 elements that are liquid at room temperature: mercury and bromine.
Would the tetraethyl lead burn? Sure it would. Tetraethyl lead has a flashpoint around 100 degrees centigrade - near boiling point. Therefore it will be burned if it is ingested into the bad air machine. Query: what happens to old tetraethyl lead in the soi - and why don't our public servants tell us this stuff? Does it evaporate? Sure it does. This is the "natural tenuation" that Dick Roach talked about - - - but lead complicates matters because it makes the molecule mass 323.45 (compared to 32 for oxygen gas) - and therefore heavy and not able to easily do the "flight" of evaporation. Can it be pushed along with the air stream? It is a liquid. Hmm.
Did they make a mistake; Remediation methods for fuel spills are bioventing - not thermal oxidation. Hmm.
Site after site describes bioventing as the remediation method. Maybe Ulf is a little to eager to get some mileage out of his machine.
Time spent on this report #5084.
Tuesday, August 14, 2001. 4:09 PM. I have spent 2 hours on this research so far today. 7:30 pm I have spent 5.5 hours on this research today.
Summary - Burning tetraethyl lead
Tetraethyl lead burns in the bad air machine - just like in cars. The products of this combusion are called "organic leads" if they contain a carbon molecule. Lead Bromide is one such product. Lead oxide is the other - and it is red and used as a pigment in paint.
However, ethylene dibromide is another typical additive, often used in combination with tetra ethyl lead which burns to form products which combine with lead oxide to form lead bromide. Lead bromide is
toxic and volatile, and is one of the more troublesome of the compounds produced from the burning of leaded gasoline. ( Hmm, what do you mean "volatile, fer crise sake? It has a boiling point of 916 degrees centigrade - pretty high to be called volatile. - Douglas)
From: http://208.154.71.60/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,73721+1+71851,00.html
| tetraethyl lead
organometallic compound that is the chief antiknock agent for automotive fuels. Manufactured by the action of ethyl chloride on a powdered alloy of lead and sodium, the compound is a dense, colourless liquid that is quite volatile, boiling at about 200º C (400º F). As an antidetonant (i.e., antiknock agent), tetraethyl lead is added to gasoline in quantities not exceeding 3 cubic cm (0.2 cubic inch) per gallon; a small quantity of ethylene dibromide and sometimes ethylene dichloride is added to prevent accumulation of lead deposits in the engine. Tetraethyl lead can cause acute or chronic lead poisoning if inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Its use declined markedly during the 1970s because the products of its combustion are toxic and detrimental to catalytic devices that were introduced to nullify other objectionable components of the exhaust gases of engines. |
||||
From: http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/leadtet/leadh.htm
There are two problems. First, the lead that's released from car exhausts is dispersed into the
environment, and has been linked to a number of health problems. In particular, studies indicated
that children living near motorways seemed to have lower IQs than those living in areas with less
lead pollution, suggesting that the lead was somehow linked to a lowering of brain function and
intelligence in children.
The second problem is that car exhausts contain environmentally unfriendly gases, such as CO
and nitrogen oxides. A catalytic converter can help to remove these gases, but it cannot be used
on leaded petrol since the lead 'poisons' the catalyst.
Are there any alternatives to lead tetraethyl ?
Yes, there's another additive called MTBE, which stands for methyl tertiary-butyl ether, and it is designed to reduce carbon monoxide and ozone emissions as well as to boost Octane ratings.
So why is MTBE a problem in the USA?
Leaking petrol storage tanks and spillage have caused MTBE to get into groundwaters in the USA. Although it is not very toxic, it is not very biodegradable either, and has a strong taste and smell, noticeable at the 15 parts per million level. There is now a strong movement to ban it from petrol, in California in particular.
What will they use instead?
Probably another oxygen-containing compound such as ethanol. This is not so toxic, though it will probably increase the cost of the gasoline.
Is MTBE used in the UK?
No, instead of MTBE we have toxic compounds like benzene (left) and toluene (right), with Octane ratings of around 106, added to our petrol !
From:
http://wellness.ucdavis.edu/safety_info/poison_prevention/poison_book/lead_poisoning.html
A common source of lead is breathing leaded gasoline smoke - such as the bad air machine produces.
Common symptoms of lead poisoning in adults (Brian, this reads like the combined medical chart of you and James)
Fatigue
Depression
Heart failure
Abdominal pain
Gout
Kidney failure
High blood pressure
Wrist or foot weakness
Reproductive problems
Anemia
Call: 1-800-876-4766 anytime, anyplace in California. California Poison Control System. Pee wee Herman answered the phone and had never heard of tetraethyl lead. He sarcastically said "tetraethy lead?" Now calling back the 3rd time. I talk to a doctor. He says that they are a medical triage unit of 3 people and that they do not provide general information - just medical emergency triage.
http://www.leadpoison.net/general/full-history.html is called
HISTORY OF LEAD POISONING IN THE WORLD
Dr. Herbert L. Needleman (He is the main guy that I find on the web. His photo is up there.)
No toxic substance has been more widely distributed throughout man's environment than the lead additive Tel in gasoline. For over seven decades, millions of autos of all descriptions have successfully dispersed this toxic substance to all corners of the world. How did such a toxic substance ever gain approval to expose hundred's of millions of people?
http://yarchive.net/chem/tetraethyl_lead.html :
From: B.Hamilton@irl.cri.nz (Bruce Hamilton) Subject: Re: Ethyl - product details Date: Aug 08 1997 Newsgroups: sci.geo.petroleum,sci.chem Jim Davidson <davidson@net1.net> wrote:
Bruce Hamilton wrote:
>> >I don't believe that the toxicity of TEL was ever shown.
>> Nonsense, the parts of the FAQ that you carefully omitted *pointed* to
>> references on the subject , and I'll include some others also from the
>> FAQ.
>>However, the toxicity of tetra ethyl lead is not the only relevant
>issue. When tetra ethyl led is burned in an engine, it forms lead
>oxide, which is not especially desirable but is also not especially
>toxic.
No. What is formed is a range of lead compounds and metallic lead
- depending on the combustion conditions. These compounds will
deposit in the combustion chamber, exhaust manifold, and exhaust
system and the engine soon ceases to function. As the FAQ notes,
right up until the 1950s it was common to find balls of metallic
lead rolling around inside the muffler because the scavenger
formulation was not optimum.
>However, ethylene dibromide is another typical additive, often
>used in combination with tetra ethyl lead which burns to form products
>which combine with lead oxide to form lead bromide. Lead bromide is
>toxic and volatile, and is one of the more troublesome of the compounds
>produced from the burning of leaded gasoline.
Either ethylene dichloride and/or ethylene dibromide can, and are,
used as scavengers usually around equal amounts of each, and it is
only in aviation gasoline where ethylene dibromide is solely specified
( to reduce the corrosion of aluminium ).
[Stuff about catalyst poisoning deleted, all in the FAQ, along which
other toxic emissions such as the organohalogens like dioxin ]
>> Review the early history of the manufacture of TEL in the early 1920s,
>> and a large number of workers were harmed, and some killed, before all
>> the appropriate precautions were taken.
>I find this argument entirely specious. Obviously when the manufacture
>of a new compound is developed, there can be some risk.
Well I'm stunned. I point to several reasonably-accessible
publications and, rather than read them and comment, you
instead " find this argument entirely specious "
Let's just review some of that "specious" history, most of
which filled the American Journal of Public Health during
the 1920s. This was not your typical new industrial chemical...
1910s - Alice Hamilton had shown that lead was an industrial toxin,
and a major hazard to exposed workers.
1921 - 9 December, Midgley discovers the anti-knock properties of TEL.
1922 - W.M.Clark, a chemistry professor wrote to the Assistant Surgeon
General at the Public Health Service warning of "a serious menace
to public health " and expresseed concern about the accumulation
of the toxin near roads " on busy thoroughfares it is highly
probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum".
There were already reports available to him about incidents involving
TEL in laboratories, although the researchers understood the
potential hazards.
1922 The PHS couldn't afford to undertake an investigation into TEL, so
they wrote to Ethyl Corp. asking what research they had undertaken.
Thomas Midgley replied that no experiments had been performed.
1923 - 1st February, First gasoline containing TEL additive marketed.
1923 Ethyl Corp. realised they needed an "independant" assessment, so
they contracted the Bureau of Mines, however they specified that
no interim results should be made public by either party.
1924 July, Graham Edgar ( the inventor of Octane rating scale ) of Ethyl
wrote to the American Medical Association claiming that the BoM
research showed " that there is no danger of acquiring lead poisoning
through even prolonged exposure to exhaust gases of cars using Ethyl
fluid ", even though the preliminary report had not been released.
1924, 26 October Five workers die, thirty others show neurological
symptoms of organic lead poisoning, after an accident at the
Standard Oil Research Labs. Of the 49 workers and researchers in
the TEL plant, over 80% were severely poisoned ( went insane ).
The newspapers started to call TEL the " Looney Gas ".
As public health and labour officials ( Federal and State ) started
to investigate, they demonstrated, and Ethyl admitted " that it was
known that this gas had collected a previous toll of death and
insanity.. ".
