A Brief History Of Gasoline: Searching For The Magic Bullet

Before leaded gasoline hit the market, those credited with its invention, General Motors’ Charles Kettering and Thomas Midgley, Jr., stumbled in the dark for several years, revealing in the process a distinct absence of chemical understanding and an even more remarkable lack of concern for the public health consequences of several of the octane-boosting gasoline additives they’d unsuccessfully champion. Even their corporate masters at DuPont and future collaborators at Standard Oil of New Jersey were unimpressed. But there was surely money to be made.

This is the ninth story in a series of stories on the history of gasoline. So far, Jalopnik’s tech coverage has been focused primarily on the emergence, or reemergence of the electric vehicle. One of the primary arguments levied against electric cars and electric charging infrastructure has been that bringing both into the mainstream would take significant investment from private and public actors, and that this has not generally been politically palatable in the United States. In this multi-part series, award-winning journalist Jamie Kitman will lay out how American corporate and government entities have been cooperating on a vastly more costly, complex and deadly energy project for well over a century: gasoline.

Here are our previous parts:

Part 7: They Lied About The Science

Part 6: The Original Sin Of General Motors

Part 5: Better Things For Deader Living ... Through Chemistry

Part 4: How Standard Oil Got Away With It

Part 3: How Standard Oil Built Its Toxic Monopoly

Part 2: They Trashed Pennsylvania First

Part 1: How Gasoline Got Into Our Lives

Prelude: A Century And A Half Of Lies

“There is the question of how thoroughly the General Motors may have canvassed the motor fuel situation and their conclusions as a result of their consideration of the problem and there is the question of the degree to which we can depend upon the accuracy of their conclusions.”1 

—Charles A. Stine, chief chemist, DuPont Corporation, to Lammot duPont, May 1, 1920.

On November 13, 1918, two days after the Armistice ending World War I was signed, Irenée duPont wrote J. Amory Haskell, a former DuPont vice president, now a member of GM’s executive and finance committees, proposing that DuPont might take over GM’s chemical research. With the government funding which kept the GM program, part of the war effort, afloat drying up, DuPont’s war-expanded research department was only telling the truth when it said it outstripped Kettering’s Dayton Metal Products’ Lab for size and chemical knowledge many times over.

Though none of the authorized histories recount it, along the way to realizing its goal of a ubiquitous gasoline additive, the Dayton team encountered steady resistance from the DuPont organization, which expressed, not always privately, the view that the Kettering lab was careless and far more clueless about matters of chemistry than they ought to have been for an enterprise engaged in dangerous chemical research.

GM, taking its cue from Kettering, even before it had acquired the Dayton lab, steadfastly resisted the suggestion that it might wish to hand over its research to DuPont, despite the fact that the explosive and chemical concern now claimed principal ownership of GM’s whole shebang. Nor was the management of the car maker’s lab even willing to feign attempting the time-consuming exercise DuPont advocated, that is, making a thorough, intellectually rigorous, academic attack on engine knock by conducting basic research into engines, the fundamentals of combustion, and the chemical makeup of the fuels being burned.

This was not the Kettering way. Before, during the war and for some time afterwards, he’d proudly subscribed to the so-called Edisonian method of research (“try everything until you find something that works”). Far from conducting the informed and directed scientific research he and his successors would regularly claim for it, his lab appears to have specialized in random experiments to find a suitable anti-knock.

While the GM lab was left to get on with whatever it was they were getting on with, significant DuPont oversight would nonetheless be the rule going forward.2 General Motors and DuPont were as one, and DuPont was the one. Yet because DuPont was new coming to the area of fuel research, and because of Kettering’s popularity with Pierre duPont, GM’s more “experienced” but less competent anti-knock team was to a large extent able to call its own tune. Like the hash served up by a school cafeteria, their ideas may have been half-baked and unpalatable but at least they were plentiful.

Kettering’s initial stated goal after the war was to develop an anti-knock compound that would allow more widespread use of kerosene — cheaper and more easily supplied than gasoline. A huge driver of the oil industry’s early growth when employed for lighting, kerosene’s light was fading as a result of the advent of the electric bulb. It was still prevalent, however, on American farms, with their electrical systems run by kerosene-powered generators.

