Part 1 of 2

How Big Oil screwed the American public and environment.

By Jamie Lincoln Kitman

The next time you pull the family barge in for a fill-up, check it out: The gas pumps read "Unleaded." You might reasonably suppose this is because naturally occurring lead has been thoughtfully removed from the gasoline. But you would be wrong. There is no lead in gasoline unless somebody puts it there. And, a little more than 75 years ago, some of America's leading corporations -- General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (known nowadays as Exxon) -- were that somebody. They got together and put lead, a known poison, into gasoline, for profit.

Lead was outlawed as an automotive gasoline additive in this country in 1986 -- more than 60 years after its introduction -- to enable the use of emissions-reducing catalytic converters in cars (which are contaminated and rendered useless by lead) and to address the myriad health and safety concerns that have shadowed the toxic additive from its first, tentative appearance on US roads in the twenties, through a period of international ubiquity only recently ending. Since the virtual disappearance of leaded gas in the United States (it's still sold for use in propeller airplanes), the mean blood-lead level of the American population has declined more than 75 percent.

How did lead get into gasoline in the first place? And why is leaded gas still being sold in the Third World, Eastern Europe and elsewhere? Recently uncovered documents from the archives of the aforementioned industrial behemoths and the US government, a new skein of academic research and a careful reading of that long-ago period's historical record, as well as dozens of interviews conducted by The Nation, tell the true story of leaded gasoline.

This is not just a textbook example of unnecessary environmental degradation, however. The leaded gasoline story must also be read as a call to action, for the lead menace lives.

Consider:

• the severe health hazards of leaded gasoline were known to its makers and clearly identified by the US public health community more than 75 years ago, but were steadfastly denied by the makers, because they couldn't be immediately quantified;

• other, safer antiknock additives -- used to increase gasoline octane and counter engine "knock" -- were known and available to oil companies and the makers of lead antiknocks before the lead additive was discovered, but they were covered up and denied, then fought, suppressed and unfairly maligned for decades to follow;

• the US government was fully apprised of leaded gasoline's potentially hazardous effects and was aware of available alternatives, yet was complicit in the cover-up and even actively assisted the profiteers in spreading the use of leaded gasoline to foreign countries;

• the benefits of lead antiknock additives were wildly and knowingly overstated in the beginning, and continue to be. Lead is not only bad for the planet and all its life forms, it is actually bad for cars and always was;

• for more than four decades, all scientific research regarding the health implications of leaded gasoline was underwritten and controlled by the original lead cabal -- Du Pont, GM and Standard Oil; such research invariably favored the industry's pro-lead views, but was from the outset fatally flawed; independent scientists who would finally catch up with the earlier work's infirmities and debunk them were -- and continue to be -- threatened and defamed by the lead interests and their hired hands;

• confronted in recent years with declining sales in their biggest Western markets, owing to lead phaseouts imposed in the United States and, more recently, Europe, the current sellers of lead additives have successfully stepped up efforts to market their wares in the less-developed world, efforts that persist and have resulted in some countries today placing more lead in their gasoline, per gallon, than was typically used in the West, extra lead that serves no purpose other than profit;

• faced with lead's demise and their inevitable days of reckoning, these firms have used the extraordinary financial returns that lead additive sales afford to hurriedly fund diversification into less risky, more conventional businesses, while taking a page from the tobacco companies' playbook and simultaneously moving to reorganize their corporate structures to shield ownership and management from liability for blanketing the earth with a deadly heavy metal.

You can choose whether to smoke, but you can't pick the air you breathe, even if it is contaminated by lead particles from automobile exhaust. Seventy-five years ago, well-known industrialists like GM's Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering (remembered today for having founded the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) and the powerful brothers Pierre and Irénée du Pont added to their substantial fortunes and did the planet very dirty by disregarding the common-sense truth that no good can come from burning a long-known poison in internal-combustion engines.

GM and Standard Oil sold their leaded gasoline subsidiary, the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, to Albemarle Paper in 1962, while Du Pont only cleaned up its act recently, but all hope to leave their leaded gasoline paternity a hushed footnote to their inglorious pasts. The principal maker of lead additive today (the Associated Octel Company of Ellesmere Port, England) and its foremost salesmen (Octel and the Ethyl corporation of Richmond, Virginia) acknowledge what they see as a political reality: Their product will one day be run out of business. But they plan to keep on selling it in the Third World profitably until they can sell it no longer. They continue to deny lead's dangers while overrating its virtues, reprising the central tenets of the lead mythology chartered by GM, Du Pont and Standard lifetimes ago.

Though the number of cases of lead poisoning has been falling nationwide, the lead dust in exhaust spewed by automobiles in the past century will continue to haunt us in this one, coating our roads, buildings and soil, subtly but indefinitely contaminating our homes, belongings and food.

The Problem with Lead

Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears.

For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains -- in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man's lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. While lead from mining, paint, smelting and other sources is still a serious environmental problem, a recent report by the government's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimated that the burning of gasoline has accounted for 90 percent of lead placed in the atmosphere since the 1920s.

Classical acute lead poisoning occurs at high levels of exposure, and its symptoms -- blindness, brain damage, kidney disease, convulsions and cancer -- often leading, of course, to death, are not hard to identify. The effects of pervasive exposure to lower levels of lead are more easily miscredited; lead poisoning has been called an "aping disease" because its symptoms are so frequently those of other known ailments. Children are the first and worst victims of leaded gas; because of their immaturity, they are most susceptible to systemic and neurological injury, including lowered IQs, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span, hyperactivity, behavioral problems and interference with growth. In adults, elevated blood-lead levels are related to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, particularly strokes, heart attacks and premature deaths. Lead exposure before or during pregnancy is especially serious, harming the mother's own body, affecting fetal development and frequently leading to miscarriage. In the eighties the EPA estimated that the health damages from airborne lead cost American society billions each year.

The Search for an Antiknock

On December 9, 1921, a young engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr., working in the laboratory of the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, reported to his boss, Charles Kettering, that he'd discovered that tetraethyl lead -- a little-known compound of metallic lead and one of the alkyl series, also referred to as lead tetraethyl or TEL -- worked to reduce "knock" or "pinging" in internal-combustion engines.

Tetraethyl lead was first discovered by a German chemist in 1854. A technical curiosity, it was not used commercially on account of "its known deadliness." It is highly poisonous, and even casual cumulative contact with it was known to cause hallucinations, difficulty in breathing and, in the worst cases, madness, spasms, palsies, asphyxiation and death. Still unused in 1921, 67 years after its invention, it was not an obvious choice as a gasoline additive.