1924 New York City, Philadelphia, and other municipalities and states
banned the sale of leaded gasoline.
1924 Midgley takes a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning.
1925 Evidence is discovered that 2 people had previously died of
lead poisoning at GM Research at Dayton, and four more at the
DuPont site at Deeepwater. The New York Times discovered that there
were 300 cases of lead poisoning at Deepwater over the previous two
years.
1925 The BoM report is issued after long, protracted negotiations which
had resulted in Ethyl Corp providing funds on the condition that they
had to approve all released reports. The released report was roundly
criticised by the public and the health officials as the claims of no
potential harm were obviously incorrect.
1925 Midgely blames all the incidents on careless workers. When questioned
by a reporter, he responds by washing his hands in some Ethyl fluid,
and states " I'm taking no chances whatever. Nor would I take any
chances doing that every day ". History doesn't record if he had
another extended vacation.
1925 20 May, the Surgeon General calls a conference of all the leading
participants in the TEL debate. Kettering, Midgley and the industry
supportors were on one side, and the opponents were lead by Alice
Hamilton, the country's foremost expert on lead poisoning, and
Yandell Henderson, of Yale University. After the conference, Ethyl
suspended all manufacture and distribution of TEL until an
"independent' investigation had been performed. Because Ethyl claimed
that TEL was essential for the economic well-being of the nation, the
investigation was only given a few months to examine and report.
1925, December. The report was predictable. they had examined 252 workers,
mostly garage attendents and chauffeurs, of which approx 20% were
controls, and another 20+% from inorganic lead dust industries. They
found no good grounds for prohibiting the use of TEL, but recommended
that more extensive government-funded studies be performed. Ethyl Corp.
quickly publicised the first, and no government-funded studies were
performed, with all susseqyuent studies were performed by scientists
funded by Ethyl Corp.
>However, when
>appropriate precautions were taken, as they were for dozens of years
>during the period from the 1930s to the 1970s when leaded gasoline was
>commonplace, a vast quantity of tetra ethyl lead was produced without
>harm to large numbers of workers.
You are claiming that there were no further alkyl lead fatalities
or poisoning during that period, please provide the reference, as
I've got publications that clearly show otherwise.
Have you ever worked with pure TEL?, I have worked with 100ml
quatities. Let me describe what my employer considered appropriate.
First, a visit to the local occupational health specialist to check
my general state of health and take hair and blood samples for
background lead levels. These were repeated weekly, up until
one month after the last exposure, with a six monthly followup check.
First you strip, shower, and then you put on disposable cotton
undergarments. Next you put on heavy PVC trousers and a heavy
PVC jacket, buttoned and flap sealed at the back. Next follows
gumboots which are sealed inside the PVC trouser legs via ties.
Next is a positive pressure, filtered air supply hood with airline,
or a full BA system if high mobility is required. Then surgical
gloves followed by heavy PVC gauntlets that are sealed into the
sleeves. When you have finished, you pass through a high pressure
shower to thoroughly rinse the outer layers before starting to
change. At the completion of the work all clothing was disposed
of as heavy-metal contaminated.
Many of the above ( selection of healthy workers, daily monitoring,
rubber gloves, gas masks, and not wearing working clothes away from
the plant ) were already in place at the Baywater plant in the early
1920s before the poisoning.
Now, just in case you believe the above is an over-reaction, consider
the recent tragic case where an eminent researcher ( Karen E Wetterhahn )
spilt "one to a few drops" of dimethylmercury. The compound permeated
her latex gloves and was absorbed into her blood and she died. Details
can be found in C&EN 12 May 1997 p7,and C&EN 16 June 1997 p11,12.
Compounds like TEL,TML, and DMM are highly toxic, and the only reason
>Of course, the additives for unleaded gasoline have not been discussed.
>Safety issues involved in the production of these alternative additives
>as well as the pollution hazards of compounds they create when burned in
>an engine have been thoroughly underevaluated.
Well, if you had bothered reading some of the Gasoline FAQ, and
the references cited therein, you would know that the pollution
hazards of the compounds when burnt were extensively investigated
in the Auto/Oil programme, with the notable exception being the
potential for global carbonyl pollution - which is difficult and
expensive.
The problems lie more with the pollution problems due to the
different water solubility of the oxygenates and the inhalation
hazards of the oxygenates in the fuel during refuelling, rather
than combustion properties. The major issue is whether they are
actually effective in reducing pollution.
>A person far more cynical than I would note that the patents on leaded
>gasoline had run out, as well as on the various lead-related gasoline
>additives, by the time the phase out of tetra ethyl lead was in full
>swing.
What patents?. The TEL discovery was made on 9 Dec 1921, marketed on
1 February 1923, and TML was first marketed in 1960 by Standard Oil
Company of California. Give us the patent numbers, as a cynical
person like myself might assume you have no evidence.
>Might it have been an interested chemical company or two that
>wanted their new additives to have a protected and preferred place in
>the market who were the driving force behind the adoption of the
>unleaded gasoline laws?
Come on, the battle to retain lead in the early 1970s is well
documented. Associated Octel and Ethyl were unable to discover
a viable lead-tolerant exhaust catalyst, and there were no obvious
alternative octane enhancers that were viable, hence the octane
rating of the fuel dropped dramatically. For your claim to be
valid, there had to be an alternative available - there wasn't.
Bruce Hamilton
From: B.Hamilton@irl.cri.nz (Bruce Hamilton)
Newsgroups: sci.geo.petroleum,sci.chem
Subject: Re: Ethyl - product details
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 20:08:43 GMT
Jim Davidson <davidson@net1.net> wrote:
>Bruce Hamilton wrote:
>> Jim Davidson wrote:-
>>> When tetra ethyl led is burned in an engine, it forms lead
>>> oxide, which is not especially desirable but is also not
>>> especially toxic.
Note this claim is discussing "tetra ethyl lead ", not formulated
lead additive ( with scavengers ) - such as " Ethyl fluid ".
>> No. What is formed is a range of lead compounds and metallic lead
>> - depending on the combustion conditions. These compounds will
>> deposit in the combustion chamber, exhaust manifold, and exhaust
>> system and the engine soon ceases to function. As the FAQ notes,
>> right up until the 1950s it was common to find balls of metallic
>> lead rolling around inside the muffler because the scavenger
>> formulation was not optimum.
>One of those compounds is lead oxide.
Yes it is, and it is also non-volatile, and thus deposits in the
engine, manifold, and exhaust as above. That's the reason why TEL
was formulated with scavengers when added to gasoline. As far as
I'm aware, the investigation of scavengers immediately followed the
discovery of the anti-knock properties of TEL and by 1928 fuels
contained both ethylene dibromide and ethylene dichloride, thus
there was only a four year period when TEL could have been
marketed without scavengers. Your reference has yet to
be supplied that indicates lead oxide deposits in significant
quantities on the seat from leaded gasolines. One reference I have
states that lead halides deposit on the seat and oxides on the valve.
( " Exhaust Valve Recession with low-lead gasolines " Automotive
Engineering v.95 n.11 p.72-76 (1987).
>"Soon" seems to be an ill-defined term. I know of internal combustion
>engines that have operated for 40 years on leaded gasoline.
Strange, please cite your sources, as there was a maximum period
of four years when tetra ethyl lead ( the subject of your claim )
was used without scavengers. I suspect that you have now changed
your claim to "leaded gasoline" - which includes scavengers, and
thus supports my claim.
>> You are claiming that there were no further alkyl lead fatalities
>> or poisoning during that period, please provide the reference, as
>> I've got publications that clearly show otherwise.
>No, I made no such claim.
>Your documentation clearly shows, as you indicate, that with proper
>precautions, vast quantities of TEL were produced without harm to
>large numbers of workers.
Nowhere does my documentation claim that. TEL wasn't produced
worldwide " from the 1930s to the 1970s ... with proper
precautions " as you claim. There were hundreds of incidents
involving serious exposure of workers to TEL, including eight
fatalities in a single US incident more than thirty years after
the introduction of TEL ( " Tetraethyl Lead Poisoning Incident with
Eight Deaths " Am.Ind.Hyg.Assn.J. v.21 p515-517 (1960)). There were
incidents virtually every year, even though the known toxicity of
TEL had produced increasingly sophisticated production systems that
minimised the numbers of workers potentially exposed, and extensive
worker training was given.
Disproportionate numbers of workers were harmed by TEL - compared
to those handling and manufacturing of most other chemicals that
were also routinely available to the general public. The industry
expended great effort to minimise public concern and government
toxicological research during the period and yet, unlike asbestos,
the evidence of toxicity was comprehensive and compelling.
I finished my history of alkyl lead in 1928, but if you want to
learn about how the industry used several "scientific institutes",
including the " Mellon Institute " and the " Charles F.Kettering
Foundation and Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology " to
monopolise the public health research on TEL and lead hazards, then I
suggest you read " Hegemony through Science: Information Engineering
and Lead Toxicology, 1925-1965 " W.Graebner. Chapter 9 of
Dying for Work: Workers' Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century
America. Indiana University Press ISBN 0-253-31825-4 (1987).