Far from the dedicated, informed and directed scientific research operation he and his predecessors would later describe, his lab appears to have sprung only occasionally to life, blindly throwing things at the wall in an effort to find an anti-knock product, any anti-knock product that worked. These practices did not change immediately following its purchase by GM, but within a few years, it dawned on Kettering’s research team and all who knew them that they might want to apply a little more chemistry to the matter. Somewhere along the way, it had also occurred that there might be considerable money to be made in a gasoline additive, which could “cure” knock.

No sooner was Kettering installed as the head of the GM Research lab, then DuPont’s chief chemist Charles M.A. Stine maneuvered to commandeer his anti-knock program. Writing to GM boss William Crapo Durant, Stine had renewed DuPont’s offer to tackle fuel issues for General Motors.

Stine set up the organic chemistry department at DuPont in 1916 and, aside from the obvious economic advantage his lab would have enjoyed from any contract work it might drum up now from GM, his recommendation was based on the not unreasonable claim that his organization had a deeper scientific foundation, better equipment, and was more lavishly staffed.

Familiar with GM’s work in the area of fuel research, but unimpressed, Stine said he could not with clear conscience advocate any of the anti-knock solutions GM was putting forth until there was an initial step backward, for a more thorough examination of a “complete cycle of the gas engine operation.”3 It was an important problem, he cautioned, that had not been fully considered, and which “cannot be solved without the expenditure of a considerable sum of money.”4

This was decidedly not Kettering’s view. As K.W. Zimmerschied, a metallurgist who’d risen to become president of GM’s Chevrolet division, wrote Stine, Kettering felt he didn’t need to know any more. He didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. He wanted a quick fix, “something that may be added at slight expense in small quantities, in a convenient form” to the gasoline, to stop knock.5 He was ready to go to market, he just needed the so-called “magic bullet” he knew was out there.

Sensitive nonetheless to the heavy political dimension of his new arrangement, Kettering dispatched Midgley, whose chemical prowess, however limited, likely outstripped his own and whose affability was well-known, to Wilmington in 1919 to iron out any contrasting views with the leading chemical minds in DuPont’s employ. While no definitive result was achieved, the companies did garner insight into their relative strengths - GM was better at cracking petroleum, thanks to the semi-works-scale petroleum cracker maintained at Dayton, while duPont had the certain edge in its understanding of the explosive processes. DuPont again proposed that GM should help defray its research costs into engines and fuels, but Kettering demurred.6

If nothing else, there emerged in the Wilmington onlookers a grudging admiration for their Ohio GM counterparts’ dogged pursuit of the idea that there was profit in discovering an anti-knock.

ALCOHOLIC COMBUSTION

Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889, Thomas Midgley was a collegial fellow whose fondness for strong drink was often recalled by young associates, including those who credited him with having invented the idea of mixing gin with juice, a favorite libation through the present day along with the related “screwdriver” cocktail, the vodka and orange juice blend that continues to lead so many novice partygoers astray. There is little independent evidence of Midgley’s primacy in this field; still several reminiscences of his drinking days describe all-night booze and science sessions, where Midgley’s young guests would tank up with their mentor and then attempt to solve the riddles of the scientific world.

Though one may wonder whether the effects of alcohol on Midgley’s life and work were purely benign, there’s little doubting that the Screwdriver (if it be his) was the only one of his famous inventions for which public regard endures. We’ve heard many tales of those who become famous after their deaths; Midgley poses the paradoxical obverse, one who was revered in life but has come to be reviled long after his death, to the extent he is known at all.

This mechanical engineer, who would soon be receiving the chemical industry’s highest honors, learned the science, he recalled, “on the run.”7 By all accounts he remained personable as his stature in the chemical world rose. Boyd always wrote of him with lavish affection in his many remembrances, Kettering called him “my greatest discovery.” Today we might call him tragic, a smart fellow who got it very wrong and likely died young as a result.

Though it can be inferred that he was often in his cups, Midgley was not alone, as the Dayton crew all drank heavily. Yet he worked long hours alongside Boyd and other researchers at the GM lab, who would later remember him methodically testing and eliminating thousands of compounds in the great quest to stop engine knock. Or maybe it was hundreds of compounds. Or maybe only several dozen. The evidence tends to argue for a lower range of total experiments, but we may never know for sure as the many adoring accounts of lead gasoline’s discovery are in wild conflict.

