Bill Bryson- Getting the Lead Out

Bill Bryson- Getting the Lead Out

This chapter is about Thomas Midgley, Clair Patterson, and carbon dating. 

The chapter starts by talking about Thomas Midgley: he was trained as an engineer, and worked for the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio. He was also fascinated by industrial chemistry. One day while working in the late 1940's, he investigated a compound called tetrahedral lead, and discovered that it stopped engine cock, which was a common problem in those days. Lead was widely know as dangerous but was still used in everyday products such as toothpaste holders and food cans, if you get too much lead in your system then in can permanently damage the brain and cause serious health problems, for example kidney failure, delirium and comas. 

When the 3 biggest petrol companies in the USA heard that tetrahedral lead stopped engine cock they formed a company called Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to make as much tetrahedral lead the world could take. They discovered that it was very easy to work and extremely profitable. The company used 'ethyl' instead of 'lead because it sounded less toxic. The problem was when lead was introduced into petrol, it had the massive and long-lasting effect on the amount of lead on the earth.

The chapter then starts to talk about carbon-dating, which is the process of finding the age of rocks through the particles in it. Many people had tried to find a way to accurately do this but it was proving near impossible it seemed. Willard Libby and Arthur Holmes both put forward theories in the early 1940s but they were both proved wrong in one way or another.

When everyone had given up Clair Patterson worked on, even when he lost all funding from his university and didn't even have the funds to afford a calculator he tested and trialled with the most basic and cheapest equipment around.  It took seven years but finally, in 1953, he had samples to take into the National Laboratory for final testing, and it was discovered that he was right, his theory, involving Carbon-14 was correct. During his research Patterson had found unusual amounts of lead in the atmosphere,  he decided to research more into this.

After researching for a while he was astounded to find the amount of lead in the atmosphere and was shocked to see that by trial different things, before the 1900s, and the introduction of leaded petrol and use of lead in household items, there had been almost zero lead in the atmosphere. 50 years later and there was hundreds of thousands of pounds, all because of Thomas Midgley's idea of leaded petrol. 

Patterson was so stunned by the information he found, he started a full scale campaign to ban lead from petrol. It started a war between him and the Ethyl Corporation, Patterson arguing that the lead had devastating affects on the environment and people living there. The war lasted decades, when it finished Clair Patterson had no friends, and hardly any possessions, but he had won, leaded petrol was banned in the early 1990's and began to phase out.

The Ethyl company is still active and as late as 2001 it was still trying to get leaded petrol introduced again.