In the laboratories of Charles Kettering, however, the search for a gasoline additive to cure "knock" had been going on for some years prior to Midgley's rediscovery of TEL. In 1911 Kettering had invented the electric self-starter -- a landmark development in automotive history that eliminated dangerous hand-cranking and enabled many Americans (particularly women) to drive for the first time, arguably killing steam and electric cars in the process. Thanks to the starter, the folksy inventor's new firm, Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, or DELCO, received its first big order, for $10 million, from the upstart General Motors Corporation, founded only three years earlier by William Crapo Durant.

GM's 1912 Cadillac was equipped with DELCO's self-starter and battery ignition. When customers reported that the engine of this luxury automobile had an alarming tendency to knock -- a sharp, metallic sound hinting at damage being done inside the engine -- critics blamed Kettering's electrical components.

Kettering was convinced, rightly, that knocking was a function of an engine's fuel rather than ignition problems. When Kettering and his partners sold DELCO to Durant's GM and its new partner -- Alfred Sloan's Hyatt Roller Bearings -- in 1916, his lab was already engaged in a search for the cure. Following the sale, this work was transferred to his new firm, the Dayton Research Laboratories, where a newly hired assistant, Thomas Midgley, was assigned to study the problem of engine knock.

Stabbing in the dark, Midgley got lucky quickly when he added iodine to the fuel, stopping knock in a test engine and establishing for all time that the malady -- premature combustion of the fuel/air mixture -- was connected to the explosive qualities of the fuel, what would later be called "octane." Iodine raised octane and cured knock; however, it was corrosive and prohibitively expensive. Inspired by the fundamental breakthrough, Midgley nonetheless carried on with fuel research, testing every substance he could find for antiknock properties, "from melted butter and camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride." Unfortunately, "most of them had no more effect than spitting in the Great Lakes."

A utomotive engineers knew by this time that engines that didn't knock would not only operate more smoothly. They could also be designed to run with higher compression in the cylinders, which would allow more efficient operation, resulting in greater fuel economy, greater power or some harmonious combination of the two. The key was finding a fuel with higher octane.

By 1917 Kettering and his staff had trained their octane-boosting sights on ethyl alcohol, also known as grain alcohol (the kind you drink), power alcohol or ethanol. In tests supervised by Kettering and Midgley for the Army Air Corps at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, researchers concluded that alcohols were among the best antiknock fuels but were not ideal for aircraft engines unless used as an additive, in a blend with gasoline.

The story of TEL's rise, then, is very much the story of the oil companies' and lead interests' war against ethanol as an octane-boosting additive that could be mixed with gasoline or, in their worst nightmare, burned straight as a replacement for gasoline. For more than a hundred years, Big Oil has reckoned ethanol to be fundamentally inimical to its interest, and, viewing its interest narrowly, Big Oil might not be wrong. By contrast, GM's subsequent antipathy to alcohol was a profit-motivated attitude adjustment. Alcohol initially held much fascination for the company, for good reason. Ethanol is always plentiful and easy to make, with a long history in America, not just as a fuel additive but as a pure fuel. The first prototype internal-combustion engine in 1826 used alcohol and turpentine. Prior to the Civil War alcohol was the most widely used illuminating fuel in the country.

As the automobile era picked up speed, scientific journals were filled with references to alcohol. In 1907 and 1908 the US Geological Survey and the Navy performed 2,000 tests on alcohol and gasoline engines in Norfolk, Virginia, and St. Louis, concluding that higher engine compression could be achieved with alcohol than with gasoline. They noted a complete absence of smoke and disagreeable odors.

Despite many attempts by Big Oil to stifle its home-grown competitor (one time-honored gambit: lobbying legislators to pass punitive taxation thwarting alcohol's economic viability), power alcohol would number among its adherents several highly regarded inventors and scientists, including Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford built his very first car to run on what he called farm alcohol. As late as 1925, after the advent of TEL, the high priest of American industry would predict in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor that ethanol -- "fuel from vegetation" -- would be the "fuel of the future." Four years later, early examples of his Model A car would be equipped with a dashboard knob to adjust its carburetor to run on gasoline or alcohol.

Ethanol made a lot of sense to a practical Ohio farm boy like Kettering. It was renewable, made from surplus crops and crop waste, and nontoxic. It delivered higher octane than gasoline (though it contained less power per gallon), and it burned more cleanly. By 1920, as Kettering was aware, a US Naval Committee had concluded that alcohol-gasoline blends "withstand high compression without producing knock."

Higher compression was, after all, what the GM men were after. In February 1920, shortly after joining General Motors' employ, Thomas Midgley filed a patent application for a blend of alcohol and cracked (olefin) gasoline, as an antiknock fuel.

Ethanol on the March

In October 1921, less than two months before he hatched leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley drove a high-compression-engined car from Dayton to a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers in Indianapolis, using a gasoline-ethanol blended fuel containing 30 percent alcohol. "Alcohol," he told the assembled engineers, "has tremendous advantages and minor disadvantages." The benefits included "clean burning and freedom from any carbon deposit...[and] tremendously high compression under which alcohol will operate without knocking...Because of the possible high compression, the available horsepower is much greater with alcohol than with gasoline."

After four years' study, GM researchers had proved it: Ethanol was the additive of choice. Their estimation would be confirmed by others. In the thirties, after leaded gasoline was introduced to the United States but before it dominated in Europe, two successful English brands of gas -- Cleveland Discoll and Kool Motor -- contained 30 percent and 16 percent alcohol, respectively. As it happened, Cleveland Discoll was part-owned by Ethyl's half-owner, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Kool Motor was owned by the US oil company Cities Service, today Citgo). While their US colleagues were slandering alcohol fuels before Congressional committees in the thirties, Standard Oil's men in England would claim, in advertising pamphlets, that ethanol-laced, lead-free petrol offered "the most perfect motor fuel the world has ever known," providing "extra power, extra economy, and extra efficiency."

In 1919 GM purchased Kettering's Dayton research laboratory. The following year the company installed him as vice president of research of the renamed General Motors Research Corporation.

No longer the shambling, anarchic outfit it had been under the inveterate risk-taker W.C. Durant, GM was now to be run in the militarily precise mold of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company of Wilmington, Delaware. Awash in a sea of gunpowder profits from World War I, the du Pont family had been increasing its stake in GM since 1914. By 1920 it controlled more than 35 percent of GM shares and moved to pack the board, installing professional management, with the du Pont faction taking control of the corporation's all-powerful finance committee.

Caught short by a margin call in the recession of 1920, Durant, GM's colorful founder, lost his stake and was forced by the du Pont family to walk the plank (he would spend his final days running a bowling alley). One of the clan's craftiest patriarchs, Pierre du Pont, was coaxed from retirement and named GM's interim president; Alfred Sloan, who had demonstrated the coldhearted allegiance to the bottom line the du Ponts revered, became executive vice president preparatory to assuming the top slot. The pressure on all concerned, including Kettering and his research division, was to make money and to make it fast.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, Sloan wrote to Kettering in September of 1920, alerting him to the du Ponts' new math: "Although [the Research Corporation] is not a productive unit and a unit that is supposed to make a profit...It may be inferred at some future time...that we are spending too much money down there [in Dayton] and being in a position to show what benefits had accrued to the corporation would strengthen our position materially."