Confusion is left to reign, inevitably and quite deliberately it would seem, in part because of the dearth of documentary evidence lead gasoline’s creators have left behind for public examination. Given its profound economic and environmental impact, TEL goes strangely unmentioned in classic investigations of the oil industry like John Blair’s The Control of Oil, Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters, James Ridgeway’s Powering Civilization or Daniel Yergin’s The Prize. As Prof. William Kovarik has observed, not unreasonably:

All of these works suffer from a serious handicap in that the public archives contain little of the detailed documentation historians might expect concerning a discovery of the magnitude of tetraethyl lead. Historians writing about Thomas Edison’s 1879 invention of the electric light or Lavoisier’s 1775 discovery of the oxygen principle have access to hundreds of day-to-day laboratory notebooks and thousands of records about their subjects.8

Yet none of Kettering and Midgley’s lab notebooks are available in any archive. And as Kovarik and others have discovered, thousands of pages of relevant documents, known as the “Lead Diary” by the Dayton team, are nowhere to be found, along with minutes of the meetings of the Board of Directors’ for the Ethyl Gasoline Corp, as well as most reports about possible anti-knock alternatives and workers’ medical records. What has been removed from and what never made it into the General Motors archives at the former General Motor Institute, now known as the Schaarchburg Archive at Kettering University, is unclear. In the words of one archivist at the old institute who spoke with Kovarik, GM’s lead archives were “sanitized.”9

Thus the modern reader is left to guess. One 1925 article in the Literary Digest put the number of compounds tested at 2500,10 while a 1927 pamphlet called The Story of Ethyl, released by the company Kettering and Midgley would help found, states that 33,000 were studied.11 Another time, Midgley claimed 14,991 elements were examined,12 while F.O. Clements, Kettering’s former Ohio State chemistry professor, installed at his behest in the GM labs, estimated that more than 100,000 experiments were conducted.13 Ethyl publicist Ralph Champlin’s unpublished history counts the study of 143 anti-knocks (and the discovery of 31 materials that would induce knock)14 while a 1980 Ethyl Corporation statement adjusted the former number upward to 144.15 The breadth of the disparities is almost laughable, but the question remains important because GM’s discovery of lead’s antiknock properties would later be hailed in popular media and cited in textbooks as a model of rational, orderly scientific inquiry that sought the single best answer to the knock question. As Thomas Hughes, a highly regarded academic concerned with the history of technology, gushed as recently as the 1970s , TEL’s discovery was “a beautiful [example] of pure, or at least deliberately planned, research,” which bridged the gap between so-called Edisonian (i.e., trial and error,) and modern directed research.16

With the actual logs of the Kettering lab’s experiments missing and a wildly conflicting record as to how many experiments were even conducted, (none of the “official” tallies bother to enumerate all of the materials they count as studied,) precision science does somehow seem like one thing that probably wasn’t going on in 1919. But, in the official telling of the lead gasoline tale, actual facts don’t matter as much as the broad strokes. The Ethyl Creation Myth is supposed to be a success story, after all. The point we are meant to take away from the scattered accounts of the many experiments is: “We tried everything, exhausting every possibility before we found the one and only true answer!”

SWEET ANILINE AND OTHER MOMENTS OF TRUTH

Few of the dozens or hundreds or thousands of failures one may infer from the aforementioned tallies are chronicled, but those that do make it into the authorized histories with a purpose: to humanize the endeavor and to underscore the rightness of the final result.

The story begins with Kettering’s suggestion of the trailing red arbutus, a ground flower that can bloom in winter. Perhaps, he conjectured, it can absorb more heat on account of its red color. It didn’t work. A related dead end with iodine – red once more — is also widely recorded. In these same accounts, we learn how the Kettering lab again wrongly supposed it had struck pay dirt on January 30, 1919, when researcher T.A. Boyd discovered the knock-stopping properties of aniline.17 GM’s Chevrolet division had a test car built, sporting an engine with a jaunty 7 to 1 compression ratio, instead of the day’s standard 4 to 1, and it ran happily on ordinary gasoline enhanced with nitrogen, in the form of an aniline compound. Thanks to its higher compression ratio, it was more powerful, faster and yet still able to deliver forty percent better fuel economy when compared to a low compression motor.18

But again we are misled. For while the Creation Myth suggests that aniline’s obvious infirmities would quickly relegate it to the dustbin of history, in fact the archival record reveals Kettering advocated it strongly for some time, in spite of its profound limitations. Indeed, earlier in the month of January, he sounded a false alarm, telling Midgley that owing to the demands of the new engine he had persuaded GM to manufacture for the so-called copper-cooled Chevrolet – a project close to his heart, anti- knock studies would should be wrapped up in two weeks, freeing “Midge” to work on this new assignment, which Kettering, as we’ll see, felt even more important.19

