Enplas Lecture Series in Science and Society
Kennesaw State University

March 11, 2001

Automotive inventors, fuel choices and air pollution issues in the early 20^th century

GOOD AFTERNOON. 

ITS AN HONOR TO BE HERE FOR THE ENPLAS SCIENCE AND SOCIETY LECTURE.  

Im also honored to represent the historians point of view in a science and society lecture series. Too often the historical perspective is neglected in the crush of other important things. This is a shame because a culture that loses its sense of history is as helpless as a person with amnesia.  I say sense of history because it is entirely possible to lose a sense of direction without forgetting everything altogether, and I think we are starting to see that more and more as we get a kind of watered down Disney version of science and history on television. 

Carl Sagan said, in his last book the Demon Haunted World:  I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time, when the United States is a service and information economy ... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical facilities in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media ... --    

One antidote to ignorance is history. 

When I teach history at my small university in the Blue Ridge mountains, I usually start the semester with a discussion about two Greek historians who discovered what you might call the two major theoretical approaches to history.   

One was Herodotus, the “father of history,” who used the term “historie” which meant investigation. The reason Herodotus started writing his history of the Trojan war around 430 BC was to honor the heroes. 

The second was Thucydides, who, around 400 BC,  insisted on presenting facts without romance so that we could learn the lessons of history. 

Herodotus approach is frequently the perspective we take in professional education, and for that matter in American history,  and there are some good reasons for it. But Thucydides approach  seems, to me, the more useful, or even, scientific posture.

I would maintain in general that the scientific frame of mind is as important in history  as science. Only by exploring for all available evidence,  only by considering all the possibilities and then accepting conditional theories that can be refuted -- only then can we can begin to understand the lessons of history.  Historians certainly can appreciate the scientific frame of mind. 

Scientists and engineers, however, could benefit from the historical mind set as well.  This mind set is grounded not only in respect for facts and the investigative process but also in an appreciation for what is often called context and perspective. We try to see the past in the context of related facts and trends, not  in isolation. And we try to keep many perspectives in mind,  to understand the past on its own terms. We try to see things the way the people who were engaged in the historical events saw them, even though the initial questions we ask may have been formed on the basis of a present perspective.  

At the close of World War II, as people woke up to the enormous influence of science and engineering on the war effort, there was a groundswell of very vocal support for increased education in science and engineering in England and America.  The English novelist George Orwell, who would later become famous for his book 1984,  wrote an essay in which he said that science education was important but not enough. 

Orwell asked whether is was really true that a scientist is more likely than other people to approach non scientific problems in an objective way.    Take one simple test – the ability to withstand nationalism. When it came to the Nazis, for instance, artists and writers fled in droves and denounced the Nazis for what they were. Scientists – at least the non Jewish scientists – cooperated for the most part. 

Orwell wasn’t saying that scientists in general were evil, and Im sure he was as appreciative as any of us are for the work done by our own radar and weapons experts in the US during World War II.  But he did say something important here. Scientific thinking isn’t enough.  Science education should include problems in context. It should at the very least consider the social issues of science as part of the education. That is why lecture series like these are very important. 

So I believe we need a scientific mind set when we approach history because so much of what we have accepted as the truth is based on incomplete evidence. In the vacuum of the full spectrum of evidence, dangerous myths can emerge.

Well talk about two myths today: 

            1 -- That environmental conflict only began in the 1960s, as part of an hysterical reaction to science and technology, and

            2 --A more specific myth about energy called the whale oil myth. 

This first question I wanted to ask,  as an historian, ran along these lines:

In the light of present day concern about global warming, smog and acid rain,  what do we know about the origins of pollution problems and the attempts to deal with them?  This is a humanistic historical question.  It is animated, and I would maintain properly so, by a concern for our future and the well being of other people. We are not asking who won a battle or why. We are not asking how to understand a natural phenomena or make a machine more efficient, as important as all those things are.   We are asking a larger sort of question.  

So—what do we know about the origin of air pollution problems and the automobile and how can that inform our vision of the future?

My understanding is this:  despite a large amount of raw archival evidence of various kinds and qualities, there is an astonishingly small amount of what we call general environmental history available to the public and a much smaller amount of the history of air pollution and automotive fuels. 

My job today is to share some of it with you, but I very much wanted to put this into perspective before simply laying out an assortment of novel facts and ideas. 