That time would come soon enough for Kettering to deliver. An air-cooled engine he'd championed -- copper-cooled, he called it -- would soon prove a costly disaster for GM. Fortunately for him, immediately after joining GM he had given his trusted assistant Midgley two weeks to find something to ignite the new management's interest in funding continued fuel research. Though it would take somewhat longer than two weeks to fire their masters' enthusiasm, "Midge" succeeded.

And the Winner Is...

The effect of this sudden time constraint was striking. As GM researcher and Kettering biographer T.A. Boyd noted in an unpublished history written in 1943, Midgley's main research in 1919-20 had been to make alcohols out of olefins found in petroleum through reactions with sulfuric acid. (Farm alcohol was one thing, but a patentable process for production of petroleum-derived alcohol -- a possible money-maker -- was quite another, one of considerably greater interest to the corporation.) "But in view of the verdict setting a time limit on how much further the research for an antiknock compound might continue," Boyd said, "work was resumed at once in making engine tests of whatever further compounds happened to be available on the shelf of the lab...or which could be gotten readily."

As noted earlier, Midgley tested many compounds before isolating tetraethyl lead in December 1921. In the early days, he would attribute the discovery of TEL's antiknock properties to "luck and religion, as well as the application of science." In a 1925 magazine article, he would recall false trails with iodine, aniline, selenium and tellurium before hitting upon lead. Curiously, his article omitted any reference to the alcohol-gasoline blend he'd patented just five years earlier.

Another oddity: The exact number of compounds tested prior to TEL's discovery varies dramatically in different accounts. As Professor William Kovarik of Radford University has observed, confusion reigns in part because the lab's day-to-day test diaries have never been released to the public by the General Motors Institute (GMI) archive. In the words of one archivist there, GM's lead archives have been "sanitized." One 1925 article in the Literary Digest put the number at 2,500 compounds tested, while The Story of Ethyl Gasoline, a 1927 pamphlet released by a company Midgley would help found, states that 33,000 were studied. Another time, he claimed 14,991 elements were examined, while a 1980 Ethyl corporation statement set the number at 144. This question is important because GM's discovery of lead's antiknock properties, which initially caused little internal excitement, would be hailed in popular media and later cited in polytechnical texts as a model of rational, orderly scientific inquiry that sought the single best answer to the knock question. A more realistic view of events is that TEL's re-emergence in the twenties was the result of a crude empirical potshot that was understood to promise a landslide of earnings over time.

Apprised of Midgley's discovery that one part TEL could be used to fortify 1,000 parts of gasoline, Kettering proposed the name "Ethyl" for the new antiknock fluid, a mild irony in light of both men's longtime -- and soon to fade -- interest in ethyl alcohol. At researcher Boyd's suggestion Ethyl was dyed red. There was as yet, however, no plan to market Ethyl.

From the corporation's perspective, the problems with ethyl alcohol were ultimately insurmountable and rather basic. GM couldn't dictate an infrastructure that could supply ethanol in the volumes that might be required. Equally troubling, any idiot with a still could make it at home, and in those days, many did. And ethanol, unlike TEL, couldn't be patented; it offered no profits for GM. Moreover, the oil companies hated it, a powerful disincentive for the fledgling GM, which was loath to jeopardize relations with these mighty power brokers. Surely the du Pont family's growing interest in oil and oil fields, as it branched out from its gunpowder roots into the oil-dependent chemical business, weighed on many GM directors' minds.

In March 1922, Pierre du Pont wrote to his brother Irénée du Pont, Du Pont company chairman, that TEL is "a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately." This statement of early factual knowledge of TEL's supreme deadliness is noteworthy, for it is knowledge that will be denied repeatedly by the principals in coming years as well as in the Ethyl Corporation's authorized history, released almost sixty years later. Underscoring the deep and implicit coziness between GM and Du Pont at this time, Pierre informed Irénée about TEL before GM had even filed its patent application for it.

The Rise of Tetraethyl Lead

With the application filed, the groundwork was laid for manufacture of TEL. An October 1922 agreement contracted Du Pont to supply GM. Signing for GM was Pierre du Pont; signing for Du Pont: his brother Irénée. Manufacturing began in 1923 with a small operation in Dayton, Ohio, that made 160 gallons of tetraethyl lead a day and shipped it out in one-liter bottles, each of which would treat 300 gallons of gasoline.

In February 1923 the world's first tankful of leaded gasoline was pumped at Refiners Oil Company, at the corner of Sixth and Main streets, in Dayton, Ohio, from a station owned by Kettering's friend Willard Talbott. But four months earlier, an agitated William Mansfield Clark, a lab director in the US Public Health Service, had written A.M. Stimson, assistant Surgeon General at the PHS, warning that Du Pont was preparing to manufacture TEL at its plant in Deepwater, New Jersey. It constituted a "serious menace to public health" he stated, with reports already emerging from the plant that "several very serious cases of lead poisoning have resulted" in pilot production.

Clark additionally speculated that widespread use of TEL would mean "on busy thoroughfares it is highly probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum." Estimating that each gallon of gasoline burned would emit four grams of lead oxide, he worried that this would build up to dangerous levels along heavily traveled roads and in tunnels.

Stimson was troubled enough by Clark's letter to request that the PHS's Division of Pharmacology conduct investigations; unfortunately, the division's director responded, such trials would be too time-consuming. He suggested that the PHS rely upon industry to supply the relevant data, a spectacularly poor plan that would amount to government policy for the next forty years.

Perhaps spurred by Clark's missive and Stimson's concern, in December 1922 the US Surgeon General, H.S. Cumming, wrote Pierre du Pont: "Inasmuch as it is understood that when employed in gasoline engines, this substance will add a finely divided and nondiffusible form of lead to exhaust gases, and furthermore, since lead poisoning in human beings is of the cumulative type resulting frequently from the daily intake of minute quantities, it seems pertinent to inquire whether there might not be a decided health hazard associated with the extensive use of lead tetraethyl in engines."

The year 1923 did not begin well, then, for supporters of tetraethyl lead. In January, on account of lead poisoning, Thomas Midgley was forced to decline speaking engagements at three regional panels of the American Chemical Society, which had awarded him a medal for his discovery. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He repaired to Miami.