TEL was not, and is not, a typical industrial chemical, and
is highly toxic. The production and distribution cost the lives
and health of many workers. Whilst the USA banned alkyl leads
because of their adverse effect on exhaust catalysts, other
countries ( such as the UK ) severely curtailed their use of alkyl
leads because of the adverse health effects of lead emissions,
especially on children.
TEL was required in the 1920s and 1930s to progress the development
of the internal combustion engine, and to efficiently produce
gasoline, and it served those purposes admirably well. However,
the dark side was the legacy of death and madness that persisted
right up until the 1970s, when public health officials finally
realised that the costs far outweighted the benefits, and that
society would benefit from the removal of alkyl leads.
Bruce Hamilton
The UCI COEH, in conjunction with the UCI Vice Chancellor of Research, Dean of Social Ecology and the Violence Research Foundation recently co-sponsored the international conference, Advances in Heavy Metal Neurotoxicity and Exposure Assessment, on September 18-19, 2000. This conference is the fifth in a series of programs emphasizing the value of interdisciplinary scholarship and collaborative research in personal careers, research institutions and the community as a whole. The meeting detailed advances in the neurotoxicity of lead and manganese (Mn) with implications for public policy for management of neurotoxic sources.
The conference was promoted by the concern that MMT, a Mn-rich compound, is to replace MTBE as a gasoline additive. Preliminary evidence suggests that the prenatal and early neonatal exposures to manganese, a combustion product, may be neurotoxic and linked to increased violence and aggression. The release of ambient manganese into the environment may have neurotoxic consequences, which parallel the release of lead from combustion of tetraethyl lead from the 1920's - 1980's. The last two decades of research on the health effects and consequences of lead exposure have made it abundantly clear that early regulatory control of tetraethyl lead would have averted significant and long-lasting health effects on a global proportion. We are at the same historical moment with the combustion of MMT in gasoline. The conference presented preliminary scientific evidence on the neurotoxic effects of Mn.
The conference was organized to provide an ecological approach to the topic of heavy metal neurotoxicity. It drew an internationally recognized group of speakers from around the country and Canada. Herb Needleman, MD and Professor John Donaldson provided keynote addresses on lead and manganese on the first and second days of the conference, respectively. Speakers covered the gamut from neurobiology, epidemiology, and exposure assessment to public policy. The conference culminated in a public policy forum lead by State Senator Robert Presley. Representatives from the EPA, USGS, and the State of California, as well as the CEO of the Violence Research Foundation provided comments on public policy regarding these heavy metals.
The conference drew an audience of over 80 professional people drawn from UCI, UCLA, State of California Department of Health Services, local public health officials, federal agencies (FDA, EPA, USGS), faculty, students, researchers, residents and the general public. Radio station KFWB provided press coverage during the conference, which will be featured in an upcoming national journal article.
The conference has culminated in the writing of a 5-year Center Grant ($1M/year) proposal, to be co-sponsored by NIEHS and EPA. The organizers expect to offer a competitive proposal based in part from new research activities, hypotheses, and contacts resulting from the conference.
This is the second conference on Advances of Heavy Metal Toxicity held on campus. The original conference was held in 1996-97 and drew an audience of over 150 faculty, students, researchers, government officials, and the general public.
http://members.nbci.com/osseticamb/piombo01.html is a good site.
For Immediate Release: March 4, 2000
Contact: Danielle Veith at 212-209-5426 or Peter Rothberg at 212-209-5425 or Stacia Tipton or Charles Miller of Fenton Communications at 202-822-5200.
Hidden History of Leaded Gasoline Reveals Industry Conspiracy to Conceal Dangers
Lethal Product Still Marketed Throughout World
NEW YORK-The makers of leaded gasoline systematically suppressed information about the severe health hazards of their product for decades, even though they knew from the mid-1920s on that leaded gasoline was a public health menace, according to an investigative article published in the March 20 issue of The Nation, available in bookstores and on newsstands March 7. Moreover, both the auto and oil industries, as well as the makers of lead additive, knew from the early 1900s that safe anti-knock substitutes were cheaply available, but rejected them because they would be unprofitable. For years, according to automotive journalist Jamie Kitman, who researched and wrote the article, these manufacturers wildly exaggerated the benefits of leaded gasoline while downplaying or outright denying its dangers.
Moreover, 14 years after the federal government banned lead from gasoline sold in the US, the American company, Ethyl, and the British company, Octel, are still selling leaded gasoline throughout the developing world and Eastern Europe, despite lead's clearly established dangers, particularly to children.
(Ninety-three percent of all gasoline sold today in Africa contains lead.)
"The story of how millions of tons of lead, a potent neurotoxin, were spewed into the environment and people's blood for 60 years ranks beside tobacco and the exploding gas tank of the Ford Pinto in the annals of corporate crime in America," said Kitman. "And what's truly outrageous, leaded gasoline continues to be sold around the world."
Ironically, Kitman also reveals that leaded gasoline, in addition to being harmful to humans, is also ruinous to car engines, leading to greater engine wear and damage.
Since leaded gasoline was phased out in the US, starting in the 1970s, blood levels of lead have fallen almost 80 percent, even as the makers of lead additive denied that their product was responsible for lead in Americans' blood, and at one point sued to prevent EPA and the CDC from even measuring lead in blood.
To reveal the hidden history of lead in gasoline, Kitman uncovered documents in the archives of corporate giants like General Motors, E.I. duPont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), examined records of the US Public Health Service, and conducted dozens of interviews. The year-and-a-half long process revealed a shocking venture, with complicity of the US government, of putting corporate profits ahead of public safety.
The parallel to the tobacco industry extends into the arena of junk science, with scientists from the lead additive industry denying, even today, that their product is dangerous.
Lead was added to gasoline in the 1920s to reduce engine knock and enable engineers to design cars with higher compression in the cylinders, permitting greater power and efficiency. Other octane boosters that early car designers experimented with included ethyl alcohol, also known as ethanol or grain alcohol.
Because ethanol is plentiful and easy to make, however, it was rejected by corporate titans at General Motors and duPont, who needed an additive they could control and profit from -like tetraethyl lead (TEL), which could be patented. (In 1920 duPont controlled 35.8% of GM stock.) And so, despite its manifest dangers and unsuitability for internal combustion engines, TEL became the standard octane booster in gasoline. Among its foremost promoters were Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering of General Motors, remembered today for having founded the prestigious Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Early on, prominent health and safety experts, including officials at the US Public Health Service, expressed concern about adding TEL to gasoline. One expert called TEL "a creeping and malicious poison," and in 1922 the Surgeon General himself expressed concern in a letter to GM interim president Pierre S. duPont.
A special committee of health and safety experts was formed to investigate the dangers of TEL, and in 1926 the committee found "no good grounds" for banning TEL. Significantly, however, the committee cautioned that if leaded gasoline became widespread, further studies would be warranted. But for the next 40 years, all research of TEL's health effects would be underwritten by GM, Standard Oil, duPont, and trade associations for the lead industry.
Since the 1920s, an estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the US remain in the soil, air, water, and bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, modern man's lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. Children are the first victims of leaded gas. Because of their immaturity, they are susceptible to systemic and neurological injury, including lowered IQs, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, and behavioral problems. In adults, elevated lead levels are related to blood pressure increases, cardiovascular disease, and heart attacks.
Lead expert Dr. Paul Mushak, in a 1988 report to Congress, estimated that 68 million children had toxic exposures to lead from gasoline from 1927 to 1987. A 1985 EPA study estimated that as many as 5,000 Americans were dying annually from lead-related heart disease before the lead phase-out in the U.S.
An irony uncovered by Kitman is that leaded gasoline is ruinous to car engines, leading to more frequent oil changes and tune ups, piston ring wear, damage to exhaust systems, and camshaft and lifter wear. The damaging effects of lead necessitated the introduction of another gasoline additive, ethyline dibromide, which created even more environmental problems. When unleaded fuel was required in the US, EDB's manufacturers found a new use for the chemical, as a pesticide. EPA banned EDB in 1974.
For further information or to interview Jamie Lincoln Kitman, contact Danielle Veith at 212-209-5426 or Peter Rothberg at 212-209-5425, or Stacia Tipton or Charles Miller of Fenton Communications at 202-822-5200. This article will be available at www.thenation.com on March 4 at 12 p.m. EST.
THE ENGINEER
Charles "Boss" Kettering. 1876-1958. Inventor of electric self-starter, later head of General Motors' research division; major GM shareholder. Popular public speaker ("The greatest salesman of science this country has ever known"--Time), with more than 2,000 speeches and numerous articles to his name. Championed leaded gas before public and complaisant government, abandoning superior but less profitable additive--ethanol--he had earlier praised.
HIS TRUSTED AIDE
Thomas Midgley Jr. 1889-1944. Mechanical engineer, self-taught chemist, longtime Kettering "go to" man, "the father of Ethyl gas." Stumbled on tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive in 1921, defended its safety to government. Alerted Kettering to immense profits to be made in leaded gasoline. Other contributions to better living through chemistry: Invented Freon and related family of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in pesticides, plastics and propellants; later banned by EPA.