My question about the origins of air pollution falls into the category of environmental history but thats really a kind of catch phrase for three important historical themes: 

            • Public health (history of science)

            • Conservation of natural resources (historical biology and geography)

            • Regulation of technology (history of engineering and technology)

Long before the word “environmentalism” was commonly used, you find all kinds of concerns about public health,  preservation of nature, smoke abatement, municipal housekeeping, occupational disease, air pollution and water pollution. Only the word "environmental" is recent as an umbrella term for these longstanding concerns.

The second question involves a myth about energy.

If you go to most library shelves or search through most archives, you would come away with the impression that the history of the automotive industry and the history of the petroleum industry have almost nothing in common. There is very little context.  And that is primarily because most of this history is done from the inside, by employees or former employees or contractors or retainers of these industries. 

If you are writing a history of the oil industry, for example, youve already decided to exclude non-petroleum fuel.  And if you are writing a history of the automotive industry, you have your hands full with the car itself. Who cares about the fuel?

Well, nobody in the historical professions cared much about the context of fuels use until the late 1970s. That was when the myopia of our energy policy was first becoming apparent to the government. (This myopia has since become apparent many times, with fewer trips to the opticians than we might have all hoped for). 

So in the vacuum of history,  we have myths.  One of the whoppers was what former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger used to call the whale oil myth.  

The whale oil myth goes like this:  Its a good thing that old Edwin Drake discovered oil in 1859 in Pennsylvania because we were just about to run out of whales.  The variation on the myth that infuriated Schlesinger was this:  Don't worry about running out of whales --  the marketplace will always find a way to discover new sources of energy.  Thus, there is no need for a strong national energy policy – just keep the marketplace open and watch Adam Smith's invisible hand at work.  Schleshinger maintained there were many invisibile hands in the marketplace, as well he knew. He had been CIA direct before  Jimmy Carter asked him to head the DOE.  

Schlesinger was right in more ways than one. 

Whale oil lamps tended to be expensive. While they might be OK for a single person’s reading needs, they were too weak and too expensive for anything other than very limited use. In many ways, whale oil was a minor fuel.  

Demand for better lighting came early in the 19^th century with the growth of literacy, industry and urban life. People were reading more, partly because there were more publications and also because of the democratization of political life.  Lighting was needed to extend the work day for industrial operations like mining and factory work. Police wanted better lighting for city streets. And theaters needed safer lighting systems to lower insurance premiums.

Two new kinds of lighting systems emerged. Both of these were significant in the development of the automobile.   

One kind of lighting was gas made from coal pyrolysis, which was introduced in Britain in 1812 and quickly spread throughout Europe and America.  Coal gas systems lit streets, theaters, parks and other public places and, increasingly, private homes.  John Quincy Adams, on a diplomatic mission to England in 1816, said the gas light was “almost too dazzling for my eyes.” 

Coal gas spread very quickly of course, and by the 1870s was used in the first practical internal combustion engines developed by Nicholas Otto and the Otto & Langen Co.  It powered a stationary used by small factories engine – by the way a great improvement over steam – and this success gave the company the engineering and financial conditions that led to the four stroke Otto cycle engine that has been the dominant prime mover for over a century.

The second kind of lighting system that emerged in the early 19^th century was even more influential in the development of the automobile. It was called burning fluid or camphene, and it was often superheated in carbureted spirit lamps to give a very bright light.  It was made with anywhere from 50 to 70 percent alcohol with the rest turpentine and a few drops of camphor oil thrown in to mask the smell. There were all kinds of variations on the fuel, many of them patented.

At about 50 cents per gallon, it was far cheaper than whale oil (which had ranged from 1.30 to $2.50 per gallon) and lard oil (90 cents per gallon). Coal oil and the new but rather smelly fuel from petroleum were also selling in the 50 cents per gallon range.  

Camphene was a logical fuel for two of the first auto inventors. One was Samuel Morey, a Connecticut inventor whose carbureted internal combustion engine powered a wagon and a boat at the very surprising date of 1826.

Another was Nicholas Otto, whose early experiments with the engine were not as successful as they were later.  In fact, Otto’s 1860 patent application for a fuel vaporizing carburetor was denied by the Prussian government because it was based on the well known venturi principle used in spirit lamps across Europe.  