Before leaving town, Midgley penned a reply to Cumming's letter, which had been passed on to him by Pierre du Pont. Although the question "had been given very serious consideration," he wrote, "...no actual experimental data has been taken." Even so, Midgley assured the Surgeon General, GM and Du Pont believed that "the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption." In other words, TEL, the deadly chemical curiosity, was being brought to market without any thought or study as to its public health implications, but rather on the hopeful hunch of a clever mechanical engineer who had just been poisoned by lead.

Around this time, Midgley had also begun to receive letters expressing grave concern over TEL from well-known public health and medical authorities at leading universities, including Robert Wilson of MIT, Reid Hunt of Harvard, Yandell Henderson of Yale (America's foremost expert on poison gases and automotive exhaust) and Dr. Erik Krause of the Institute of Technology, Potsdam, Germany. Charles Kettering may have been concerned by this growing chorus of TEL critics, but the early months of 1923 saw his mind preoccupied with another matter. In May of that year, after four costly years of development, Kettering's beloved copper-cooled engine was abandoned as a production program, a high-profile embarrassment within the company and the larger automotive community.

The abject failure of the copper-cooled engine led the fiercely proud Kettering to believe his personal capital in the company had been terminally depleted. Kettering's shame was so enormous that he tendered his resignation in a letter to Sloan.

Sloan declined to let Kettering go. But America's most famous automotive engineer after Henry Ford emerged with a renewed sensitivity to the profit-making needs of his corporation. In this regard, TEL held out an immediate lifeline. Writing Kettering from Florida in March 1923, Midgley related a mad brainstorm whose relevance had now become fully clear to Kettering. "My dear boss," he began, "The way I feel about the Ethyl Gas situation is about as follows: It looks as though we could count on a minimum of 20 percent of the gas sold in the country if we advertise and go after the business -- this at three cent gross to us from each gallon sold. I think we ought to go after it as soon as we can without being too hasty."

Midgley barely scratched the surface of the wealth to come. With a legal monopoly based on patents that would provide a royalty on practically every gallon of gasoline sold for the life of its patent, Ethyl promised to make GM shareholders -- among whom the du Ponts, Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the largest -- very rich. Profit-free ethanol, indeed. As Kovarik has calculated: "With gasoline sales [in 1923] around six billion gallons per year, 20 percent would come to about 1.2 billion gallons, and three cents gross would represent $36 million. With the cost of production and distribution running less than one cent per gallon of treated gasoline, more than two thirds of the $36 million would be annual gross profit. Of course, within a decade 80 percent of the then 12 billion gallon market used Ethyl, for an annual gross of almost $300 million."

The fears of excessive hastiness expressed in Midgley's letter were evidently allayed. In April 1923, one month after he'd performed his riveting calculations, the General Motors Chemical Company was established to produce TEL, with Charles Kettering as president and Thomas Midgley as vice president.

Octane, the Motorist's Friend

Beginning in 1921, GM's executive committee began to articulate the first principles that would come to be known as Sloanism -- that is, planned obsolescence and product differentiation through speed, power, style and color; "a car for every purse and purpose," as Sloan was fond of saying.

Between 1922 and the end of the decade, Sloan and his GM associates would devise marketing strategies that would see GM overtake Ford as the world's largest automobile manufacturer and set the tone for the next 50 years of American automotive consumption. Central to this growth would be an awareness that consumers were no longer looking merely for basic transportation, which was the stock in trade of Ford's beloved Model T. In addition to consumer financing (which Ford opposed), Sloan was convinced that style, snob appeal and speed would help GM steal its customers away. He was right.

The new additive could be fitted neatly into the Sloanist equation. For while TEL was initially seen by Kettering and his staff as a way to cure knock and to husband fossil-fuel supplies, the high compression it enabled in motors was just as easily exploited to make cars faster and more powerful, thus easier to sell. Alan Loeb, a former EPA attorney and lead historian who has examined the period closely, has neatly summed up Kettering's conversion: "By 1923...it was clear that Kettering's original purpose for the antiknock research had given way to GM's desire to improve auto performance without regard for its effect on fuel economy....Kettering did not give up on efficiency and conservation as his own ideals, but ever after he knew better than to try to push a product that would not sell. In later years, even as Kettering's advocacy of conservation became more and more public, it represented GM's true motive less and less."

Tellingly, Ethyl's earliest advertisements dealt solely with speed and power and invariably neglected to mention its active ingredient: lead. With the advent of the Depression in the thirties, Ethyl's advertising nodded to the economic realities of the day but still focused on power. An ad that ran in February 1933 contains a Norman Rockwell-esque portrait of a small boy who is complaining to his embarrassed father, "Gee, Pop -- they're all passing you." The accompanying text rubs it in. "They didn't pass you when your car was bright and new -- and you still don't like to be left behind. So just remember this: the next best thing to a brand new car is your present car with Ethyl."

With the formation of the GM Chemical Company, work on a large-scale Du Pont TEL plant began immediately. Irénée du Pont hailed his company's technical director, W.F. Harrington: "It is essential that we treat this undertaking like a war order so far as making speed and producing the output, not only in order to fulfill the terms of the contract as to time but because every day saved means one day advantage over possible competition."

Significantly, GM's patent on TEL would have covered any threat from competing makers of lead additive. Thus, as Kovarik has reasoned, the competition referred to must have been from those who would have offered a different kind of antiknock. GM, Du Pont and TEL's other backers would long publicly claim there were no conceivable alternatives to the lead antiknock additive. But the facts were otherwise. Ethanol was still out there. And GM negotiated throughout the twenties with Germany's I.G. Farben over an additive it made from iron carbonyl. Then, in August 1925, Kettering himself joyously announced "Synthol," a blended automotive fuel of benzene and alcohol that promised to "double gas mileage." There was, as we shall see, an unexpected -- and momentary -- business need for Synthol. The point is, there were alternatives.

Tetraethyl Death

In August, Du Pont's TEL plant opened at Deepwater, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Wilmington. Less than thirty days would pass before the first of several TEL poisoning deaths of workers there would occur. Not surprisingly, given Du Pont's stranglehold on all local media within its domain along the Delaware, the deaths went unreported.

Even so, news of these and similar deaths would inevitably come out. Realizing that its own medical research would be less than credible then, and having been turned down by reputable academics and the Public Health Service in its search for consultants to help "refute any false propaganda," GM hurriedly contracted the US Bureau of Mines in September 1923 to explore the dangers of TEL. Even by the lax standards of its day, the bureau was a docile corporate servant, with not an adversarial bone in its body. It saw itself as in the mining promotion business, with much of its scientific work undertaken in collaboration with industry. The bureau's presumptive harmlessness notwithstanding, to its written agreement with GM was nonetheless added a remarkable proviso, that the bureau "refrain from giving out the usual press and progress reports during the course of the work, as [GM] feels that the newspapers are apt to give scare headlines and false impressions before we definitely know what the influence of the material will be."