THE INDUSTRIALISTS
Pierre (1870-1954) and Irénée (1877-1963) du Pont. Scions of 200-year-old family-explosives business; used windfall profits made selling gunpowder during World War I to purchase a controlling interest in General Motors. Pierre installed as GM president; Irénée as head of Du Pont. Their firms productionized TEL and, separately and together with Standard Oil of New Jersey, earned royalties on gasoline sold around the world between 1924 and 1992. Ignored the dangers of TEL production while hundreds died or suffered poisoning at their factories; misled press and public as to nature of hazard posed by lead gasoline. Aided Nazi war effort in pacts with German chemical giant I.G. Farben.
THE MAN OF SCIENCE
Dr. Robert Kehoe. 1893-1992. Toxicologist, chief medical consultant to Ethyl Gasoline Corporation; leading apologist for its leaded gasoline additive. Director, Kettering Laboratory, University of Cincinnati, founded with gift from GM, Du Pont and Ethyl. Came to prominence at 1925 Surgeon General's hearing on tetraethyl lead, claiming unique expertise; for next forty years point man of GM/Standard Oil/Du Pont monopoly on lead research. Central belief, later debunked: All planetary life forms carry heavy natural lead burden. Proponent of practice of perpetually obfuscating scientific data that question safety of lead, setting pattern for other polluting industries and makers of hazardous products opposed to regulation. In 1966 tells Muskie Clean Air subcommittee: "I would simply say that in developing information on this subject [leaded gasoline], I have had a greater responsibility than any other persons in this country."
SOUNDING THE EARLY WARNING ON TEL
Yandell Henderson. 1873-1944. Chairman, Medical Research Board, US Aviation Service WW1, consultant, Bureau of Mines. Supervised hundreds of poison-gas experiments, developed first Army gas mask, which he personally tested in a chamber filled with chlorine gas. Professor of applied physiology, Yale. Approached by Ethyl to study TEL, he insisted on research freedom; offer withdrawn. Most insightful critic of TEL after its introduction. Criticized industry funding of research. Identified nature of lead hazard sixty years before its ban and predicted that "conditions will grow worse so gradually and the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously (for this is the nature of the disease) that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold that can run only on that fuel before the public and the Government awaken to the situation." Refused to buy leaded gasoline and planned trips so as to be able to stop at Amoco stations, which carried unleaded gas.
PIONEERING EARLY STUDIES OF INDUSTRIAL POISONS
Alice Hamilton. 1869-1970. Physician at 24, groundbreaking work in industrial medicine and pathology. Conducted first survey of use and effects of poison in US industry. Hired in 1910 by State of Illinois to study lead trades. Shocking findings resulted in new regulations, minimum safety standards. First woman faculty member at Harvard Medical School in 1919 (never tenured). Angered American Institute of Lead Manufacturers by issuing report, which that institute had funded, showing that lead accumulated in the bones and tissues of those exposed to it and was neither metabolized nor excreted. Early critic of tetraethyl lead use in gasoline. In 1925 told TEL makers, who claimed factories could be made safe: "You may control the conditions within a factory. But how are you going to control the whole country?" Also, "Where there is lead some case of lead poisoning sooner or later develops, even under the strictest supervision."
DATING THE EARTH--AND DISCOVERING LEAD CONTAMINATION
Clair Patterson. 1922-1995. Geochemist, Cal Tech professor. Definitively dated Earth as 4.55 billion years old. Aided by new generation of mass spectrometers and insistence on strict cleanliness so as not to contaminate samples. Scrupulous, incorruptible and methodical; basis for character Sam Beech in Saul Bellow novel The Dean's December. An asteroid and an Antarctic mountain peak named after him. Stumbled on heavy planetary lead contamination while dating Earth; detailed dust route to lead exposure, concluded industrial man has raised his lead burden 100 times and atmospheric lead 2,000 times. Measured lead content in bones of 1,600-year-old Peruvian Indians. His 1965 work "Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man," in Archives of Environmental Health, assailed by industry but cited in 230 articles, blew the lid off forty years of industry-funded lead science. Resisted subsequent industry attempts to buy, fire and isolate him. Hired by NASA to analyze moon rocks. Quote: "It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to cooperate and collaborate with industries in investigating and deciding whether public health is endangered--it is a direct abrogation and violation of the duties and responsibilities of those public health organizations."
EXPOSING LEAD-INDUSTRY 'SCIENCE'
Herbert Needleman. 1927-. Pediatric neurologist, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, University of Pittsburgh. Published 1972 article in Nature proposing that dental-lead levels be used to estimate body lead burden after exposure had ended; harangued by oil industry, Du Pont, Associated Octel and Ethyl. In 1976 became one of the first scientists funded to study effects of lead besides Ethyl's Kehoe. In 1979 published, with Alan Leviton and Bob Reed, a study showing that children with elevated levels of lead in their teeth score lower on tests of IQ, speech and language and on measures of attention. Later, supplied additional key scientific research to EPA as it prepared to eliminate lead from gasoline. Attacked regularly by lead interests. Hunton and Williams, law firm of Ethyl board members, filed an academic dishonesty complaint with the NIH. The University of Pittsburgh did not support him; he came through a grueling public hearing with his reputation intact. Quote: "If my case illuminates anything, it shows that the federal investigative process can be rather easily exploited by commercial interests to cloud the consensus about a toxicant's dangers, can slow the regulatory pace, can damage an investigator's credibility, and can keep him tied up almost to the exclusion of any scientific output for long stretches of time, while defending himself."
J.L.K.
March 20, 2000
SPECIAL REPORT
by JAMIE LINCOLN KITMAN
The next time you pull the family barge in for a fill-up, check it out: The gas pumps read "Unleaded." You might reasonably suppose this is because naturally occurring lead has been thoughtfully removed from the gasoline. But you would be wrong. There is no lead in gasoline unless somebody puts it there. And, a little more than seventy-five years ago, some of America's leading corporations--General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (known nowadays as Exxon)--were that somebody. They got together and put lead, a known poison, into gasoline, for profit.
Lead was outlawed as an automotive gasoline additive in this country in 1986--more than sixty years after its introduction--to enable the use of emissions-reducing catalytic converters in cars (which are contaminated and rendered useless by lead) and to address the myriad health and safety concerns that have shadowed the toxic additive from its first, tentative appearance on US roads in the twenties, through a period of international ubiquity only recently ending. Since the virtual disappearance of leaded gas in the United States (it's still sold for use in propeller airplanes), the mean blood-lead level of the American population has declined more than 75 percent. A 1985 EPA study estimated that as many as 5,000 Americans died annually from lead-related heart disease prior to the country's lead phaseout. According to a 1988 report to Congress on childhood lead poisoning in America by the government's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, one can estimate that the blood-lead levels of up to 2 million children were reduced every year to below toxic levels between 1970 and 1987 as leaded gasoline use was reduced. From that report and elsewhere, one can conservatively estimate that a total of about 68 million young children had toxic exposures to lead from gasoline from 1927 to 1987.
* * *
How did lead get into gasoline in the first place? And why is leaded gas still being sold in the Third World, Eastern Europe and elsewhere? Recently uncovered documents from the archives of the aforementioned industrial behemoths and the US government, a new skein of academic research and a careful reading of that long-ago period's historical record, as well as dozens of interviews conducted by The Nation, tell the true story of leaded gasoline, a sad and sordid commercial venture that would tiptoe its way quietly into the black hole of history if the captains of industry were to have their way. But the story must be recounted now. The leaded gas adventurers have profitably polluted the world on a grand scale and, in the process, have provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other twentieth-century corporate bad actors, for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty.
This is not just a textbook example of unnecessary environmental degradation, however. Nor is this history important solely as a cautionary retort to those who would doubt the need for aggressive regulation of industry, when commercial interests ask us to sanction genetically modified food on the basis of their own scientific assurances, just as the merchants of lead once did. The leaded gasoline story must also be read as a call to action, for the lead menace lives.