Markets for camphene in 1860, just before the Civil War, were at roughly the level that kerosene reached by 1870.  Within 10 years, the new fuel from Pennsylvania replaced the fuel made by distilleries and tree farmers. Since all you had to do was pull it from the ground and then process it, kerosene could be quite a bit cheaper. But it didn’t help that, in the US, a $2 per gallon tax was placed on all alcohol as part of the internal revenue act. Kerosene was only charged 10 cents per gallon. Thus, the oil industry was born with a  silver spoon – a tax subsidy -- the very thing the oil industry says it does not want to see on the marketplace today.  

Europeans did not tax alcohol. In fact, because the internal combustion engine had become so important, and because the Americans and the Russians were the ones with great oil reserves, Europeans took pains to encourage domestic alcohol fuel production industries.  These lasted from the dawn of the automotive era through World War II.  The French were especially keen on what they called “carburantes naturales “ petrol verte and simply alcool.

Altogether 40 nations (all but the US basically)  had tax subsidies or made blending of alcohol and gasoline mandatory for two reasons – one, it provided an emergency fuel supply in case of national emergency. That was important in countries with no domestic supplies or secure colonies.  And two, it gave farmers a market for surplus crops and created economic activity in the declining farm sector. 

Alcohol had another advantage that auto racing enthusiasts soon discovered – you could raise engine compression ratios fairly high and get more power out of an alcohol engine than you could from an engine fueled only by gasoline. Alcohol had a very high anti-knock quality.

This problem of knocking was very serious for the auto industry in the era around World War I, and it reflected the declining quality of gasoline due to the pending exhaustion of known oil fields, 

What would happen to Detroit when the oil ran out?  That was the perennial question for the auto industry.  In 1906, the Detroit Chamber of Commerce sent representatives to Congress to help get the alcohol tax repealed for industrial uses.  In 1919, with the same concerns looming,  General Motors got very serious about a very interesting man named Charles F. Kettering.  

Now Kettering was an Ohio State grad who was brilliant. He created the NCR servo mechanism that allowed automatic electric cash registers, and he used that to create a clutched electric starter motor for cars. When he sold the starer moter company, DELCO, he created a new company, Dayton Metal Products Co. That company was so successful it became the central core of GM research.

Kettering had strong views about the technical directions the auto industry should take. In an SAE speech 1919, he talked about two routes to anti-knock, high-compression engines of the future, which he vastly preferred to the low-compression, low quality fuel engines that seemed the logical route to go in an oil shortage.

In the short term, two "classes" of solutions to fuel improvement were available, Kettering said: the “high percentage class” and the “low percentage class.”  The former involved adding large amounts of another liquid fuel to gasoline, such as 40 percent benzene, which “makes an engine operate entirely satisfactorily,” Kettering said. Alcohol was another fuel in this class. The “low percentage class” of solution was represented in 1919 by  a single impractical discovery -- one percent iodine solution in gasoline -- which cut engine knock and would  allow higher compression ratios were it not far too expensive and corrosive, Kettering said[i] 

In the long run, if oil were no longer available, Detroit would need something to run automotive engines.  Kettering and most engineers were convinced that if oil were to run out, alcohol would be the fuel of the future. 

The broad ranging competition between gasoline and alcohol fuels in the early and mid 20^th century is not today as well known today as a similar competition between steam and electric automobiles with gasoline powered automobiles.[ii] Nevertheless, hundreds of magazine articles, reports, books and technical papers reflect that fact that alcohol fuel was widely acknowledged as  technically feasible fuel and economically competitive if oil supplies should run short.[iii]  By 1920, the consensus,  Scientific American said, was “a universal assumption that [ethyl] alcohol in some form will be a constituent of the motor fuel of the future.” Alcohol met all possible technical objections, and although it was more expensive than gasoline, it was not prohibitively expensive in blends with gasoline. “Every chemist knows [alcohol and gasoline] will mix, and every engineer knows [they] will drive an internal combustion engine.”[iv]

So its no surprise that the high percentage route continued to be attractive to Kettering even after TEL was invented. 

The experiments were guided by a peg board with a portion of the periodic table of elements pasted on it. The board helped the researchers compare their tests of already known knock suppressors (such as bromine, iodine,  tellurium, tin and selenium) and new fuel additives (such as arsenic and sulfur).  Historians have seen it as a beautiful piece of pure research.

