Tetraethyl Lead
Boss Ket, Midge, and The Ethyl Corporation
In the 1920s, the second and third most famous automotive engineers in the country were Charles Kettering (aka “Boss Ket”1 or just “Boss”2) and his employee, Thomas Midgley, Jr. (aka “Midge”3). Kettering had designed the electric self-starter—the prototype of all modern ignition systems, and the reason that cars need batteries—at his Dayton Engineering Laboratory Company (DELCO), which he had sold to William Crapo Durant to put in GM’s cars. Kettering reported that one of Midge’s ancestors was a “trusted employee” of James Watt, just as Midge was his own most trusted employee.4 Midgley would later become known to the public as “The brilliant inventor who made two of history’s biggest mistakes,” as the patentholder for tetraethyl lead, discussed here, and freon, chloroflurocarbon, which put a hole in the ozone that could have destroyed all life on earth.5 After Kettering sold DELCO in 1916 and formed a new company, Dayton Metal Products Co. Research Division, Midge kept working for him. This is when they began working on knock.
There is a way in which engine knock was a real problem, but the search for its solution was also cover for a deeper set of motivations that animated the push for widespread adoption of leaded gasoline in the 1920s.
Engine knock occurred at the upper limits of an engine’s performance, and could only be rectified by burning a fuel that has more molecules of the highly-explosive chemicals in gasoline, including but not limited to iso-octane. Iso-octane, and its equivalents (measured by Midgley in reference to iso-octane, resulting in a total “octane number”), make the fuel explode harder when ignited, and so drive a more efficient engine with higher internal pressure differentials. Boss Ket was miffed that engine knock was being blamed on his DELCO units,6 which had competition including the Bosch magneto ignition.7 He wrote in his unpublished memoir, “The Bosch magneto people had representatives out telling Cadillac dealers that if they had magnetos instead of battery ignition they wouldn’t have all the trouble.”8
But to Ket and Midge, the solution was obvious: mix alcohol in with your gasoline.
The Civil-war era tax on fuel alcohol had finally been removed in 1906 by the “free alcohol” bill that Teddy Roosevelt championed as a way to introduce competition against the Standard Oil trust.9 In reality, the cost of refined oil products could stay below the cost of even untaxed alcohol, and Standard Oil could live on fine without trying to target alcohol fuels with its anticompetitive tactics, even to the point of allowing enthusiasm for alcohol as an automotive fuel to blossom into a whole movement.
The figurehead of that movement for fuel alcohol was also, along with Rockefeller, one of the most vocal opponents of beverage alcohol. He also happened to be the most powerful American Nazi. You guessed it, Henry Ford. In 1925, in an interview with Christian Science Monitor, in which he said that ethanol—“fuel from vegetation”—would be the “fuel of the future.”10 Ford funded two major conferences in Dearborn on “chemurgy,” an ideological hybrid of chemistry and liberalism that put forth an idea of American self-sufficiency that was the mirror image of the Nazi’s goal of German self-sufficiency.11
(Unlike the Civil War-era alcohol taxes, prohibition had specific carve-outs for industrial and fuel alcohol; indeed one of the stated goals of the Volstead act was to support fuel alcohol production to offset the losses to the distilleries.)
Like Ford, Midge and Boss Ket were big boosters of fuel alcohol. They designed high-compression engines that burned 7:1 alcohol to fuel blends. In 1921, Midge invited the media to watch him drive just such a car from Dayton to Indianapolis.12
Rockefeller and his vassals weren’t thrilled about all this enthusiasm for alcohol fuels. They controlled the automotive fuel market, and they intended to remain. But, at the same time, they were selling alcohol fuel in Europe,13 and, more pressingly, anxiety about oil depletion had firmly taken hold—of everyone. It seemed prudent to develop an alternative “fuel of the future” when the fuel of the present appeared to be running out in the 1920s.