Though this research would re-emerge, aniline kept the antiknock dream alive. For the better part of the next two years, when he wasn’t feverishly developing the copper-cooled engine, Kettering would be insisting that this chemical compound, stumbled upon in their dye studies following the false lead with iodine and now quickly patented, was the key to a no-knock future. He begged DuPont to get involved in aniline’s volume manufacture, while Champlin’s unpublished history notes that “manufacturing and marketing plans were seriously discussed.”20

Today, we best know aniline, an aromatic amine typically derived from benzene, for its application in the manufacture of polyurethane, used in furniture foam and spray coatings.21 Historically, it was used in the manufacture of dye, (the great, early engine of modern chemical science and scientific research) and diphenylamine, a stabilizer for smokeless powder, both of which uses had brought DuPont into frequent contact with it.22

Fortunately for mankind, Stine and the men in white suits at DuPont’s Eastern Research Laboratory were not inclined to heed Kettering’s assurances and expand their aniline production facilities. Not that they were likely to have cared, but we know today that breathing spent aniline in car exhaust wouldn’t have been healthful. A highly acrid poison that smokes when burning, aniline has been adjudged a probable human carcinogen by the EPA. It is known to damage the ability of hemoglobin to carry out its vital function, transporting oxygen through the blood system.

Tellingly, DuPont’s objections to aniline weren’t related to any concern for the public health, they were economic; aside from the heavy capital investment in plant that would be required to produce it in the necessary quantities, the company cautioned that such an additive would lower supplies of kerosene and thus drive up its price. They again called for further study of the basics.

Though they may not have appreciated the health particulars, the basics of aniline included less subtle and indeed glaring demerits like its highly corrosive action on engines and fuel systems and the fact that it smelled terrible — like rotten fish. The high-compression test car Chevrolet built swiftly earned a nickname from Dayton engineers, who called it “The Goat” on account of the appalling odor aniline left in its wake.23 As Champlin recorded, “Mr. Midgley expressed himself as doubtful if ‘humanity, even to doubling their fuel economy, will put up with this smell.’”24 After the failure of aniline, Midgley is said to have grown despondent about the whole antiknock enterprise.

In later reminiscences, Kettering would acknowledge aniline’s shortcomings, but his private correspondence at the time reveals that he was incensed by DuPont’s lack of enthusiasm, and irritated with Stine for failing to appreciate the value of what he was trying to do with the putrid substance.25

Regaining his composure and changing tack, Kettering, who would be named a GM vice president on January 13, 1920, arranged to visit Wilmington shortly after the New Year, with the ostensible purpose of working out a joint research agreement. But Stine would privately conclude the real purpose of Kettering’s visit was to attempt again to persuade DuPont to build a giant aniline works. On top of the concerns he’d already noted, Stine had concluded Kettering’s aniline patents were weak and likely to be soon supplanted.26

More generally, Stine doubted the validity of any of the Kettering lab’s research and science. As he wrote to Lammot duPont, “There is the question of how thoroughly the General Motors may have canvassed the motor fuel situation and their conclusions as a result of their consideration of the problem and there is the question of the degree to which we can depend upon the accuracy of their conclusions.”27

Stine’s preferred result — a contract for cooperative research between the two commercial heavyweights, with DuPont restored to its rightful lead role — had again been placed before Kettering when he visited Wilmington. He’d taken the document back to Dayton where, he promised, it would get his full and fair attention, but it went unsigned.28 For its part, the Delaware contingent was reluctant to confront or openly disappoint Kettering, a favorite of the duPont patriarch, Pierre. Promising GM that it would ramp up its capacity to manufacture aniline forthwith, DuPont then moved glacially to do so, which turned out to be a provident course for aniline was even worse than they realized.