The atmosphere in the labs grew more  expectant as the pegboard seemed to point the way toward the heavy end of the carbon group:  silicon, germanium, tin and lead.  Visiting his father in Massachusetts in late  October, Midgley had antiknock results from each new test sent via telegraph daily.  Tetraethyl tin proved effective, but even more  exciting was the prospect of metallic lead at the bottom of the column on the peg board.

When the chemists finally delivered a small amount of tetraethyl lead on the morning of December  9, 1921, the knock in the one-cylinder laboratory engine was utterly silenced. Even diluted to a strength of two or three grams per gallon, or one thousand to one, tetraethyl lead had a remarkable ability to quiet the relentless knocking. 

Midgley, Boyd and others in the  lab “danced a very unscientific jig” and hurried off to include Kettering in their victory party.  Holding a test tube full of the stuff in his fingers, Kettering suggested, perhaps ironically, the name “ethyl” for the chemical compound tetraethyl lead. Although the term referred to the ethyl alcohol solvent used to dissolve the lead, and utterly confused the question of high percentage versus low percentage solutions, the name Ethyl  stuck.

Midgley and Kettering’s interest in ethyl alcohol fuel did not fade once tetraethyl lead was discovered as an antiknock in December, 1921. In fact, not only was ethyl alcohol a source of continued interest as an antiknock agent, but more significantly, it was still considered to be the fuel that would eventually replace petroleum.  A  May, 1922 memo from Midgley to Kettering was a response to a report on alcohol production from the Mexican  "century" plant, a desert plant that contains fermentable sugars.  Midgley said he was "not impressed" with the  process as a way to make motor fuel:

            Unquestionably alcohol is the fuel of the future and is playing its part in tropical countries situated similar [sic] to Mexico. Alcohol can be produced in those countries for approximately 7 - 1/2 cents per gallon from many other sources than the century plant, and the quantities which are suggested as possibilities in this report are insignificantly small compared to motor fuel requirements. However, as a distillery for beverage purposes, these gentlemen may have a money making proposition.[v]

Even as chemists tinkered with various processes to produce tetraethyl lead in a nearby lab,  Midgley and Boyd continued working on alcohol for fuel.  In a June 1922 Society of Automotive Engineers paper, they said:

            That the addition of benzene and other aromatic hydrocarbons to paraffin base gasoline greatly reduces the tendency of these fuels to detonate [knock] ... has been known for some time. Also, it is well known that alcohol ... improves the combustion characteristics of the fuel ...The scarcity and high cost of gasoline in countries where sugar is produced and the abundance of raw materials for making alcohol there has resulted in a rather extensive use of alcohol for motor fuel.  As the reserves of petroleum in this country become more and more depleted, the use of benzene and particularly of alcohol in commercial motor fuels will probably become greatly extended.” [vi]  (Italics indicate section omitted from printed version).

In September, 1922, Midgley and Boyd wrote that “vegetation offers a source of tremendous quantities of liquid fuel.” Cellulose from vegetation would be the primary resource because not enough agricultural grains and other foods were available for conversion into fuel. “Some means must be provided to bridge the threatened gap between petroleum and the commercial production of large quantities of liquid fuels from other sources. The best way to accomplish this is to increase the efficiency with which the energy of gasoline is used and thereby obtain more automotive miles per gallon of fuel.”[vii]  At the time the paper was written, in late spring or early summer 1922, tetraethyl lead was still a secret within the company, but it was about to be announced to fellow scientists and test marketed. The reference to a means to "bridge the threatened gap" and increase in the efficiency of gasoline clearly implies the use of tetraethyl lead or some other additive to pave the way to new fuel sources. 

This inference is consistent with an important statement in an unpublished 1936 legal history of Ethyl Gasoline for the du Pont corporation:

            It is also of interest to recall that an important special motive for this [tetraethyl lead] research was General Motors’ desire to fortify itself against the exhaustion or prohibitive cost of the gasoline supply, which was then believed to be impending in about twenty-five years; the thought being that the high compression motors which should be that time have been brought into general use if knocking could be overcome could more advantageously be switched to [ethyl] alcohol. [viii]

            Thus, during the time Kettering and Midgley researched anti-knock fuels (1916 to 1925), and especially after tetraethyl lead was discovered in December of 1921, there were two “ethyls” on the horizon for General Motors:  Ethyl leaded gasoline, which would serve as a transitional efficiency booster for gasoline,  and ethyl alcohol, the "fuel of the future" that would keep America’s cars on the roads no matter what happened to domestic or world oil supply. Thus, Kettering's strategy in the post World War I years was to prepare cars for high-octane alternative fuels if needed. 