Indicative of the bureau leadership's fundamental outlook was an exchange between the superintendent of its Pittsburgh field station, where the TEL investigation was being conducted, and the bureau's chief chemist, S.C. Lind. By letter, Lind had objected to the use of the trade name "Ethyl" when referring to tetraethyl lead gasoline.

"Of course their [GM officials] object in doing so is fairly clear, and among other things they are not particularly desirous of having the name 'lead' appear in this case. That is alright from the standpoint of the General Motors Company but it is quite a question in my mind as to whether the Bureau of Mines would be justified in adopting this name so early in the game."

The superintendent replied that omission of "the use of the word 'lead' in the interbureau correspondence" was intentional to prevent leaks to the papers. "If it should happen to get some publicity accidentally, it would not be so bad if the word 'lead' were omitted as this term is apt to prejudice somewhat against its use."

Indeed, lead had acquired a bad name by 1920, as scientific and public awareness of its supreme deadliness as an occupational and pediatric hazard was increasing. Then, in April 1924, two GM employees engaged in the manufacture of TEL at a pilot plant in Dayton also died of lead poisoning. Large numbers of nonfatal poisonings were noted at this time. Thomas Midgley was said to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." But Kettering, emerging from his copper-cooled funk, wouldn't slow down. Two months later, he would urge Du Pont to step up production. At the same time, seeking even greater control over Bureau of Mines test results, GM stipulated that "all manuscripts, before publication, will be submitted to the Company for comment and criticism.

By any measure, the TEL constituency had experienced a run of rum luck, and in June 1924 GM president Sloan, "gravely concerned about the poison hazard" and deaths at TEL plants in Dayton and Deepwater, approved the formation of a medical committee, with J. Gilman Thompson, consulting physician to Standard Oil of New Jersey (which had been marketing Ethyl and dabbling in its manufacture), as chairman.

Following its investigation, GM's medical committee delivered what was apparently a negative and highly cautionary report on TEL. But Irénée du Pont wrote Sloan on August 29, 1924, and told him not to worry: "I have read the doctors' report and am not disturbed by the severity of the findings."

For some unknown reason, the report of Sloan's blue-ribbon medical committee, like many original documents referenced in GM reports on TEL, is not available in the company's public archives.

Hello, Ethyl

Meanwhile, Standard Oil of New Jersey had developed a faster, cheaper method of synthesizing TEL. In August 1924 production began in a makeshift works at its Bayway plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. GM still held the TEL patent, but Standard now had the better manufacturing technology and a patent of its own to prove it.

To the apparent surprise of some at Du Pont, which had not been producing the fluid fast enough for GM's liking, the oil company (one of twenty-seven companies formed by the 1911 breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust) and the automobile company formed a joint venture, which they called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation.

In one of its first official acts, the newly formed Ethyl Gasoline Corporation evinced renewed sensitivity to spin (not to mention a justifiably elevated level of paranoia) by insisting that its contract with the Bureau of Mines be modified yet again, to reflect that "before publication of any papers or articles by your Bureau, they should be submitted to them [Ethyl] for comment, criticism, and approval." Thus, as the public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, who unearthed the story of government cooperation with the purveyors of leaded gasoline in the 1920s, have observed, the newly formed Ethyl Corporation was given "veto power over the research of the United States government."

Du Pont would supply most of Ethyl's TEL requirements for years to come, but, according to a letter written by Alfred Sloan to Irénée du Pont in the fall of 1924, in an accommodation to Standard Oil that firm had been permitted to maintain a small "semiworks" at its Bayway refinery. Later, Du Pont engineers would express serious reservations about the safety of Standard's facility. An internal 1936 Du Pont history would recount that the company was "greatly shocked at the manifest danger of the equipment and methods [and] at the inadequate safety precautions" at the Standard facility, but their suggestions were "waved aside." Unfortunate it was.

On October 26, 1924, the first of five workers who would die in quick succession at Standard Oil's Bayway TEL works perished, after wrenching fits of violent insanity; thirty-five other workers would experience tremors, hallucinations, severe palsies and other serious neurological symptoms of organic lead poisoning. In total, more than 80 percent of the Bayway staff would die or suffer severe poisoning. News of these deaths was the first that many Americans heard of leaded gasoline -- although it would take a few days, as the New York City papers and wire services rushed to cover a mysterious industrial disaster that Standard stonewalled and GM declined to delve into.

On October 30, days after the first Bayway death, the press was at last invited to Standard's New York City headquarters for an afternoon session of long-overdue, professionally crafted spin control. Thomas Midgley had been rushed to 26 Broadway from Dayton and would address the corps. But first, Standard's medical consultant, J. Gilman Thompson, presented them with a typewritten statement, supplying the company's most sculpted telling of recent history yet:

[TEL's] recently discovered use for greatly promoting the efficiency of gasoline engines has led to its manufacture on a commercial scale through processes still more or less in a stage of development. This has occasioned unforeseen accidents...One of these has been the sudden escape of fumes from large retorts, and the inhalation of such fumes gives rise to acute symptoms, particularly congestion of the brain, producing a condition not unlike delirium tremens. Although there is lead in the compound, these acute symptoms are wholly unlike those of chronic lead poisoning such as painters often have.

"There is no obscurity whatever about the effects of the poison and characterizing the substance as 'mystery gas' or 'insanity gas' is grossly misleading.

Asked to assess their liability to families of men who said they were not warned of the dangers, Standard Oil officials said "the rejection of many men as physically unfit to engage in the work of the Bayway plant, daily physical examinations, constant admonitions as to wearing rubber gloves and using gas masks and not wearing away from the plant clothing worn during work hours should have been sufficient indication to every man in the plant that he was engaged 'in a man's undertaking.'"

The falsity and cruelty of Standard's position were manifest, the ironies rife. First, Standard wasn't in experimental production. It was making TEL to sell. Second, its stony silence alone had led to stories in the press about a "mystery" gas, because reporters learned that TEL had been dubbed "loony gas" from Bayway workers whom they interviewed after being brushed off by the company brass. Finally, the escapes of gas weren't sudden, as claimed, but ongoing, the poisoning cumulative. The doctors at Reconstruction Hospital had told the Herald Tribune that violent insanity was "brought on by the gradual infiltration of lead in their systems."

The day's true highlight, however, would be Midgley's presentation. The celebrated engineer and Ethyl VP, who had only recently been forced to leave work to recover from lead poisoning, proposed to demonstrate that TEL was not dangerous in small quantities, by rubbing some of it on his hands. Midgley was fond of this exhibition and would repeat it elsewhere, washing his hands thoroughly in the fluid and drying them on his handkerchief. "'I'm not taking any chance whatever,' he said. 'Nor would I take any chance doing that every day.'"