SELENIUM AND TELLURIUM: OLFACTORY NIGHTMARES ON THE WAY TO SWEET-SMELLING DISASTER

In spite of all aniline’s negatives and the copper-cooled engine’s de facto termination of GM’s antiknock studies in favor of something sexier, during the second half of 1920 and early 1921, the Dayton lab was still to be found fiddling with an “aniline injector,” with Midgley going so far as to obtain a patent on a device that would have introduced aniline to the gasoline only when a driver called for full throttle, reducing expense and presumably limiting the window in which the engine might release the toxic fuel additive’s horrific pong in the battle to extinguish “ping.”29

Remembering the antiknock investigations, and deviating from the many times when he’d said that this was science at its best, Kettering would later recall that following the aniline disappointment his “research men began investigating pretty much at random to see what, if anything, would decrease the knock...They tried just about everything that came into the laboratory.”30 By Midgley’s reckoning, they tested for anti-knock value every substance they could find, “from melted butter and camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride.” Unfortunately, he would later recall, “most of them had no more effect than spitting in the Great Lakes.”31

Several times, additives would hold out great hope to laboratory staff, and then fizzle. April 6, 1921, for example, found Midgley standing beside Boyd and the test-engine, again, this time adding the rare element selenium to gasoline. The good news, Midgley wrote Stine at DuPont, was that the inorganic compound selenium oxychloride was “twenty-four times” more effective at defeating knock than aniline.32 The bad news was that it smelled even worse. As Champlin summarized in his unpublished memoir, “although the laboratory workers were so accustomed to bad chemical smells by now that they could not detect the offensive odor about each other, their families and friends refused to approach them any closer than six feet.”33

In their various reminiscences, Kettering, Midgley and Boyd would make light of their selenium detour, but, as with aniline, they were clearly prepared to go forward, despite heinous shortcomings. It says much that vile emissions of combusted poison had become for them matters of only passing concern.

Speaking to the narrowness of their interest in understanding the basic combustion process and their desperation to get to market, the moment GM’s lab discovered that selenium was an effective anti-knock — and notwithstanding its putrid odor — the company moved to terminate a modest $2500 basic research project that DuPont’s Eastern Laboratory was conducting for it on flame propagation properties inside engine cylinders, crucial to the understanding of combustion and the actual action of an anti-knock. So improbably confident were they that they’d reached the end of their study, Midgley told Stine by letter that he and Kettering now regarded such basic research as “wasting money.”34

Yet, back in the Dayton lab the dabbling continued and only two days later diethyl telluride proved even more effective than selenium, though not always in a good way. Complaints of “a satanified garlic smell” arose, with one researcher observing that “a single exposure to the stuff would cling to you for weeks.”35 Quoth Midgley, “There was no getting rid of it. It was so powerful that a change of clothes and a bath at the end of the day did not reduce your ability as a tellurium broadcasting station. Nor did the odor grow much weaker when several days were passed in absence from the laboratory.”

Boyd recalled, “The foul odor got into the men’s systems and on their clothes. They couldn’t wash it off, for water only made the odor worse. The smell was so bad that anyone working with tellurium was virtually a social outcast.”36

“Going out at night” while diethyl telluridedly-scented, Midgley confided with characteristic jocularity, “was a problem, although I found one best solution. When we went to the movies, I would look around until I found a man of Mediterranean extraction, and we would sit down beside him. Presently people would scowl at him from all directions as they got my perfume, but we were secure and comfortable.”37

Yet Midgley remained resolutely upbeat, despite the fact that GM’s latest “discovery” was a certain poison that stunk mightily. Perhaps it was the American nation’s large supply of immigrant scapegoats. In a letter to his father, dated April 25, 1921, Midgley assured him that “we expect to make it very commercial.” More recent investigations of telluride have catalogued that “Heavy exposures may, in addition, result in headache, drowsiness, metallic taste, loss of appetite, nausea, tremors, convulsions, and respiratory arrest.”

Privately, Midgley may have been less optimistic, for he cancelled vacation plans in the summer of 1921, as the hunt for a better, more plausible anti-knock grew more frantic.38 Despite their best efforts, the Dayton lab’s overlords hadn’t bought any of their pitches yet.

STANDARD OIL ROLLS INTO TOWN

Knowledge of the nature of the Dayton lab’s work had spread outside the company, and not just to their DuPont masters. At its highest levels, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, America’s biggest refiner, was also following their progress closely. As early as 1919, a Chicago patent attorney named Frank A. Howard had taken note of Kettering’s incessant speechifying on the potential value of antiknocks, and written Standard Oil of N.J. chairman Walter Clark Teagle suggesting they heed the Boss’s word.39

“Unless the fuel producers themselves get into this work of investigating the properties of their fuels, there is a good chance they may have to pay tribute to others. There would be such an insistent demand for [antiknock fuel] that any oil producer who had exclusive rights could absolutely dominate the entire motor fuel market.”40