The fuel of the future envisioned by Kettering and the research team at General Motors was not what other industries had in mind. 

While automakers had always seen the need to keep some distance from the oil industry and chart their own course in case oil supplies ran low, a corporate marriage between GM and Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey in 1924 joined the two industries for nearly 40 years. 

The marriage was a joint venture called the Ethyl Corp. that would sell tetraethlyl lead additives for gasoline.  It would be produced primarily by GM’s other partner, the  DuPont Corp., which had extensive experience handling hazardous chemicals. 

Tetra ethyl lead was indeed hazardous. In 1923 two GM employees died manufacturing it, and fuel Thomas Midgley found he had also come down with lead poisoning and had to take an extended vacation. The DuPont manufacturing process had killed 7 more workers.

The public controversy began in October 1924 with the severe poisoning of 50 workers in a Standard Oil refinery in New Jersey just across the bay from New York City.  When five of the workers  died one day at a time with symptoms described as "violent insanity," the news was carried on the front pages of newspapers around the country.  Leaded gasoline was banned in dozens of cities and states and Kettering announced it would be taken off the market voluntarily. 

As the controversy escalated, Midgley and Kettering told the media, fellow scientists and the government that no alternatives existed. “So far as science knows at the present time," Midgley said, "tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results,  which are of vital importance to the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard exists in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified.”[ix]  

At a Public Health Service conference on leaded gasoline in 1925, Kettering said: "We could produce certain [antiknock] results and with the higher gravity gasolines, the aromatic series of compounds, alcohols, etc... [to] get the high compression without the knock, but in the great volume of fuel of the paraffin series [petroleum] we could not do that."[x] Even though experts like Alice Hamilton of Harvard University insisted that leaded gasoline was dangerous and alternatives were available,[xi] the Public Health Service allowed leaded gasoline to go back on the market in 1926.  

G.M.’s research into anti-knock fuels had switched gears sometime in 1923 or 1924 because of its partnership with Standard Oil and DuPont. The companies wanted to use tetraethyl lead because if was profitable.

Yet to claim that no alternatives existed was clearly misleading, and to ignore public health concerns was simply putting profit ahead of the public interest.  

The Public Health Service’s decision to allow tetraethyl lead back on the market in January of 1926 was based on a physical examination of service station workers pumping leaded gasoline that was conducted in October of 1925.  Most of the men appeared healthy, but evidence of blood lead contamination in widespread “stippling” of blood cells was not understood as a warning sign at the time, and no blood lead tests were then available.

The final committee report on leaded gasoline found “no good reason” for continuing its prohibition, but the committee strongly recommend further independent study. The recommendation was ignored, and meanwhile, the Ethyl Corp. claimed that the committee had given Ethyl a “clean bill of health.” 

Research on the health impacts of lead that took place between the 1930s and the 1960s was funded by, and heavily biased toward, the industry. The research was aimed at proving that high levels of lead in the average American’s body were both normal and harmless.  Most of the research was carried out at the Kettering Laboratory at the University of Cincinatti by scientists with strong industry connections. 

This research was criticized as deliberately deceptive in the 1960s and 1970s as the health impacts of leaded gasoline were reconsidered. [xii]   For example, the blood lead levels of people who lived in nonindustrial nations, far from auto exhaust and lead paint, were reported inaccurately as being similar to those who lived in the U.S. 

The first indication that something was seriously amiss in the way industry scientists had measured lead problems came in 1965 with an article by Clair Patterson in the Archives of Environmental Health.  A Cal Tech geochemist, Patterson worked on the Manhattan project in WWII and studied issues surrounding geological date estimates. In the process of establishing the age of the earth, he noticed heavy lead contamination.  People were carrying over 100 times the natural level of lead in their bodies and the atmosphere contained over 1,000 that amount, he estimated.  Analyzing 1,600 year old bones of pre-Columbian humans, Patterson showed that 20^th century lead burdens were seriously elevated.

Another scientist who studied the effects of lead exposure in children was Herbert Needleman.  His work showed a direct correlation between hypertension and other nerve disorders and the level of lead in children’s bodies.