In 1920, the US Geological Survey released a report, “The Petroleum Resources of the World”14 that opened “Petroleum in the United States is a wasting asset so far depleted” He estimated the total oil reserves remaining in the US at 6.7 billion barrels, which would last only a few years.15 In that year the price of crude shot up above $3.00, where it had by a factor of three from 1917 prices.16 This occurred in the context of growing adoption of cars; Although U.S. oil production doubled between 1914 and 1919, it couldn’t keep up with the demand as the number of cars on the road increased. Worse, despite the vindictiveness displayed at Versailles, the U.S. hadn’t secured any reliable foreign sources of oil.17 Fear of oil shortages caused some analysts to warn that the U.S. might go to war with Great Britian to secure access to the Persian Gulf oilfields.18
Inside Standard Oil, the emphasis was not on finding an alternative to their product, but rather on finding ways to get more commercial fuel out of each unit of crude oil. The techniques that were adopted were in large part responsible for the increase of the problem of engine knock in the post-WWI years. They in essence diluted the quantity of octane and equivalents, resulting in octane ratings in the high 50s to low 60s.19 This exacerbated the problem of engine knock.
DuPont, which had accumulated vast capital during the Great War by providing the army with gunpowder (made with Chilean saltpeter), bought up a large stake in GM after the war. The crash of 1920 caught William Crapo Durant in a short squeeze, and he was forced to sell his majority share in GM and lost control of his company to the Du Ponts. The patriarch, Pierre du Pont, was brought out of retirement to become GM’s interim CEO.
Pierre du Pont decided that it was time to bring the Dayton research laboratories within the GM corporate structure. They bought up the firm, and Boss Ket became vice president of research, Midge comfortably under him, yet by his side. Ket and Midge, preoccupied with the predicted fuel shortage, continued to be interested in alcohol automotive fuels. But at the same time, they needed something that would make money. Alcohol might solve knock, but any idiot could make it, and it couldn’t be patented as the solution. Anyway, Pierre Du Pont was aware that committing GM to alcohol fuels might “hurt his relations” with Standard Oil. Kettering had pushed a copper-cooled engine that hadn’t worked out, and he felt pressure to deliver something that would work.
And so, Ket and Midge began to look for “low percentage” antiknock gasoline additives. The dream was a “pill” to “dope” gasoline to improve its octane rating. Midge took the easiest approach; he brainstormed a list of a bunch of chemical substances. Personally, elements were his favorite—when he was in school, he’d carried around a periodic table with him, that according to Boss Ket.20 So his “pin board” list of candidate substances included a lot of elements, particularly metals, suspended in a solution of ethyl alcohol. Then he tested each candidate in his test engine. Upon hearing this later, Carl Bosch said, he couldn’t make his scientists work that way.
On December 9, 1921, in Midge’s lab, “The ear-splitting knock of their test engine turned to a smooth purr when only a small amount of the compound [tetraethyl lead] was added to the fuel supply. and all the men danced a non-scientific jig around the laboratory.”21 As little as three grams of the stuff per gallon increased the octane rating and eliminated the knock. The beauty of the scheme was that their capitalists stood to make a royalty on each gallon of leaded gasoline sold in the world—and if GM designed their cars to require it, they would soon have a healthy slice of the cashflow that sustained giants including Standard Oil. Pierre du Pont’s successor as CEO of GM was a man who made his own name famous through philanthropy, Alfred P. Sloan, who was the first industry figure to understand that automobiles were status symbols that Americans used not just to get around, but to flaunt their wealth. This required more powerful motors, which, even if they could have run on alcohol, could only run on the proprietary formula.
With discovery comes naming rights, a delicate matter given lead’s well-earned reputation as one of the very worst ways to die, because it destroys your mind first. At the moment when the Dayton boys got into the lead business, that nefarious substance was finally on the back foot, politically. Two months before Midge tested lead in 1921, the International Labour Organization adopted a convention against white lead in paint.22 Such victories for public advocates were easily swept aside by the corporate campaign that Naomi Oreskes et. al identify as the first “merchants of doubt” campaign, setting the strategy for the chemical, tobacco, and energy industries.23
And so, Kettering advised that the name emphasize the fluid in which the lead was suspended; Midge used tetraethyl solution because he knew that ethyl alcohol blended with gasoline. And so the substance became known as tetraethyl lead, abbreviated TET, and known colloquially as “ethyl.” Whether or not these names were intended to be obfuscatory, that was their function. Ethyl is a very common prefix in organic chemistry; it indicates the presence of a hydrocarbon radical derived from ethane. The boys had spent the last seven years, including wartime, researching and promoting ethyl alcohol fuel. In fact, that work continued well after TET became the substance of their day jobs at Ethyl. This was not because they were worried that lead’s toxic nature would be any hinderance to its adoption, but because they still thought that petroleum was about to run out. Alcohol continued to be the only viable ‘fuel of the future.’ Meantime, leaded gasoline had to become the fuel of the present.