Consider:
§ the severe health hazards of leaded gasoline were known to its makers and clearly identified by the US public health community more than seventy-five years ago, but were steadfastly denied by the makers, because they couldn't be immediately quantified;
§ other, safer antiknock additives--used to increase gasoline octane and counter engine "knock"--were known and available to oil companies and the makers of lead antiknocks before the lead additive was discovered, but they were covered up and denied, then fought, suppressed and unfairly maligned for decades to follow;
§ the US government was fully apprised of leaded gasoline's potentially hazardous effects and was aware of available alternatives, yet was complicit in the cover-up and even actively assisted the profiteers in spreading the use of leaded gasoline to foreign countries;
§ the benefits of lead antiknock additives were wildly and knowingly overstated in the beginning, and continue to be. Lead is not only bad for the planet and all its life forms, it is actually bad for cars and always was (Lead Kills Cars, Too - While they were busy glossing over its perilous shortcomings for the public health, tetraethyl lead's boosters almost forgot that their "gift of God" posed some serious problems for cars. Instead of benefitting, engines were getting destroyed by lead deposits. GM researchers had noted this early in TEL's life, but Charles Kettering was anxious to get the new product to market. Problems, he argued, could be worked out with real-life experience to guide them. But necessary changes were slow in coming. In May 1926, three years after leaded fuel went on sale, GM's Alfred Sloan wrote Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, to express concern that valve corrosion with Ethyl gas was so bad after 2,000-3,000 miles that it rendered cars "inoperative." Rather late in the day, one would have thought, he urged further development of the product. Referring to Ethyl's decision to re-enter the market, he wrote, "Now that we are back in again and are considering pushing the sale [of Ethyl] to the utmost, I think we ought to be concerned with this question." So the additive that Standard, GM, Du Pont and the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation defended so vigorously before the Surgeon General and the nation wasn't even any good yet--it junked people's second-largest investment, after their homes. Incredibly, in spite of the near-magical claims being made for TEL, GM's own car divisions were at this very time bitterly resisting engine modifications to take advantage of it. In fact, GM's Buick, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac divisions would not recommend it to their customers until 1927, when they circulated bulletins to their dealers calling on them to withdraw any objections to leaded fuel. This was six years after TEL's invention and a full year and a half after a fractious national debate on TEL at the high-profile Public Health Service conference in Washington. Tellingly, support for TEL was forever lacking in the Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, the automotive engineering community's leading organ. The damaging effects to which Sloan referred necessitated the introduction of chemical "scavengers," which would cause the residue of the spent ethyl fluid to leave the engine along with the car's exhaust gases, thus preventing lead buildup. After a little trial-and-error experimentation proved the destructiveness of chlorine, ethylene dibromide (EDB), a byproduct of bromine invented by Dow Chemical in the twenties, was selected as the scavenger of choice. Proving the old maxim that you only make things worse when you tell a lie, Ethyl's adoption of EDB and its widespread use have created several waves of secondary environmental disaster. In more recent times, EDB combustion has been linked to halogenated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in exhaust, believed to be cancer risks. Also, when EDB is burned in the engine, it creates methyl bromide, which as a component of automobile exhaust the World Meteorological Organization has termed one of "three potentially major sources of atmospheric methyl bromide," which harms the ozone layer. With the eventual demise of the US market for leaded fuel written on the wall, Ethyl had to find a new market for its lead scavenger EDB, and in 1972 it did--as a pesticide. Twelve years later, EDB would be banned by the EPA in this application following a 1974 finding that it was a powerful cancer-causing agent in animals; a 1977 finding of "strong evidence" that it caused cancer in humans; and a 1981 determination that it was "a potent mutagen"--a carcinogen with especially damaging consequences for human reproductive systems, powerful enough that it should be removed immediately from the food chain. This was bad news, as the United States was by now putting 20 million pounds of EDB into its soils annually, and it had begun to show up in cake mixes and cereal. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would also act to restrict EDB exposure, and the EPA would cite its reduction in the atmosphere as an additional benefit of the leaded gasoline phaseout. Today the mechanical benefits of unleaded gasoline are obvious. Ever wonder why your new car goes longer than your old one between spark-plug changes? Or why exhaust systems last longer? Or why oil changes don't need to be as frequent? Try unleaded fuel. In a report delivered to the Society of Automotive Engineers, lead-free fuel was shown to significantly reduce engine rusting, piston-ring wear and sludge and varnish deposits, as well as to reduce camshaft wear. In 1985 an EPA report concluded that reduced lead levels reduced piston-ring and cylinder-bore wear, preventing engine failure and improving fuel economy. Estimated maintenance savings exceeded the maintenance costs associated with recession of exhaust valves, which is caused by the use of unleaded gasoline. Gary Smith, an English Ford engineer working in the area of fuel economy and quality/vehicle/environmental engineering, told The Nation: "The higher the lead content, the more it messes the engine oil up, and we wanted to get longer intervals between engine oil changes, so that's a negative for lead as well.... [The scavengers used in leaded gasoline] or combustion of anything with chlorine or bromine will make hydrochloric and hydrobromic acid, so the actual muffler systems get corroded. They end up on--and affect--the spark plugs. Because we're trying to keep warranty costs down and [lower] costs for customers, we found ourselves going away from lead.");
§ for more than four decades, all scientific research regarding the health implications of leaded gasoline was underwritten and controlled by the original lead cabal--Du Pont, GM and Standard Oil; such research invariably favored the industry's pro-lead views, but was from the outset fatally flawed; independent scientists who would finally catch up with the earlier work's infirmities and debunk them were--and continue to be--threatened and defamed by the lead interests and their hired hands;
§ confronted in recent years with declining sales in their biggest Western markets, owing to lead phaseouts imposed in the United States and, more recently, Europe, the current sellers of lead additives have successfully stepped up efforts to market their wares in the less-developed world, efforts that persist and have resulted in some countries today placing more lead in their gasoline, per gallon, than was typically used in the West, extra lead that serves no purpose other than profit;
§ faced with lead's demise and their inevitable days of reckoning, these firms have used the extraordinary financial returns that lead additive sales afford to hurriedly fund diversification into less risky, more conventional businesses, while taking a page from the tobacco companies' playbook and simultaneously moving to reorganize their corporate structures to shield ownership and management from liability for blanketing the earth with a deadly heavy metal.
* * *
You can choose whether to smoke, but you can't pick the air you breathe, even if it is contaminated by lead particles from automobile exhaust. Seventy-five years ago, well-known industrialists like GM's Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering (remembered today for having founded the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) and the powerful brothers Pierre and Irénée du Pont added to their substantial fortunes and did the planet very dirty by disregarding the common-sense truth that no good can come from burning a long-known poison in internal-combustion engines.
The steady emergence of improved methodology and finer, more sensitive measuring equipment has allowed scientists to prove lead's tragic toll with increasing precision. The audacity of today's lead-additive makers' conduct mounts with each new study weighing in against them. Because lead particles in automobile exhaust travel in wind, rain and snow, which know no national boundaries, lead makers and refiners who peddle leaded gasoline knowingly injure not only the local populations using their product but men, mice and fish tens of thousands of miles distant.
* * *
GM and Standard Oil sold their leaded gasoline subsidiary, the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, to Albemarle Paper in 1962, while Du Pont only cleaned up its act recently, but all hope to leave their leaded gasoline paternity a hushed footnote to their inglorious pasts. The principal maker of lead additive today (the Associated Octel Company of Ellesmere Port, England) and its foremost salesmen (Octel and the Ethyl corporation of Richmond, Virginia) acknowledge what they see as a political reality: Their product will one day be run out of business. But they plan to keep on selling it in the Third World profitably until they can sell it no longer. They continue to deny lead's dangers while overrating its virtues, reprising the central tenets of the lead mythology chartered by GM, Du Pont and Standard lifetimes ago.
These mighty corporations should pay Ethyl and Octel for keeping their old lies alive. They'll need them, in their most up-to-the-minute and media-friendly fashion: Because of the harm caused by leaded gasoline they have been joined to a class-action suit brought in a circuit court in Maryland against the makers of that other product of lead's excruciating toxic reign: lead paint. Along with the makers of lead paint and the lead trade organizations with whom they both once worked in close concert, suppliers and champions of lead gasoline additives--Ethyl, Du Pont and PPG--have been named as defendants in the suit.
Though the number of cases of lead poisoning has been falling nationwide, the lead dust in exhaust spewed by automobiles in the past century will continue to haunt us in this one, coating our roads, buildings and soil, subtly but indefinitely contaminating our homes, belongings and food.
Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears.
For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains--in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man's lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels.
Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that "it is doubtful whether any part of the earth's surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead." While lead from mining, paint, smelting and other sources is still a serious environmental problem, a recent report by the government's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimated that the burning of gasoline has accounted for 90 percent of lead placed in the atmosphere since the 1920s. (The magnitude of this fact is placed in relief when one considers the estimate of the US Public Health Service that the associated health costs from a parallel problem--the remaining lead paint in America's older housing--total in the multibillions.)
Classical acute lead poisoning occurs at high levels of exposure, and its symptoms--blindness, brain damage, kidney disease, convulsions and cancer--often leading, of course, to death, are not hard to identify. The effects of pervasive exposure to lower levels of lead are more easily miscredited; lead poisoning has been called an "aping disease" because its symptoms are so frequently those of other known ailments. Children are the first and worst victims of leaded gas; because of their immaturity, they are most susceptible to systemic and neurological injury, including lowered IQs, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span, hyperactivity, behavioral problems and interference with growth. Because they often go undetected for some time, such maladies are particularly insidious. In adults, elevated blood-lead levels are related to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, particularly strokes, heart attacks and premature deaths. Lead exposure before or during pregnancy is especially serious, harming the mother's own body, affecting fetal development and frequently leading to miscarriage. In the eighties the EPA estimated that the health damages from airborne lead cost American society billions each year. In Venezuela, where the state oil company sold only leaded gasoline until 1999, a recent report found 63 percent of newborn children with blood-lead levels in excess of the so-called safe levels promulgated by the US government.