Dominating the motor fuel market being, of course, one of Standard’s raisons d’être. For his efforts, Howard was named head of research for Standard Oil [New Jersey] Development Company, from which post he would keep a close eye on GM’s research. As a private Ethyl corporate history, found in the archives of Ethyl medical director Robert Kehoe, recounted, “Laboratory experiments were planned by Howard and Clark and launched at Bayway [Standard’s refinery] in 1919 to check Midgley’s work and to try to find better compounds to reduce knocking.”41

The following year, Standard recalled, “experiments directed toward the common goal were independently conducted under Midgley at Dayton and under Howard at Bayway.”

The companies maintained reasonably civil relations, however. According to the Standard private history, “Jersey assured General Motors…that it was willing to assist in the distribution of an antiknock additive if a suitable one could be found. In its early research efforts, Howard stated, the Jersey Company actually was “one jump ahead of Kettering.” When Kettering announced, early in 1920 that aniline would serve to stop engine knock, experiments at Bayway had already established the fact that aniline stopped the knock at low speeds but aggravated [it] at high speeds.”42 It is hard for the modern reader to decide which is more striking: that yet another major infirmity of aniline had been found or that Kettering continued to champion it.

THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

With the race on, the GM lab was at last compelled to abandon its haphazard methods and take a more orderly scientific approach to its antiknock studies. Several explanations of the sudden change of play have been offered. One has Kettering meeting future GM president Charles Wilson on a train speeding through the Midwest. Striking up a conversation, the GM engineer was encouraged to note a correlation between the periodic arrangement of elements and their anti-knock effectiveness. Another account has Midgley consulting Dr. Robert E. Wilson at MIT, who proposed using Langmuir’s periodic table, to place elements according to their chemical valence.43

Writing in 1936, Thomas Midgley would credit Kettering for “his guiding genius, faith, patience, and financial support.” But for his change in thinking and methodology he later thanked his one-time instructor, H.M. Robert, of the Betts Academy, a college preparatory school he’d attended in Stamford, CT, more than 30 years earlier, with engaging his interest in the periodic table of elements. Crying out for explanation is the interval before the lab’s application of such thinking. Nonetheless, Midgley concluded, “With these facts before us, we profitably abandoned the Edisonian method in favor of a correlational procedure based on the periodic table. What had seemed at times a hopeless quest, covering many years and costing a considerable amount of money, rapidly turned into a ‘fox hunt.’”44

Ethyl’s Ralph Champlin recalled that application of the periodic table led GM researcher T.A. Boyd to the Carbon Group, and metallic lead.45 And Kettering biographer Stuart Leslie concluded that, after years of study, Midgley and his lab assistants had finally learned “a great deal about chemistry. They noticed that when the elements of the Periodic Table were rearranged according to the number of vacant spaces in the outer spaces of their electron shells, antiknock substances were bunched together.”46 This led them inevitably, Leslie and other lead boosters have written, to tetra-ethyl lead.

On December 9, 1921, it is regularly vouchsafed, the antiknock properties of tetra-ethyl lead were discovered by Thomas Midgley, Jr. Identified almost 70 years earlier, tetra-ethyl lead — one of the akyl series and a little-known compound of metallic lead — had never been mass-produced or used, largely because it was known to be incredibly deadly, killing several German scientists who’d attempted to experiment with it.

Contrary to the popular tale, however, Midgley’s assistants, T.A. Boyd and Carroll A. Hochwalt, performed the first test of TEL on December 8, 1921. As Champlin’s unpublished manuscript reveals, “Mr. Midgley was in New York that day, but rushed back to Dayton upon receipt of an enthusiastic telegram from the laboratory.” The trial was then “double-checked” the following day, Dec. 9, and the credit has accrued to Midgley (and Kettering) ever since. Even Champlin, notwithstanding his report on the events of December 8, writes “Tetraethyl lead, as a chemical, was discovered in 1854. Tetraethyl lead, as an antiknock agent, was discovered on December 9, 1921.” It just didn’t count until the top men were present.47

This is the deum mirabilis, the great moment in the history of lead gasoline, if one subscribes to self-serving history supplied by its makers for the next 90 years. After a considered interval in the desert, this tale ran, the great inventors had arrived at the perfect solution, one that would benefit humankind and advance its progress. And as one misty-eyed account had it years later, jubilation erupted in Kettering and Midgley’s Dayton laboratory, as “the ear-splitting knock of their test engine turned to a smooth purr when only a small amount of the compound (tetraethyllead) was added to the fuel supply. “ The anti-knock had arrived “and all the men danced a non-scientific jig around the laboratory.”48