April, 1923, Du Pont construction on a large-scale plant to manufacture TET. Almost immediately, workers were hospitalized with lead poisoning. They began calling the plant the “House of Butterflies” because of the lead-induced hallucinations that they experienced. Du Pont’s process relied on bromine, which was available domestically only from Dow Chemical, which was Du Pont’s chief rival, and internationally only from I.G. Farben.
On September 21, Frank Burr, a 37-year-old process operator who had worked for Du Pont for 25 years, became the first of eight employees to die of lead poisoning over the next two years. Du Pont did eventually adopt basic safety measures, in stark contrast to Standard Oil’s Bayway, New Jersey, plant. Demand for ethyl fluid grew as GM began their marketing blitzes, and “Ethylized gasoline” was available throughout the country. As Du Pont stepped up production in the summer of 1924, Guiseppe Ciance, 24, a “sludge laborer” and pipefitter Frank A Hanley, 28, were gripped by violent hallucinations and then died. Midge, himself experiencing symptoms of severe trembling and shortness of breath, fled to Florida to recuperate from lead poisoning, according to his own admission.
Sloan allowed “the boys,” as he referred to Boss Ket and Midge, to spin out a separate corporate entity to collect royalties on TET, the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation: Charles F. Kettering, President; Thomas A. Midgley, Jr., Vice President and General Manager.24 GM entered into a new and bigger production contract with Standard Oil Co., of New Jersey (which became Exxon) in January 1924. Standard had patented an alternative manufacturing process that used ethyl chloride instead of bromine, and turned out to be much more dangerous, because it involved much higher temperatures and pressures, and also because Standard didn’t provide their employees even basic protective equipment. In a Tuesday afternoon in October 1924, William McSweeny left work at the Bayway plant early, feeling nauseous and gripped by an inexplicable and overwhelming fear. Back in Ireland, he’d fought the British in the Irish Free State Army, so he was no stranger to fear and paranoia, but this was of a different order. He awoke the next morning shaking uncontrollably, hallucinating violently. It took four men to wrestle McSweeny into a police van, “writhing and screaming.”
The next day, Thursday, at the Bayway refinery, a handsome young Swede named Ernest Oelgert began howling that he could see hooded figures “coming after me,” scrambling across the factory floor. Workers wrapped him up in a straightjacket.
On Friday, two more workers were sent home, and one of them jumped out of the second story window of his home. The other one began threatening his family, and had to be wrestled into an ambulance just like McSweeny. All five workers were taken to New York City’s Reconstruction Hospital, where Oelgert died on Saturday evening. The medical examiner brought in to do Oelgert’s autopsy was horrified, and contacted the Union County New Jersey district attorney, who began an investigation. Newspapers quickly picked up the story. When asked for comment, the chief chemist of the Bayway works, Matthew D. Mann told reporters “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard.” The reporters who found this statement incredible couldn’t have known that Mann himself was probably himself delirious from lead poisoning when he made it.25 Standard would not disclose to the papers what chemicals were handled at the Bayway plant.
So began the great Ethyl controversy of the 1920s, which had been completely memory-holed by the 1980s, when leaded gasoline was finally successfully challenged by advocates. Historian Bill Kovarik—whose work is the basis for most of this section—has analyzed the newspaper coverage of controversy in the 1920s and found that the newspapers reacted to genuine concern raised by public academics like Alice Hamilton; contrary to the conventional narrative, Ethyl wasn’t attacked by muckrakers and yellow journalists in the 1920s. For example: headlines about “Death by Loony Gas” were written by the New York World, it was Bayway workers who first called it loony gas.