On December 9, 1921, a young engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr., working in the laboratory of the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, reported to his boss, Charles Kettering, that he'd discovered that tetraethyl lead--a little-known compound of metallic lead and one of the alkyl series, also referred to as lead tetraethyl or TEL--worked to reduce "knock" or "pinging" in internal-combustion engines.
Tetraethyl lead was first discovered by a German chemist in 1854. A technical curiosity, it was not used commercially on account of "its known deadliness." It is highly poisonous, and even casual cumulative contact with it was known to cause hallucinations, difficulty in breathing and, in the worst cases, madness, spasms, palsies, asphyxiation and death. Still unused in 1921, sixty-seven years after its invention, it was not an obvious choice as a gasoline additive.
In the laboratories of Charles Kettering, however, the search for a gasoline additive to cure "knock" had been going on for some years prior to Midgley's rediscovery of TEL. In 1911 Kettering had invented the electric self-starter--a landmark development in automotive history that eliminated dangerous hand-cranking and enabled many Americans (particularly women) to drive for the first time, arguably killing steam and electric cars in the process. This invention would make "Boss" Kettering rich, famous and beloved to a nation falling in love with its wheels. Thanks to the starter, the folksy inventor's new firm, Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, or DELCO, received its first big order, for $10 million, from the upstart General Motors Corporation, founded only three years earlier by William Crapo Durant.
GM's 1912 Cadillac was equipped with DELCO's self-starter and battery ignition. When customers reported that the engine of this luxury automobile had an alarming tendency to knock--a sharp, metallic sound hinting at damage being done inside the engine--critics blamed Kettering's electrical components.
Kettering was convinced, rightly, that knocking was a function of an engine's fuel rather than ignition problems.
When Kettering and his partners sold DELCO to Durant's GM and its new partner--Alfred Sloan's Hyatt Roller Bearings--in 1916, his lab was already engaged in a search for the cure. Following the sale, this work was transferred to his new firm, the Dayton Research Laboratories, where a newly hired assistant, Thomas Midgley, was assigned to study the problem of engine knock.
Stabbing in the dark, Midgley got lucky quickly when he added iodine to the fuel, stopping knock in a test engine and establishing for all time that the malady--premature combustion of the fuel/air mixture--was connected to the explosive qualities of the fuel, what would later be called "octane." Iodine raised octane and cured knock; however, it was corrosive and prohibitively expensive. Inspired by the fundamental breakthrough, Midgley nonetheless carried on with fuel research, testing every substance he could find for antiknock properties, "from melted butter and camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride." Unfortunately, "most of them had no more effect than spitting in the Great Lakes."
Automotive engineers knew by this time that engines that didn't knock would not only operate more smoothly. They could also be designed to run with higher compression in the cylinders, which would allow more efficient operation, resulting in greater fuel economy, greater power or some harmonious combination of the two. The key was finding a fuel with higher octane. Though octane sufficient for use in high-compression engines had been achievable since 1913 through a process called thermal cracking, the process required added expenditures on plant and equipment, which tightfisted oil refiners didn't relish. The nation's fuel supply remained resolutely low grade, a situation that troubled Kettering.
By limiting allowable compression, low-octane fuel meant cars would be burning more gasoline.
Like many visionary engineers, Kettering was enamored of conservation as a first principle. As a businessman, he also shared persistent fears at the time that world oil supplies were running out. Low octane and low compression meant lower gas mileage and more rapid exhaustion of a dwindling fuel supply. Inevitably, demand for new automobiles would fade.
By 1917 Kettering and his staff had trained their octane-boosting sights on ethyl alcohol, also known as grain alcohol (the kind you drink), power alcohol or ethanol. In tests supervised by Kettering and Midgley for the Army Air Corps at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, researchers concluded that alcohols were among the best antiknock fuels but were not ideal for aircraft engines unless used as an additive, in a blend with gasoline.
This undoubtedly led Kettering to concur with an April 13, 1918, Scientific American report: "It is now definitely established that alcohol can be blended with gasoline to produce a suitable motor fuel."
* * *
The story of TEL's rise, then, is very much the story of the oil companies' and lead interests' war against ethanol as an octane-boosting additive that could be mixed with gasoline or, in their worst nightmare, burned straight as a replacement for gasoline. For more than a hundred years, Big Oil has reckoned ethanol to be fundamentally inimical to its interest, and, viewing its interest narrowly, Big Oil might not be wrong. By contrast, GM's subsequent antipathy to alcohol was a profit-motivated attitude adjustment. Alcohol initially held much fascination for the company, for good reason. Ethanol is always plentiful and easy to make, with a long history in America, not just as a fuel additive but as a pure fuel. The first prototype internal-combustion engine in 1826 used alcohol and turpentine. Prior to the Civil War alcohol was the most widely used illuminating fuel in the country.
Indeed, alcohol powered the first engine by the German inventor Nicholas August Otto, father of the four-stroke internal-combustion engines powering our cars today. More important, by the time of Kettering's antiknock inquiry, alcohol was a proven automotive fuel.
As the automobile era picked up speed, scientific journals were filled with references to alcohol.
Tests in 1906 by the Department of Agriculture underscored its power and economy benefits. In 1907 and 1908 the US Geological Survey and the Navy performed 2,000 tests on alcohol and gasoline engines in Norfolk, Virginia, and St. Louis, concluding that higher engine compression could be achieved with alcohol than with gasoline.
They noted a complete absence of smoke and disagreeable odors.
Despite many attempts by Big Oil to stifle its home-grown competitor (one time-honored gambit: lobbying legislators to pass punitive taxation thwarting alcohol's economic viability), power alcohol would number among its adherents several highly regarded inventors and scientists, including Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
Henry Ford built his very first car to run on what he called farm alcohol. As late as 1925, after the advent of TEL, the high priest of American industry would predict in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor that ethanol--"fuel from vegetation"--would be the "fuel of the future." Four years later, early examples of his Model A car would be equipped with a dashboard knob to adjust its carburetor to run on gasoline or alcohol.
* * *
Ethanol made a lot of sense to a practical Ohio farm boy like Kettering. It was renewable, made from surplus crops and crop waste, and nontoxic. It delivered higher octane than gasoline (though it contained less power per gallon), and it burned more cleanly. By 1920, as Kettering was aware, a US Naval Committee had concluded that alcohol-gasoline blends "withstand high compression without producing knock."
Higher compression was, after all, what the GM men were after. In February 1920, shortly after joining General Motors' employ, Thomas Midgley filed a patent application for a blend of alcohol and cracked (olefin) gasoline, as an antiknock fuel. Later that month K.W. Zimmerschied of GM's New York headquarters wrote Kettering, observing that foreign use of alcohol fuel "is getting more serious every day in connection with export cars, and anything we can do toward building our carburetors so they can be easily adapted to alcohol will be appreciated by all." Kettering assured him that adaptation for alcohol fuel "is a thing which is very readily taken care of" by exchanging metal carburetor floats for lacquered cork ones. GM was concerned (albeit temporarily) about an imminent disruption in oil supply, and alcohol-powered cars could keep its factories open. An internal GM report that year stated ominously, "This year will see the maximum production of petroleum that this country will ever know."
In October 1921, less than two months before he hatched leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley drove a high-compression-engined car from Dayton to a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers in Indianapolis, using a gasoline-ethanol blended fuel containing 30 percent alcohol. "Alcohol," he told the assembled engineers, "has tremendous advantages and minor disadvantages." The benefits included "clean burning and freedom from any carbon deposit...[and] tremendously high compression under which alcohol will operate without knocking.... Because of the possible high compression, the available horsepower is much greater with alcohol than with gasoline."
After four years' study, GM researchers had proved it: Ethanol was the additive of choice. Their estimation would be confirmed by others. In the thirties, after leaded gasoline was introduced to the United States but before it dominated in Europe, two successful English brands of gas--Cleveland Discoll and Kool Motor--contained 30 percent and 16 percent alcohol, respectively. As it happened, Cleveland Discoll was part-owned by Ethyl's half-owner, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Kool Motor was owned by the US oil company Cities Service, today Citgo). While their US colleagues were slandering alcohol fuels before Congressional committees in the thirties, Standard Oil's men in England would claim, in advertising pamphlets, that ethanol-laced, lead-free petrol offered "the most perfect motor fuel the world has ever known," providing "extra power, extra economy, and extra efficiency."
For a change, the oil companies spoke the truth. Today, in the postlead era, ethanol is routinely blended into gasoline to raise octane and as an emissions-reducing oxygenate. Race cars often run on pure ethanol.