The levels of lead in the human body are usually measured by blood samples. In the 1950s and 60s, blood lead levels of less than 60 micrograms per deciliter were considered acceptable because obvious symptoms of lead poisoning like convulsions did not usually occur above that level.  Today the US Centers for Disease Conrol and Prevention (CDC) considers a level of 10 mcg/dl as a threshold of serious effects, especially in children. 

At very high levels of lead exposure, which are now rare in the U.S., lead poisoning can cause mental retardation, coma, convulsions, and death. More common are cases where children are poisoned through chronic, low-level exposure. This can cause reduced IQ and attention span, hyperactivity, impaired growth, reading and learning disabilities, hearing loss, insomnia, and a range of other health behavioral effects. High lead levels have been associated with juvenile delinquency. 

The success of Ethyl gasoline in the 1930s in the U.S. involved several factors. It was heavily advertised and it did have an obvious octane boosting effect on engines. But it was also a way for refiners to deny market access to anyone in the oil business who did not comply with Standard Oil’s version of “business ethics.” Ethyl lost an anti-trust lawsuit   in 1940, but not before it had cornered 90 percent of US gasoline market.

Ethyl also persued sales in Europe with the help of letters from the Surgeon General explaining that its studies had found TEL to be perfectly safe.  These worldwide sales proved to be Ethyl’s lifeline when US markets started to shrink in 1976,  and by 1979 its overall international sales exceeded domestic sales. 

At its peak in the 1970s, tetraethyl lead was used in about 80 to 90 percent of all gasoline worldwide. A health related phaseout of leaded gasoline in Europe in the 1990s meant that Ethyl sales would be increasingly confined to Third World markets. Today, over 90- percent of all gasoline sold in Africa and the Middle East is still leaded, while over 30 percent of Asian and Latin American gasoline is also leaded.

In January of 1970, GM president Ed Cole announced the company’s intention of meeting new clean air laws by using a new device called a catalytic converter.  Attached to a car’s exhaust system, the convert traps and converts carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbon emissions. 

The converters did nothing to lower lead emissions, but their use made leaded gasoline impossible since lead would deactivate the main catalytic element, platinum.  Unleaded gasoline would be necessary. 

 GM and Standard had divested the Ethyl Corp. eight years beforehand, in 1962, and it  struck some observers as ironic that the company that had created leaded gasoline was announcing its demise only a few years after it had gotten out of the lead additive business.

The US phase out of lead began in 1976 when the first cars using catalytic converts were introduced on the market.  By 1986 all gasoline was unleaded.

The phaseout  had strking results in the U.S. Before it took place, 88 percent of children had blood lead levels higher than 10 mcg/dl. Afterwards, only 9 percent had elevated blood lead levels.  The blood lead levels of all Americans declined 78 percent between 1978 and 1991, falling in exact proportion to the declining levels of lead in the overall gasoline supply.

International lead phase-out has only occurred in Europe and a very few Third World nations.  The serious concern is the concentration of lead in urban areas. In Mexico city, 4 million cars pump an estimated 32 tons of lead each day into the air. In Jakarta, Indonesia, one and a half tons enters the atmosphere daily. According to a World Bank estimate, 1.7 billion urban residents are in danger of nerve damage, high blood pressure and heart disease from leaded gasoline.

While US average blood lead levels are about 3 mcg/dl, those in Mexico City, Jakarta, Ciaro and other Third World urban centers are around 30 mcg/dl. Residents of one particularly polluted city, Bangkok, have average blood lead levels at 40 mcg/dl. Venezuela, the most industrialized nation in South America, did not even introduce unleaded gasoline as an option until the year 1999.  A report found that 63 percent of newborn chiklren had blood lead levels above the 10 mcg/dl mark. 

In 1996, a World Bank  study called for a five year global phaseout of leaded gasoline. It said the US had saved more than $10 for every dollar spent on lead phaseout. The savings came in reduced health costs, saving on engine maintenance and improving fuel efficiency.

The World Bank, the World Health Organization and many other international organizations have issued urgent calls for the removal of lead from gasoline worldwide, but the decision has to be made on a country by country basis and progress has been slow.  

/// One final point before the peroration:

What ever happened to ethyl alcohol fuel?  

The Free Alcohol hearings in 1906 were the efforts made by American farm movements that would propose wider alcohol fuels use again in the 1930s and 1970s, with much the same arguments made by Capen. 