Ethyl Adrift

The response of local governments and public health officials to the Bayway disaster was swift and stern. The day of Midgley's peculiar demonstration, the New York City Board of Health banned the sale of TEL-enhanced gasoline. Within a matter of days Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the State of New Jersey would ban gasoline containing the lead additive. Ethyl would continue to be sold in the Midwest, but elsewhere on the East Coast its use was unofficially discouraged by authorities.

In early November 1924, after the fifth Bayway worker died, the Bureau of Mines study on TEL was released (remember that GM and then Ethyl had reserved for themselves the right to approve the timing of its release). Not surprisingly, the bureau's report, based on limited animal testing it had conducted, gave the substance a clean bill of health.

Yandell Henderson of Yale and others assailed the Bureau of Mines study as a hopelessly shoddy investigation financed by an interested party, Ethyl, and bemoaned Washington's antiregulatory climate. The bureau had "investigated the danger to the public of acute lead poisoning," he noted derisively, and had failed even to take into account the possibility that the atmosphere might be polluted to such an extent along automobile thoroughfares that those who worked or lived along such streets would gradually absorb lead in sufficient quantities to poison them in the course of months...

Echoing the fears of PHS lab director William Clark more than two years earlier, Henderson had clearly isolated the greatest threat of leaded gasoline -- not the severe cases of industrial poisoning that had grabbed the headlines but the slow, unrelenting low-level exposure that was sure to occur as the use of leaded gasoline spread. As we shall see, the industry would use this dichotomy -- accidental deaths at the plant versus insidious poisoning -- to its advantage. The former risk could be acknowledged because it could be prevented, while the latter was doubted, denied and endlessly debated.

Three months after the Bayway disaster, a grand jury acquitted Standard Oil of criminal responsibility for the tragedy despite the fact that, as the New York Times stated in summarizing the grand jury's findings: "The report found that the deaths were directly due to poisoning...[and] recommended that before it resumes operations the company try to perfect some machinery by which ethyl gas can be manufactured without endangering life."

This was good news for Ethyl's backers, but strangely at variance with the views of Standard's own partners. As Du Pont's internal history of 1936 concluded: "Notwithstanding...foreknowledge at the peril, the precautions taken in the small manufacturing operation at Bayway were grossly inadequate." And GM took a dim view of the Standard operation as well. Ferris Hurd, a GM attorney testifying in the government's 1953 antitrust suit against Du Pont, summarized events:

[Standard] put up a plant that lasted two months and killed five people and practically wiped out the rest of the plant. The disaster was so bad that the state of New Jersey entered the picture and issued an order that Standard could never go back into the manufacture of [tetraethyl lead] without the permission of the state of New Jersey. In fact, the furor over it was so great that the newspapers took it up, and they misrepresented it, and instead of realizing that the danger was in the manufacture, they got to thinking that the danger was exposure of the public in the use of it, and the criticism of its use was so great that it was banned in many cities and they had to close down the manufacture and sale of Ethyl.

Of course, there was a danger to the public in the use of Ethyl, but the public wouldn't know it for decades. The wave of publicity surrounding the Bayway disaster had left Ethyl on the defensive, however. The company knew it would be up to government to set matters right.

A Gift of God?

Today business school students carefully analyze the corporate response to the scare caused by a small batch of tainted Tylenol and widely hail it as a work of genius. Yet it was nothing compared with Ethyl's road back from disaster, skillfully negotiated with a product that was a deadly poison from the get-go.

On Christmas Eve, 1924, Charles Kettering, Frank Howard of Standard and Du Pont chief engineer W.F. Harrington paid a private visit to Surgeon General Hugh Cumming to request that the Public Health Service hold public hearings on TEL. Cumming readily agreed.

On May 4, 1925, in an act exquisitely timed and brilliantly crafted to the right tone of seriousness for the proceedings, Ethyl publicly withdrew its product from the market. On May 20, 87 participants convened in the Butler Building at Third and B Streets, in Washington, DC, along with a dozen reporters, for the Surgeon General's conference. Conspicuously absent was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose agency was charged with oversight of the PHS. Nowhere was it reported that Mellon family interests controlled Gulf Oil, which had recently acquired an exclusive Ethyl distributorship.

At the hearing, Standard's Frank Howard (soon to be an Ethyl director) uttered the memorable pronouncement that TEL was "a gift of God" that conscience and the march of human progress compelled GM to exploit.

"What is our duty under the circumstances? Should we throw this thing aside? Should we say, 'No, we will not use it,' in spite of the efforts of the government and the General Motors Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. toward developing this very thing, which is a certain means of saving petroleum? Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely?"

Ethyl sales manager A.S. Maxwell got even more carried away, telling a reporter that engines would run so efficiently with leaded gas that GM was developing an engine that "will triple the best mileage a gallon of gasoline will give today." Actually, while the high compression Ethyl permitted -- like ethanol or any octane booster -- might have offered fuel-economy benefits, average fuel economy in the United States fell steadily from 1925, the year of Ethyl's introduction, through the seventies, when cars shrank and unleaded fuel became the standard. In 1974 GM's corporate average fuel economy had fallen to a near-comical 12.2 miles per gallon. By 1987, after unleaded became predominant and catalytic converters a standard, the sales/registered-fleet average for cars sold in the United States had climbed to 27.3 miles per gallon. Yet TEL defenders to this day cite conservation as its key benefit.

America's automotive population was multiplying exponentially, yet the Surgeon General's conference spent six hours and forty-five minutes deliberating on what Yandell Henderson had prophetically called "probably the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public" and reached no conclusion. Instead, it voted unanimously on a motion by Dr. Matthias Nicoll, New York State Commissioner of Health, to place the question of tetraethyl lead in the hands of Cumming and a seven-member committee of experts to be appointed by him, with orders to report back by January 1, 1926. And it commended Ethyl for withdrawing its product while the question of its effect on the public health was still unsettled.

Awkwardly for Ethyl, soon after the conference ended but months before the Surgeon General's newly impaneled committee could complete its study, details emerged about eight more TEL-related deaths and more than 300 injuries at Du Pont's sinister Deepwater plant.

Happily for the du Ponts and the other lead interests, on January 19, 1926, the special committee appointed by Surgeon General Cumming found "no good grounds" for prohibiting the sale of Ethyl gasoline.

The committee reviewed the evidence of studies it had conducted in Ohio on 252 workers exposed to lead in their occupations as chauffeurs and garage men. While the committee noted "a greater storage of lead in the bodies of those exposed to ethyl gasoline" and lead in the dust of garages dispensing ethyl, nothing conclusive could be established in the short time given to it. It did not give tetraethyl lead a clean bill of health or settle the question of its effect on the public health. In fact, it cautioned:

It remains possible that if the use of leaded gasolines becomes widespread, conditions may arise very different from those studied by us which would render its use more of a hazard than would appear to be the case from this investigation. Longer experience may show that even such slight storage of lead...may lead eventually in susceptible individuals to recognizable or to chronic degenerative diseases of a less obvious character....