DaimlerChrysler and Ford earn credits allowing them to sell additional gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles by engineering so-called flex-vehicles that will run on clean-burning E85, an 85 percent ethanol/gasoline blend. GM helped underwrite the 1999 Ethanol Vehicle Challenge, which saw college engineering students easily converting standard GM pickup trucks to run on E85, producing hundreds of bonus horsepower. Ethanol's technical difficulties have been surmounted and its cost--as an octane-boosting additive rather than a pure fuel--is competitive with the industry's preferred octane-boosting oxygenate, MTBE, a petroleum-derived suspected carcinogen with an affinity for groundwater that was recently outlawed in California. With MTBE's fall from grace, many refiners--including Getty, which took out a full-page ad in the New York Times congratulating itself for doing so--returned to ethanol long after it was first developed as a clean-burning octane booster.
In 1919 GM purchased Kettering's Dayton research laboratory. The following year the company installed him as vice president of research of the renamed General Motors Research Corporation.
No longer the shambling, anarchic outfit it had been under the inveterate risk-taker W.C. Durant, GM was now to be run in the militarily precise mold of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company of Wilmington, Delaware. Awash in a sea of gunpowder profits from World War I, the du Pont family had been increasing its stake in GM since 1914.
By 1920 it controlled more than 35 percent of GM shares and moved to pack the board, installing professional management, with the du Pont faction taking control of the corporation's all-powerful finance committee.
Caught short by a margin call in the recession of 1920, Durant, GM's colorful founder, lost his stake and was forced by the du Pont family to walk the plank (he would spend his final days running a bowling alley). One of the clan's craftiest patriarchs, Pierre du Pont, was coaxed from retirement and named GM's interim president; Alfred Sloan, who had demonstrated the coldhearted allegiance to the bottom line the du Ponts revered, became executive vice president preparatory to assuming the top slot. The pressure on all concerned, including Kettering and his research division, was to make money and to make it fast.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, Sloan wrote to Kettering in September of 1920, alerting him to the du Ponts' new math: "Although [the Research Corporation] is not a productive unit and a unit that is supposed to make a profit, nevertheless the more tangible result we get from it the stronger its position will be.... It may be inferred at some future time...that we are spending too much money down there [in Dayton] and being in a position to show what benefits had accrued to the corporation would strengthen our position materially."
That time would come soon enough for Kettering to deliver. An air-cooled engine he'd championed--copper-cooled, he called it--would soon prove a costly disaster for GM. Fortunately for him, immediately after joining GM he had given his trusted assistant Midgley two weeks to find something to ignite the new management's interest in funding continued fuel research. Though it would take somewhat longer than two weeks to fire their masters' enthusiasm, "Midge" succeeded.
The effect of this sudden time constraint was striking. As GM researcher and Kettering biographer T.A. Boyd noted in an unpublished history written in 1943, Midgley's main research in 1919-20 had been to make alcohols out of olefins found in petroleum through reactions with sulfuric acid. (Farm alcohol was one thing, but a patentable process for production of petroleum-derived alcohol--a possible money-maker--was quite another, one of considerably greater interest to the corporation.) "But in view of the verdict setting a time limit on how much further the research for an antiknock compound might continue," Boyd said, "work was resumed at once in making engine tests of whatever further compounds happened to be available on the shelf of the lab...or which could be gotten readily."
As noted earlier, Midgley tested many compounds before isolating tetraethyl lead in December 1921. In the early days, he would attribute the discovery of TEL's antiknock properties to "luck and religion, as well as the application of science." In a 1925 magazine article, he would recall false trails with iodine, aniline, selenium and tellurium before hitting upon lead. Curiously, his article omitted any reference to the alcohol-gasoline blend he'd patented just five years earlier.
Another oddity: The exact number of compounds tested prior to TEL's discovery varies dramatically in different accounts. As Professor William Kovarik of Radford University has observed, confusion reigns in part because the lab's day-to-day test diaries have never been released to the public by the General Motors Institute (GMI) archive. In the words of one archivist there, GM's lead archives have been "sanitized." One 1925 article in the Literary Digest put the number at 2,500 compounds tested, while The Story of Ethyl Gasoline, a 1927 pamphlet released by a company Midgley would help found, states that 33,000 were studied. Another time, he claimed 14,991 elements were examined, while a 1980 Ethyl corporation statement set the number at 144. This question is important because GM's discovery of lead's antiknock properties, which initially caused little internal excitement, would be hailed in popular media and later cited in polytechnical texts as a model of rational, orderly scientific inquiry that sought the single best answer to the knock question. A more realistic view of events is that TEL's re-emergence in the twenties was the result of a crude empirical potshot that was understood to promise a landslide of earnings over time.
Apprised of Midgley's discovery that one part TEL could be used to fortify 1,000 parts of gasoline, Kettering proposed the name "Ethyl" for the new antiknock fluid, a mild irony in light of both men's longtime--and soon to fade--interest in ethyl alcohol. At researcher Boyd's suggestion Ethyl was dyed red. There was as yet, however, no plan to market Ethyl. Indeed, in July 1922, seven months after TEL's discovery, J.W. Morrison of the GM Patent Department would encourage Midgley to "see if the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Co. have opened a valuable line of research. Mr. Clements [the lab manager at GM] stated some time ago that it might be worth our while to carry our investigations further on the problem of utilizing alcohols in motors. I think he mentioned specifically combinations of alcohol and gasoline."
From the corporation's perspective, however, the problems with ethyl alcohol were ultimately insurmountable and rather basic. 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. And ethanol, unlike TEL, couldn't be patented; it offered no profits for GM. Moreover, the oil companies hated it, a powerful disincentive for the fledgling GM, which was loath to jeopardize relations with these mighty power brokers. Surely the du Pont family's growing interest in oil and oil fields, as it branched out from its gunpowder roots into the oil-dependent chemical business, weighed on many GM directors' minds.
In March 1922, Pierre du Pont wrote to his brother Irénée du Pont, Du Pont company chairman, that TEL is "a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately." This statement of early factual knowledge of TEL's supreme deadliness is noteworthy, for it is knowledge that will be denied repeatedly by the principals in coming years as well as in the Ethyl Corporation's authorized history, released almost sixty years later. Underscoring the deep and implicit coziness between GM and Du Pont at this time, Pierre informed Irénée about TEL before GM had even filed its patent application for it.
With the application filed, the groundwork was laid for manufacture of TEL. An October 1922 agreement contracted Du Pont to supply GM. Signing for GM was Pierre du Pont; signing for Du Pont: his brother Irénée. Manufacturing began in 1923 with a small operation in Dayton, Ohio, that made 160 gallons of tetraethyl lead a day and shipped it out in one-liter bottles, each of which would treat 300 gallons of gasoline.
In February 1923 the world's first tankful of leaded gasoline was pumped at Refiners Oil Company, at the corner of Sixth and Main streets, in Dayton, Ohio, from a station owned by Kettering's friend Willard Talbott. But four months earlier, an agitated William Mansfield Clark, a lab director in the US Public Health Service, had written A.M. Stimson, assistant Surgeon General at the PHS, warning that Du Pont was preparing to manufacture TEL at its plant in Deepwater, New Jersey. It constituted a "serious menace to public health" he stated, with reports already emerging from the plant that "several very serious cases of lead poisoning have resulted" in pilot production.
Clark additionally speculated that widespread use of TEL would mean "on busy thoroughfares it is highly probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum." Estimating that each gallon of gasoline burned would emit four grams of lead oxide, he worried that this would build up to dangerous levels along heavily traveled roads and in tunnels.
* * *
Stimson was troubled enough by Clark's letter to request that the PHS's Division of Pharmacology conduct investigations; unfortunately, the division's director responded, such trials would be too time-consuming. He suggested that the PHS rely upon industry to supply the relevant data, a spectacularly poor plan that would amount to government policy for the next forty years.
Perhaps spurred by Clark's missive and Stimson's concern, in December 1922 the US Surgeon General, H.S. Cumming, wrote Pierre du Pont: "Inasmuch as it is understood that when employed in gasoline engines, this substance will add a finely divided and nondiffusible form of lead to exhaust gases, and furthermore, since lead poisoning in human beings is of the cumulative type resulting frequently from the daily intake of minute quantities, it seems pertinent to inquire whether there might not be a decided health hazard associated with the extensive use of lead tetraethyl in engines."
The year 1923 did not begin well, then, for supporters of tetraethyl lead. In January, on account of lead poisoning, Thomas Midgley was forced to decline speaking engagements at three regional panels of the American Chemical Society, which had awarded him a medal for his discovery. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote, "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." He repaired to Miami.
Before leaving town, Midgley penned a reply to Cumming's letter, which had been passed on to him by Pierre du Pont. Although the question "had been given very serious consideration," he wrote, "...no actual experimental data has been taken." Even so, Midgley assured the Surgeon General, GM and Du Pont believed that "the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption." In other words, TEL, the deadly chemical curiosity, was being brought to market without any thought or study as to its public health implications, but rather on the hopeful hunch of a clever mechanical engineer who had just been poisoned by lead.