Midgley would soon write an old professor from Cornell, exclaiming “we have recently discovered a new antiknock material approximately 50 times as powerful as aniline and which proves to be 100 % practical and commercial. In fact, our wildest dreams of success on this problem are exceeded by this new material. ‘Allah is good.’”49

Jamie Kitman is a NY-based lawyer, rock band manager, picture car wrangler, and automotive journalist. Winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary and the IRE Medal for investigative magazine journalism, he has a penchant for Lancias and old British cars, and is a World Car of the Year juror. Follow him on Twitter @jamiekitman and on Instagram @commodorehornblow.

1. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.131, citing Charles M.A. Stine to Lammot DuPont, May 1, 1920, GM Suit, DTE, DP95. [GM Suit, DTE – United States v. E.I. de Nemours & Co., General Motors et al., Civil Action No. 49-C-1071, Defendents’ Trial Exhibit, followed by source (DuPont, General Motors, etc.,) and document number.
2. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.128.
3. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.128-129, citing Charles M.A. Stine to W.C. Durant, Sept 13 1919, Acc. 1662, Box 16 [Box 1662 refers to Records of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Administrative Papers of the Office of the President]
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.130.
7. Ralph C. Champlin, HISTORY OF THE ETHYL CORPORATION: 1923-1948, Historical Summary, New York, Ethyl Corporation, department of Public Relations, 1951 (Third Draft, unpublished, mimeographed for distribution.) p.21.
8. Kovarik, William J., “Charles F. Kettering and the 1921 Discovery of Tetraethyl Lead In the Context of Technological Alternatives,” Paper presented to the Society of Automotive Engineers Fuels & Lubricants Conference, Baltmore, Md., 1994; revised in 1999, citing Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, Edison’s Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987, p. 249. Also, Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p.xv.
9. Kovarik personal communication to author 10.98
10. “To Learn the Truth about Leaded Gas,” Literary Digest, 4.18.25, p.17
11. The Story of Ethyl Gasoline, pamphlet (New York: Ethyl Gasoline Corp., 1927
12. Rosamond Young, Boss Ket (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1961)
13. Theodore F. MacManus and Norman Beasley, Men, Money, and Motors, New York: Harper & Bros., 1930, p.125-126.
14. Ralph C. Champlin, HISTORY OF THE ETHYL CORPORATION: 1923-1948, Historical Summary, New York, Ethyl Corporation, department of Public Relations, 1951 (Third draft, unpublished, mimeographed for distribution.) p.21.
15. John C. Lane, Ethyl Corp., “Gasoline and Other Motor Fuels,” Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), p.656
16. Hughes Thomas P., “Inventors: The Problems They Choose, The Ideas They Have and the Inventions They Make,” in eds., Kelly, Patrick et al., Technological Innovation: A Critical Review of Current Knowledge, San Francisco: San Francisco Press, Inc., 1979, p. 177.
17. Leslie, Stuart, W., “Thomas Midgley and the Politics of Industrial Research,” The Business History Review, Vol. 54, No. 4, Business History and the History of Technology (Winter, 1980), pp. 480-503, p.484.
18. T.A. Boyd, Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p.145.
19. Leslie, Stuart, W., “Thomas Midgley and the Politics of Industrial Research,” The Business History Review, Vol. 54, No. 4, Business History and the History of Technology (Winter, 1980), pp. 480-503, p484.
20. Ralph C. Champlin, HISTORY OF THE ETHYL CORPORATION: 1923-1948, Historical Summary, New York, Ethyl Corporation, department of Public Relations, 1951 (Third Draft, unpublished, mimeographed for distribution.) p.15.
21. NOTE: Inhaling polyurethane can quickly destroy lung capacity and function. Thomas Kahl, Kai-Wilfrid Schröder, “Aniline” in Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry 2007; John Wiley & Sons: New York.
    