In view of such possibilities the committee feels that the investigation begun under their direction must not be allowed to lapse...The vast increase in the number of automobiles throughout the country makes the study of all such questions a matter of real importance from the standpoint of public health, and the committee urges strongly that a suitable appropriation be requested from Congress for the continuance of these investigations under the supervision of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service.

While proposing that the sale of leaded gasoline should go forward, regulated by the Surgeon General, the committee passed a resolution calling on the Public Health Service to conduct further studies. Separately, the president of the Society of Automotive Engineers called for additional investigations concerning lead's possible relation to sterility. And the American Chemical Society, which might have been supposed a lockstep supporter of Ethyl, proposed around this time that increased governmental regulation over chemicals "is a subject worthy of further discussion."

Thus, even the industry's paid scientists were uneasy about the use of lead in gasoline. Yet none of these calls for further government action were ever acted upon, and it was this failure that gave Ethyl its opening. The PHS never conducted the studies, the Surgeon General never lobbied Congress to pay for them and, for the next 40 years, all research on TEL's health impact would be underwritten by GM, Standard Oil, Du Pont, Ethyl and lead-industry trade associations. With the credulity-stretching statement of an Ethyl spokesman that the only purpose of GM and Standard Oil -- "two of the largest units in the automobile and oil industry" -- was "to conserve a vital natural resource," the company welcomed the committee's report as total vindication. "We plan to resume operations," Ethyl announced without delay the day of the report's release.

But There Is No Alternative

Misrepresenting the Surgeon General's committee report findings and glossing over its call for further study, Ethyl medical consultant Robert Kehoe recalled in a 1928 article the government's abdication of its charge: "As it appeared from [the committee's] investigation that there was no evidence of immediate danger to the public health, it was thought that these necessarily expensive studies should not be repeated at present, at public expense, but that they should be continued at the expense of the industry most concerned, subject, however, to the supervision of the Public Health Service." His own study, Kehoe wrote unsurprisingly, failed to "show any evidence for the existence of such hazards."

Others were less sanguine about the committee's report and Kehoe's summary of the evidence. Committee member Dr. David Edsall, dean of Harvard's School of Public Health, called the report incomplete and "half-baked." C.E.A. Winslow of Yale recommended that "the search for an investigation of antiknock compounds be continued intensively with the object of securing effective agents containing less poisonous metals (such as iron, nickel, tin, etc.) or no metals at all." Winslow unsuccessfully sought to have the committee mention alternatives to TEL in its final report, forwarding this recommendation to the PHS, along with correspondence from the Ford Motor Company.

Surgeon General Cumming was not interested in alternatives to lead, even though proof of their existence ought to have immediately thrown the veracity of all Ethyl utterances into question. Speaking in August 1925, for instance, Thomas Midgley had told a meeting of scientists, "So far as science knows at the present time, 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 rests in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified."

Midgley had conveniently overlooked his earlier, high-profile endorsement of ethanol, as would Kettering and the entire US press corps. Kettering was also forgetting Synthol, the octane-boosting alternative he had publicized just months earlier when it looked like Ethyl might be forced to close shop. With the government's de facto seal of approval in hand for TEL, Kettering never again mentioned Synthol.

Uncle Sam Lends a Hand

Far from heeding his committee's call for the initiation of further studies on the effects of widespread use of tetraethyl lead, the Surgeon General thrust himself quickly into the role of international cheerleader for Ethyl's lead gasoline additive. In 1928 England's Daily Mail quoted British scientists voicing fear over the potential public health hazard posed by TEL, which was soon to be introduced to the British market by the Anglo-American oil company brand Pratt's. Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, apprised Surgeon General Cumming of this development and received a warm, familiar response. "Your courtesy in keeping us informed of such developments is helpful and I am grateful for its continuance," Cumming replied, before contacting the British ministry.

Soon thereafter, England's Ministry of Health would give TEL a clean bill of health, referring to American findings. This would be hard to jibe with a soon-to-be-published report in the British Medical Journal on "the slow, subtle, insidious saturation of the system by infinitesimal doses of lead extending over a long period of time," but Cumming wasn't through yet.

Foreshadowing years of sterling service on behalf of Ethyl, the Surgeon General, the nation's highest-ranking medical officer, would put pen to paper again in 1928, encouraging New York City sanitary officials to lift the city's ban on the use of TEL-laced gasoline. "There are no good grounds" for the ban, he implored them.

In 1932 the du Pont family would temporarily shift party allegiance and support to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential bid with a sizable contribution to his campaign fund. The Democratic Administration was swift to return the favor. A year after FDR's inauguration, the Surgeon General would busy himself writing letters of introduction for Ethyl officials to public health counterparts in foreign countries.

By 1936 Ethyl fluid would be added to 90 percent of gasoline sold in America -- a resounding commercial success. But even this would not be enough. Responding to a complaint lodged by Ethyl that year, the Federal Trade Commission issued a restraining order preventing competitors from criticizing leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. Ethyl gasoline, the FTC order read, "is entirely safe to the health of motorists and the public...and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public."

Dr. Robert Kehoe of the University of Cincinnati, Ethyl's chief medical consultant, would express the opinion following the inconclusive 1926 report of the Surgeon General's committee (of which he was a member) that there was no basis for concluding that leaded fuels posed any health threat whatsoever. And while it is true that tetraethyl lead's opponents could point in 1924 to no exact scientific test of leaded gasoline emissions as incontrovertible proof of their hazards, there was a large body of evidence, dating back 3,000 years, that lead is poison.

Though the principals must surely have been aware of this historical evidence, it will suffice to recap merely a few of the contemporaneous scientific descriptions of lead's poisonous effects. In 1910, for instance, Alice Hamilton completed a ground-breaking and widely reported study of the lead industries for the State of Illinois, finding pervasive worker poisoning and conditions markedly worse than in European industry. In 1914 Americans Henry Thomas and Kenneth Blackfan detailed pediatric lead-poisoning death in the case of a boy who ate white-lead paint bitten off a crib railing. By 1921, the year of Midgley's discovery of TEL as an octane-boosting gasoline additive, the weight of the evidence was such that America's National Lead Company, sworn enemy of the antilead movement, was forced to admit grudgingly that its product was indeed a poison, in all its many forms (e.g., carbonate of lead, lead oxides and sulfate and sulfide of lead). The following year, the League of Nations would recommend banning white-lead paints for interior use on health grounds, as many European countries had already done. Establishing a pattern of tolerance for this most dangerous element, the United States declined to adopt the league's resolution.

