HEROIC MYTHS
AND TETRA ETHYL LEAD

by Bill Kovarik, Ph.D.

In this essay, written for the NSF-funded Chemcases in February 2001, I have in mind a strong exception to a view of history expressed by Ethyl Corp.'s Lloyd Osgood. In his opinion, an article in The Nation by Jamie Kitman based on new historical research was "a distorted interpretation of known historic events and documents that have long been in the public record."

Distorted? The article never been seriously challenged on the grounds of accuracy, but the word "distorted" is subjective and perhaps arguable.

More to the point, was the Ethyl controversy a "known historic event"? Until the mid-1980s, the events of 1924 were barely known and only mentioned in specialized books about the automotive, oil or chemical industries. Most of these were sponsored by the industries in question.

In addition, the documents that have "long been in the public record" are public relations memos. The original documentation of the development and marketing of Ethyl leaded gasoline has, in fact, long been hidden from the public.

Are all the facts on the table? Very definitely not. The Ethyl Corp. has retained in its archives many thousands of pages of original documentation called by Kettering and Midgley "the Lead Diary" that have never been seen by scholars or the public.

Obviously, a company with aspirations to the slightest credibility cannot hide facts on the one hand and say its own history is a closed book on the other. Nor can it pay historians to create versions of its history based on tertiary documentation and then insist that its version of history is the only proper or true version.

The remedy for this difficult state of affairs is for Ethyl Corp. to open its entire archive to scholars and the public. The chairman of National Geographic Society, who has had a seat on Ethyl's board of directors, might take a hand in this to demonstrate some interest in historical accuracy about an environmental issue.

The larger question is whether history can ever be considered a closed book, whether any body of facts can ever be so well known that new interpretations can be dismissed out of hand for merely contradicting the established view.

Ancient Greek historians approached their work with two very distinct motivations. Around 430 BC, Herodotus, the "father" of history, wrote in order to "honor the heroes" of the Trojan Wars. Thirty years later, Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War. He did not write to honor heroes, but rather was interested in helping future generations learn from the past.

It's useful to recall these two motivations, both of which are common among historians through the ages, as we examine one of the most contentious areas in modern history -- the development of tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) as a gasoline additive.

Between the 1920s and the 1970s, many historians saw the development of TEL as exemplary of high quality scientific research and portrayed it in a strongly romantic and heroic style.

But in the 1990s, the release of new documents shed a harsher light on TEL research. Today, many historians believe that the natural impulse towards heroic myth got in the way of lessons that should have been learned.

An example of the heroic approach is found in a 1978 paper by Thomas Hughes, who called TEL development "a beautiful [example of] deliberately planned research." G.M. engineers Kettering and Midgley "tried out all elements possible in a so-called Edisonian style," Hughes said.

Other historians saw leaded gasoline as the final step in a progression of discovery, a "success story" with only one possible outcome. The public health controversy was dismissed as a wildly lurid and sensational sideshow of no importance.

In recent years, historians working with new documents have asked new questions. For instance:

•Was GM management unaware of the risks of manufacturing and using TEL, as they claimed? Heroic historians (eg Joseph C. Robert) have backed up the claim, but this was before new documentation was available.

•How accurate is the portrayal of the supposedly lurid public dimension of the 1920s environmental controversy?

• Was TEL the product of a systematic, scientific search through all possible alternatives? Were there other choices?

• How accurate was the public health research used by GM to support TEL during the 1930s Ð 1960s?

• How did TEL originally fit into GM's long range plans to continue in business -- even if oil supplies ran out?

Until recently, historians lacked data on which to even raise these questions, much less reach any conclusions. Most government documents were missing or destroyed. GM's publicly available archives were three steps removed from historical validity. They were tertiary -- that is, they mostly consisted of memos about memos. Unlike most other major inventions, none of the original lab notebooks, draft papers or internal reports were available until 1992.

That year, 40 boxes of disorganized files from Midgley's Dayton, Ohio office were given to Kettering University (at that time called the General Motors Institute) of Flynt, Mich. These files did not contain most of the key documents that are still missing today. But they did have enough of the early drafts and confidential memos to give an outline of the research program for the first time.

The Midgley documents (and others) demonstrate that: GM managers were aware of the health risks in the early 1920s; that they hurried production recklessly; that GM research reports were censored when they pointed the way to less toxic alternatives; that GM and Ethyl officials claimed in scientific meetings and government hearings that no alternatives existed; that TEL was profitable but a difficult technical choice among many alternatives; that its use was supported by deceptive public health research in the 1930s-1960s; and that Kettering and Midgley's original special motivation for TEL was to boost engine compression ratios and ease the switch to non-petroleum fuels when oil ran out.

New research also showed that the public health controversy of the 1920s was based on legitimate concerns. Ironically, these concerns were entirely forgotten by the 1980s, and nearly identical arguments were replayed in public, scientific and governmental arenas.

The TEL controversy is a good example of Santayana's famous aphorism: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

These new interpretations of the history of TEL, which were rather at odds with the mythological histories, were submitted in papers for debate to historical and scientific conferences in the 1990s.

Having stood up to challenges, they are beginning to emerge in popular literature, such as the Nation article by Jamie Kitman.

The process of research, discovery, weighing facts and then submitting conclusions for debate is essential in history, science, and other areas of serious scholarship.

Scholars try to approach their material without preconceptions, follow the facts and submit their conclusions to other scholars for refutation or validation.

In this process, myths will be uprooted and heroic reputations will be tarnished. Not everyone will approve. There may be historians who decry "revisionism," implying that history is being altered from some hypothetical original truthfulness. Indeed, sometimes revisionism may seem reprehensible. For example, who does not cringe to hear fanatic claims that the Holocaust of World War II never happened? Yet such claims fall because they ignore facts, not because they attempt to revise a history which we must leave cemented in place.

It is far better for the facts to be challenged from time to time in order to retrace our steps and be as certain of their accuracy as may be possible. In this way, as John Stuart Mill once said, we don't hold our opinions as mere prejudices but rather as fully informed positions.

History, then, is not a static collection of well known facts any more than science is an unchanging description of the physical world.

History represents views of the past that may change, grow and coalesce around facts that may only become available decades after events in question. New facts may diminish the luster of our heroic narratives, and this may make an historian unpopular.

So it goes. As Thucydides said, the job of an historian is not to win the applause of the moment, but to write history "as a possession for all time."