22. Ndiaye, Pap, “Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America,” (translated by Elborg Forster,) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, p.238.
23. T.A. Boyd, Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p.145.
24. Ralph C. Champlin, HISTORY OF THE ETHYL CORPORATION: 1923-1948, Historical Summary, New York, Ethyl Corporation, department of Public Relations, 1951 (Third Draft, unpublished, mimeographed for distribution.) p.16.
25. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. P130, citing C.F. Kettering to Charles M.A. Stine, Apr. 12, 1920, Acc. 1662, Box 36.
26. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.130-131.
27. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.131, citing Charles M.A. Stine to Lammot DuPont, May 1, 1920, GM Suit, DTE, DP95. [GM Suit, DTE – United States v. E.I. de Nemours & Co., General Motors et al., Civil Action No. 49-C-1071, Defendents’ Trial Exhibit, followed by source (DuPont, General Motors, etc.,) and document number.
28. Ibid.
29. Champlin, Ralph C. , History of the Ethyl Corporation: 1923-1948, Historical Summary, New York: Ethyl Corporation, department of Public Relations, 1951 (Third Draft, unpublished, mimeographed for distribution.) p.15. (Sharchburg Archives, Kettering Institute, copy, sent to T.A. Boyd by Champlin for comment.)
30. Kettering, C.F., “Research, Horse-Sense and Profits,” Factory and Industrial Management, Vol. LXXV, Number 4, April 1928, pp. 735-739, p.736.
31. George B. Kauffman, “Midgely: Saint or Serpent?”, Chemtech, December 1989, p.718.
32. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.131, citing Thomas Midgley to Charles M.A. Stine, April 15, 1921, Acc. 1662, Box 16.
33. Champlin, Ralph C. , History of the Ethyl Corporation: 1923-1948, Historical Summary, New York: Ethyl Corporation, department of Public Relations, 1951 (Third Draft, unpublished, mimeographed for distribution.) p.17. (Sharchburg Archives, Kettering Institute, copy, sent to T.A. Boyd by Champlin for comment.)
    
34. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: R&D, 1902- 1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.131, citing Thomas Midgley to Charles M.A. Stine, April 15, 1921, Acc. 1662, Box 16.
35. George B. Kauffman, “Midgely: Saint or Serpent?”, Chemtech, December 1989, p.719.
36. Boyd, T.A. Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p.145.
37. Joseph R. Robert, Ethyl: A History of the Corporation and the People Who Made It, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1983), p.107.
38. Kettering Archive, 87-11.14-131: factory corresp. Midgley reporting that he will not take a summer vacation. 6/10/21.
39. Ethyl corp memo, excerpts of second volume of History of Standard Oil Company. Dec. 6, 1956. Robert Kehoe Archives, University of Cincinnati Medical Heritage Center. Box 23.
40. Trial Transcript, U.S. v. DuPont, p.3500.
41. Ethyl corp memo, excerpts of second volume of History of Standard Oil Company. Dec. 6, 1956. Robert Kehoe Archives, University of Cincinnati Medical Heritage Center. Box 23.
42. Ethyl corp memo, excerpts of second volume of History of Standard Oil Company. Dec. 6, 1956. Robert Kehoe Archives, University of Cincinnati Medical Heritage Center. Box 23.
    
43. Loeb, Alan P. “Birth of the Kettering Doctrine: Fordism, Sloanism and the Discovery of Tetraethyl Lead,” Business and Economic History, Volume 24, No. 1, Fall 1995, p.81
44. Midgley, Thomas Jr., “From the Periodic Table to Production,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Volume 29, pp.239-244, 1937.
45. Ralph C. Champlin, HISTORY OF THE ETHYL CORPORATION: 1923-1948, Historical Summary, New York, Ethyl Corporation, department of Public Relations, 1951 (Third Draft, unpublished, mimeographed for distribution.) p.19.
46. Leslie, Stuart, W., “Thomas Midgley and the Politics of Industrial Research,” The Business History Review, Vol. 54, No. 4, Business History and the History of Technology (Winter, 1980), pp. 480-503.
47. NOTE: Intriguingly, February 13 and 14 of 1919 were also spent trying to isolate an akyl compound of lead, but because the Dayton researchers were as yet stabbing in the dark and hadn’t yet come to appreciate the meaning of TEL’s elemental composition, the Dayton researchers had given up when the process proved difficult and moved on. Champlin, p.14-15.

1. Nickerson, Stanton P., “Tetraethyl Lead: A Product of American Research,” Journal of Chemical Education, 31, (November 1954), p. 571.
2. Letter, T. Midgley to Prof. H. Diederichs. Dec. 14, 1921. The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University. 87-11.2-231