In the 1930s, the“Farm Chemurgy” movement promoted industrial uses of all kinds of farm products. The movement was backed by Henry Ford and other conservative industry leaders from the Midwest but was not embraced as part of the New Deal.   Although the alcohol blended “Agrol” brand failed economically, the research behind it proved crucial to production of synthetic rubber and other vital industries during World War II. 

In the 1970s, Midwestern farmers again began advocating alcohol blends in gasoline, this time to fight pollution from leaded gasoline and to strech oil supplies in the wake of the Middle Eastern oil crisis. 

Today ADM owns huge share of market and pushes others out where it can. But many energy companies have investments in renewable technology and are simply waiting for the right political and market signals to bring them out. 

In the beginning I said we needed to develop and maintain a sense of history in this area.   Just as individuals are lost without their memories, civilization needs its collective memory in the form we call history. 

The broad lack of historical perspective, with origins more in neglect than misinformation, is becoming more obvious as environmental protection becomes part of a global social fabric. Issues often emerge in the mass media without context and then disappear with little more than symbolic resolutions. Political conservatives seem not to recognize the reflection of their own values in conservation movements. Political liberals lack a sense of the traditions of social reform.  Engineers and scientists forget where a technology was originally headed or what it was supposed to accomplish. 

I also said at the beginning that historians need to ask humanitarian questions.  Let me add a caveat. I believe that most people are perfectly well intelligent enough to make up their own minds about these issues given the fact. Therefore I am rather against the idea of the historian as a moralist. We don’t need to draw moral conclusions, we simply need to ask ethical questions.    

History is a fact finding discipline, as Herodotus insisted. Although subject to argument and discussion, historical facts are facts, and they can be sifted from myth, as we learned in the recent London libel trial brought by holocaust denier David Irving against Geogia’s own Deborah Lipstadt.

Jules Verne, in his 1860 book from the Earth to the Moon, said that for Americans, science and engineering was a birthright, like opera for Italians or philosophy for Germans.  I don’t know if Verne really understood America.  It's not that simple.  The real project, and there is a book by this name, was civilizing the machine, the sort of “machine in the garden” idea.  Leo Marx had it right.   Americans were going to civilize the machine.  I think what happened in late 20^th century is that people started believing it was not possible to do this.  They gave up too easily. 

When Samuel Fluorman wrote about technology and the tragic view in the 1970s, he was urging people not to give up. Problems are always the price of progress. 

I've always had the hope, perhaps naively , that if we elevate our vision beyond tragedy, we can continue finding ethical and humanitarian directions for science and technology. I would refer some of you to the ideas of Bucky Fuller and E.F. Schumacher.    Rather than constantly coping with unintended consequences, why not begin choosing technologies with better consequences?  

• Infant mortality and incubator technology – ex. Cong. George Brown – better to spend the money on pre-natal care. Greater social equity.  

• Energy production  –    Amory Lovins used the argument that it was  better to spend the money on thousands of insulation and weatherization contracting companies employing tens of thousands of people than to spend billions on high tech plants employing a few hundred engineers. Greater social equity.

Similar argument is the one made by farm Chemurgists in the 1930s – if you’re going to use an octane booster, why not one that is safe and helps the farm economy?   Greater social equity.  ?  Good question.

Renewable energy  – perhaps we should ask whether its better to spend the money on renewable energy gathered by the millions of people who need work in developing nations than to spend it on only slightly cheaper sources that will have to be cleaned up one day anyway. 

Interesting that if we look to history, that question was already asked. In 1880s, scientist and defender of evolution Thomas Henry Huxley asked whether it wasn’t possible, once the coal and oil had run out, to collect solar energy in the tropical regions where it was most abundant. 

Looking at the Ethyl controversy, we see patterns in history already repeating themselves.  MMT and MTBE are used without proper study, and it is left to the government and the people harmed to prove that there was damage. Why aren’t these things anticipated? What is the damage when we do not use the precautionary principle?  In the end, the damage is to the corporation itself –  ARCO and other MTBE manufacturers are in deep trouble with hundreds of millions in lawsuits pending over the MTBE situation. Lots of other firms have gone under when the impacts of their misjudgments hit home.

Ethyl stock, also, has tanked in recent years because nobody is using TEL any more.  If I had the chance to talk with the Ethyl board  of directors, I would say this:  Study your own history. Remember where Kettering and Midely originally wanted to take your company. 

Use history as an advisor for the future. It’s the best advice I can think of, for all of us.