Around this time, Midgley had also begun to receive letters expressing grave concern over TEL from well-known public health and medical authorities at leading universities, including Robert Wilson of MIT, Reid Hunt of Harvard, Yandell Henderson of Yale (America's foremost expert on poison gases and automotive exhaust) and Dr. Erik Krause of the Institute of Technology, Potsdam, Germany. Krause called TEL "a creeping and malicious poison," and he told Midgley it had killed a member of his dissertation committee. Charles Kettering may have been concerned by this growing chorus of TEL critics, but the early months of 1923 saw his mind preoccupied with another matter. In May of that year, after four costly years of development, Kettering's beloved copper-cooled engine was abandoned as a production program, a high-profile embarrassment within the company and the larger automotive community. "It was then," wrote Kettering's research assistant and biographer, T.A. Boyd, some years later, "that his spirits reached the lowest point in his research career."
The abject failure of the copper-cooled engine led the fiercely proud Kettering to believe his personal capital in the company had been terminally depleted. "Since this thing with the Copper-Cooled Car has come up," he wrote Alfred Sloan (who became GM's president in 1923), "the Laboratory has been practically isolated from Corporation activities." Kettering's shame was so enormous that he tendered his resignation in a letter to Sloan. "I regret very much that this situation has developed. I have been extremely unhappy and know that I have made you and Mr. du Pont equally unhappy.... work here at the Laboratory, I realize, has been almost 100% failure, but not because of the fundamental principles involved. Enough may come out of the Laboratory to have paid for their existence but no one will care to continue in Research activities as the situation now stands."
Sloan declined to let Kettering go. But America's most famous automotive engineer after Henry Ford emerged with a renewed sensitivity to the profit-making needs of his corporation. In this regard, TEL held out an immediate lifeline. Writing Kettering from Florida in March 1923, Midgley related a mad brainstorm whose relevance had now become fully clear to Kettering. "My dear boss," he began, "The way I feel about the Ethyl Gas situation is about as follows: It looks as though we could count on a minimum of 20 percent of the gas sold in the country if we advertise and go after the business--this at three cent gross to us from each gallon sold. I think we ought to go after it as soon as we can without being too hasty."
Midgley barely scratched the surface of the wealth to come. With a legal monopoly based on patents that would provide a royalty on practically every gallon of gasoline sold for the life of its patent, Ethyl promised to make GM shareholders--among whom the du Ponts, Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the largest--very rich.
Profit-free ethanol, indeed. As Kovarik has calculated: "With gasoline sales [in 1923] around six billion gallons per year, 20 percent would come to about 1.2 billion gallons, and three cents gross would represent $36 million. With the cost of production and distribution running less than one cent per gallon of treated gasoline, more than two thirds of the $36 million would be annual gross profit. Of course, within a decade 80 percent of the then 12 billion gallon market used Ethyl, for an annual gross of almost $300 million."
The fears of excessive hastiness expressed in Midgley's letter were evidently allayed. In April 1923, one month after he'd performed his riveting calculations, the General Motors Chemical Company was established to produce TEL, with Charles Kettering as president and Thomas Midgley as vice president (The Boss & Midge Sacked: Although it was not reported at the time and went unmentioned at the Surgeon General's May 1925 hearing, both Kettering and Midgley had been relieved of their positions at Ethyl (president and vice president, respectively) the month before. Kettering remained an Ethyl director and Midgley merely a GM employee. Sloan later testified, "We felt that it was a great mistake to leave the management of the property in the hands of Midgley, who is entirely inexperienced in organization matters.").
Beginning in 1921, GM's executive committee began to articulate the first principles that would come to be known as Sloanism--that is, planned obsolescence and product differentiation through speed, power, style and color; "a car for every purse and purpose," as Sloan was fond of saying.
Between 1922 and the end of the decade, Sloan and his GM associates would devise marketing strategies that would see GM overtake Ford as the world's largest automobile manufacturer and set the tone for the next fifty years of American automotive consumption. Central to this growth would be an awareness that consumers were no longer looking merely for basic transportation, which was the stock in trade of Ford's beloved Model T. In addition to consumer financing (which Ford opposed), Sloan was convinced that style, snob appeal and speed would help GM steal its customers away. He was right.
Following the failure of his copper-cooled engine, Kettering rejigged his arguments for TEL for internal--definitely not public--consumption. As it happened, the new additive could be fitted neatly into the Sloanist equation. For while it was initially seen by Kettering and his staff as a way to cure knock and to husband fossil-fuel supplies, the high compression it enabled in motors was just as easily exploited to make cars faster and more powerful, thus easier to sell. Alan Loeb, a former EPA attorney and lead historian who has examined the period closely, has neatly summed up Kettering's conversion: "By 1923...it was clear that Kettering's original purpose for the antiknock research had given way to GM's desire to improve auto performance without regard for its effect on fuel economy.... Kettering did not give up on efficiency and conservation as his own ideals, but ever after he knew better than to try to push a product that would not sell. In later years, even as Kettering's advocacy of conservation became more and more public, it represented GM's true motive less and less."
Tellingly, Ethyl's earliest advertisements dealt solely with speed and power and invariably neglected to mention its active ingredient: lead. Boasted a September 1927 ad that ran in National Geographic: "As an Ethyl user, you have the benefits of greatly increased speed, more power on hills and heavy roads. Quicker acceleration and complete elimination of 'knock.' But the real high compression automobile is here at last! Ethyl gasoline has made it possible! Ride with Ethyl in a high compression motor and get the thrill of a lifetime."
With the advent of the Depression in the thirties, Ethyl's advertising nodded to the economic realities of the day but still focused on power. An ad that ran in February 1933 contains a Norman Rockwell-esque portrait of a small boy who is complaining to his embarrassed father, "Gee, Pop--they're all passing you." The accompanying text rubs it in. "They didn't pass you when your car was bright and new--and you still don't like to be left behind. So just remember this: the next best thing to a brand new car is your present car with Ethyl."
With the formation of the GM Chemical Company, work on a large-scale Du Pont TEL plant began immediately. Irénée du Pont hailed his company's technical director, W.F. Harrington: "It is essential that we treat this undertaking like a war order so far as making speed and producing the output, not only in order to fulfill the terms of the contract as to time but because every day saved means one day advantage over possible competition."
Significantly, GM's patent on TEL would have covered any threat from competing makers of lead additive. Thus, as Kovarik has reasoned, the competition referred to must have been from those who would have offered a different kind of antiknock. GM, Du Pont and TEL's other backers would long publicly claim there were no conceivable alternatives to the lead antiknock additive. But the facts were otherwise. Ethanol was still out there.
And GM negotiated throughout the twenties with Germany's I.G. Farben over an additive it made from iron carbonyl. Then, in August 1925, Kettering himself joyously announced "Synthol," a blended automotive fuel of benzene and alcohol that promised to "double gas mileage." There was, as we shall see, an unexpected--and momentary--business need for Synthol. The point is, there were alternatives.
In a public relations coup, Ethyl leaded gasoline fueled the top three finishers at the Indianapolis 500 motor race on Memorial Day, 1923. With demand skyrocketing, Kettering signed exclusive contracts with Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), Standard Oil of Indiana (later Amoco, more lately merged with BP) and Gulf Oil (owned by the Mellon interests) for East Coast, Midwest and Southern distribution, respectively, of leaded gasoline.
In August, Du Pont's TEL plant opened at Deepwater, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Wilmington.
Less than thirty days would pass before the first of several TEL poisoning deaths of workers there would occur. Not surprisingly, given Du Pont's stranglehold on all local media within its domain along the Delaware, the deaths went unreported.
Even so, news of these and similar deaths would inevitably come out. Realizing that its own medical research would be less than credible then, and having been turned down by reputable academics and the Public Health Service in its search for consultants to help "refute any false propaganda," GM hurriedly contracted the US Bureau of Mines in September 1923 to explore the dangers of TEL. Even by the lax standards of its day, the bureau was a docile corporate servant, with not an adversarial bone in its body. It saw itself as in the mining promotion business, with much of its scientific work undertaken in collaboration with industry. The bureau's presumptive harmlessness notwithstanding, to its written agreement with GM was nonetheless added a remarkable proviso, that the bureau "refrain from giving out the usual press and progress reports during the course of the work, as [GM] feels that the newspapers are apt to give scare headlines and false impressions before we definitely know what the influence of the material will be."
Indicative of the bureau leadership's fundamental outlook was an exchange between the superintendent of its Pittsburgh field station, where the TEL investigation was being conducted, and the bureau's chief chemist, S.C. Lind. By letter, Lind had objected to them:
"Of course their [GM officials] object in doing so is fairly clear, and among other things they are not particularly desirous of having the name 'lead' appear in this case. That is alright from the standpoint of the General Motors Company but it is quite a question in my mind as to whether the Bureau of Mines would be justified in adopting this name so early in the game."
The superintendent replied that omission of "the use of the word 'lead' in the interbureau correspondence" was intentional to prevent leaks to the papers. "If it should happen to get some publicity accidentally, it would not be so bad if the word 'lead' were omitted as this term is apt to prejudice somewhat against its use."
Indeed, lead had acquired a bad name by 1920, as scientific and public awareness of its supreme deadliness as an occupational and pediatric hazard was increasing. Then, in April 1924, two GM employees engaged in the manufacture of TEL at a pilot plant in Dayton also die