Standard executives were terrified – Kettering later implied that they feared criminal prosecution for the Bayway deaths. Midgley rushed from Dayton to New York for a press conference at Standard headquarters at 26 Broadway, at which he reported to the press that he “frequently bathed in” tetraethyl lead. He then poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, wiping off the excess with a handkerchief. Then he held a bottle under his nose, inhaling the fumes. The press was unconvinced, and New Jersey quickly banned the sale of ethyl gasoline.
When the Bayway disaster erupted, Boss Kettering was in France, on his way to Germany to meet with an actual boss, Carl Bosch. We must pause to bring his story up to the “present” of 1924.
Rosamond Young. Boss Ket: A Life of Charles Kettering, (New York: Longmans Green & co, 1961)
Stuart Leslie, Boss Kettering (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
William J. (Bill) Kovarik, The Ethyl Controversy: How the news media set the agenda for a public health controversy over leaded gasoline, 1924-1926. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993. https://billkovarik.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Ethyl.Dissertation.Kovarik.1993.pdf
Kovarik quotes Young, page 162.
From Kettering’s biography of Midge: Kettering, Charles F. “Thomas Midgley, Jr: 1889-1944.” National Academy of Sciences Annual Meeting, 1947. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/midgley-thomas.pdf
Link broken, use wayback machine
Steven Johnson, “The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes” The New York Times Magazine, March 15, 2023. https://archive.is/B5R0C https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/magazine/cfcs-inventor.html
Jamie Lincoln Kitman, “The Secret History of Lead” the Nation Magazine, Investigative Fund, March 20, 2000. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lead/
https://www.bosch.com/stories/bosch-magneto-ignition/
Kovarik dissertation, pg 50, cites
Charles F. Kettering, “The Story of Ethyl Gasoline,” Experimental draft based on interviews in 1946, GMI Alumni Foundation Collection of Industrial History, Flint, Misch. (herafter cited as GMI)
Wikipedia cites Washington Post, May 5, 1906, p. 1.
Kitman, “The Secret History of Lead.”
Hal Bernton, William Kovarik, and Scott Sklar, The Forbidden Fuel: A History of Power Alcohol, New Edition. Bison Books: March 2010. 18-20
Kovarik, 60.
The Forbidden Fuel.
David White, “The Petroleum Resources of the World” United States Geological Survey May 1920, https://doi.org/10.1177/000271622008900117, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271622008900117?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.4
(1.07 x 109m3)
US Crude Oil Purchase Price, U.S. Energy Information Administration, https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=F000000__3&f=A
Kovarik dissertation 49
Kovarik cites
John Malcom Blair, The Control of Oil. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. p. 32.
Denny, We Fight For Oil,p.274; https://archive.org/details/7ludwellDennyWeFightForOil
also see E.H. Davenport and S.R. Cooke: The Oil Trusts and Anglo-American Relations, London 1923.
Kovarik dissertation pg 122
Charles F. Kettering. National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir of Thomas Midgley, Rj. 1189-1944. The Academy of Sciences Volume XXIV—Eleventh Memoir, 1947. https://www.nasonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/midgley-thomas.pdf.
From Derek Splitter, Alexander Pawlowski, Robert Wagner. “A Historical Analysis of the Co-evolution of Gasoline Octane Number and Spark-Ignition Engines. Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering. January 2016 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/mechanical-engineering/articles/10.3389/fmech.2015.00016/full but they just cite the Jamie Kittman article in The Nation
“White Lead (Painting) Convention, 1921.” International Labour Organization. https://normlex.ilo.org/dyn/nrmlx_en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312158
Kovarik dissertation
Kovarik dissertation 97.
Kovarik dissertation 73 cites "Chief Chemist Escapes As 'Loony Gas' Victim," Brooklyn Daily Eagle November 2, 1924, p. 1. The article simply says that Mann had been among those hospitalized but was by then probably out of danger from the most acute stage of lead poisoning. Since Mann must have been poisoned before the plant closed, he probably had lead intoxication at the time of the interview.