By 1928, emboldened by a refreshingly compliant government and TEL's effective victory before the Surgeon General, National Lead and St. Joseph's Lead would form the Lead Industries Association to take back the ground ceded with National Lead's 1921 admission. "Of late the lead industries have been receiving much undesirable publicity," LIA reminded its members, as if it had forgotten in the intervening years that its product was a deadly poison. For years to come, the LIA, on whose board Du Pont and Ethyl officers served, would carefully gather, fund, support and disseminate propaganda supporting its pro-lead views, fighting all who would stand in its way. This disinformation, along with the lack of an adequate regulatory framework and the expense and difficulty of scientifically proving lead's insidious impact -- bought manufacturers of lead paint and lead gasoline more than 50 years of unjust deserts.

The Kehoe Rule

Ethyl president Earle Webb once listed Robert Kehoe as one of three men without whom Ethyl could not have done what it did, and surely this must be so. Hired by Kettering in 1924 on behalf of GM to study hazards of TEL manufacturing plants, the young toxicologist quickly demonstrated the unerring instinct for pleasing one's masters that guarantees one employment of a more lasting nature. In 1925 he was appointed chief medical consultant of the Ethyl Corporation and remained in the post until his retirement in 1958. But it was in Kehoe's day job, as the outspoken director of the Kettering Laboratory -- founded with an initial $130,000 gift from GM, Du Pont and Ethyl at the University of Cincinnati, where the lead industry paid Kehoe's salary for half a century -- that he really rose to the challenge of promoting TEL. Against Kehoe's lab and decades of its pseudo-science, the general and unfunded concerns of the public health community were doomed for close to fifty years.

As Kehoe told a Senate committee with rare accuracy in 1966, "at present, this [Kettering] Laboratory is the only source of new information on this subject [occupational and public health standards for lead] and its conclusions have a wide influence in this country and abroad in shaping the point of view and the activities, with respect to this question, of those who are responsible for industrial and public hygiene."

Summing up the findings of a lifetime, Kehoe told Congress that he and his colleagues "had been looking for 30 years for evidence of bad effects from leaded gasoline in the general population and had found none."

Kehoe's central belief -- criticized by medical authorities from Yale, Harvard and Columbia at the Surgeon General's original 1925 conference and thoroughly discredited today, though still embraced by the lead-additive industry -- was that lead appeared naturally in the human body; that the high blood-lead levels his test subjects exhibited were normal and healthy. In fact, independent researchers later realized, Kehoe's control patients -- the ones who wouldn't be exposed to leaded gas in his studies -- were invariably already saturated with lead, which had the effect of making exposed persons' high lead load appear less worrisome.

Late in his career, Kehoe contended that lead levels in gasoline could -- and should -- be raised.

In recent years, a new generation of academics has singled out Robert Kehoe as the father of a rule, or paradigm, of profound importance, one that was to govern American industry and its parade of hazardous products for much of the twentieth century. By relying on what Jerome Nriagu of the University of Michigan has called the cascading uncertainty rule ("There is always uncertainty to be found in a world of imperfect information"), the lead industry and makers and marketers of TEL gasoline additives were able to argue in 1925: "You say it's dangerous. We say it's not. Prove us wrong." (Or, as Nriagu prefers, "Show me the data.") They still do.

As a result, Ethyl had its cake and ate it, several times. If the company's substance checked out as safe, then it would have been shown to have behaved responsibly. If not, it would take an eternity to prove, during which time the company could keep challenging test results and calling for more data. "Both possible outcomes," the lead historian Alan Loeb has written, "accommodated Ethyl. The general public was dealt all the risk and Ethyl and its owners were insulated from responsibility. To the extent that there was a health consequence, the Kehoe rule placed the burden upon the public." (Articles and papers by Loeb on "Sloanism," Ethyl's divestments and the Kehoe rule include: Birth of the Kettering Doctrine, Surmountable Obstacles to the Adoption of Emissions Trading Programs and Birth of the Kehoe Rule.)

In the past 50 years, nuclear power, tobacco, chemical, asbestos, coal, pesticide and automobile interests have adopted strategies similar to the one developed by Kehoe. Clutching most of the technology and all of the research capital in their own hands, they'll say "Prove us wrong, and we'll change." But confronted with damning evidence, they'll repeatedly challenge the methodology of the studies or the bias of researchers. All of which takes time. When these defenses fail, the whole notion of extrapolating from test results on animals might be questioned.

Ethyl Changes Hand

By the late thirties Ethyl had sewed up the US market, as noted, and was making major inroads in Europe. After World War II, Third World markets would begin to be opened. On the surface things looked pretty good for the company, which by now had blanketed the earth with its "gift of God." As "The Ethyl Story," an insert in the Ethyl corporation's annual report for 1963, observed with enthusiasm, "today, lead alkyl antiknock compounds are used in more than 98 percent of all gasoline sold in the United States and in billions of gallons more sold in the rest of the world. Leaded gasoline is available at 200,000 service stations in this country and thousands of others around the globe."

Strange it was, then, that in 1962 GM and Standard suddenly dumped the Ethyl Corporation on the market. Even more surprising to many was the buyer, the tiny Albermarle Paper Manufacturing Company of Richmond, Virginia, and the structure of the deal: It was the modern world's first recorded leveraged buyout. Albemarle, owned by the Gottwald family, had acquired Ethyl, eighteen times its size, with $200 million of borrowed money, making the front page of the New York Times.

No one who's talking knows why GM wanted out of Ethyl in 1962. Ethyl's official historian notes dryly that profits were flat in the late fifties. The company's TEL patents had expired in 1947, and this allowed Nalco, PPG and Houston Chemical to get into the TEL game on the back of Ethyl's yeoman work. But Ethyl was still the 800-pound gorilla in the tetraethyl arena; overall, profits were pleasingly plump and Ethyl's annual reports were upbeat. A more important factor may have been the sense that antitrust was in the air, with the du Pont family being ordered by the government during this period to divest billions in GM shares. Ethyl's incestuous paternity and its unseemly relations with Nazi Germany during World War II were reasons to avoid closer scrutiny by a nosy government. And, just perhaps, GM might have known something heavy was coming.

Ethyl's new owners would, in fact, soon find themselves staring at more worrisome smoke signals than a patch of duff profits. In July 1943 the Los Angeles Times reported the city's first major smog episode. In 1950 Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit reported that the interaction of hydrocarbons (HC) and oxides of nitrogen (NOX) caused smog in Los Angeles. By 1953 automobiles would be identified as the region's largest source of hydrocarbons. End part 1.

Jamie Lincoln Kitman, a New York lawyer and writer, is a columnist and editor for Automobile Magazine and England's Car. Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. The complete version of this article as well as the letters exchange that followed it's publication and a bilbliography of articles from which the author drew important information can be accessed from The Nation's Web site, The Secret History of Lead: Special Report.

Letters received by The Nation regarding this article

Part 2 of this article