The Man With an Instinct for the Regrettable

Thomas Midgley Jr. was, on paper, one of the great American inventors. He graduated from Cornell in 1911, held more than a hundred patents, won the Nichols, Perkin, and Priestley Medals, and in 1944 was elected president of the American Chemical Society.

He had a gift for solving problems in ways that created much larger ones.

In December 1921, working under Charles Kettering at General Motors, he discovered that tetraethyl lead stopped engines knocking. When workers at the Bayway refinery began dying in fits of violent insanity, Midgley called a press conference, poured the lead compound over his bare hands, and inhaled the vapor for sixty seconds. He said he could do this every day. He had, the year before, been treated for lead poisoning in Miami.

In 1930 he invented Freon. He introduced it to the American Chemical Society by inhaling a lungful and exhaling it onto a lit candle, which went out. Shortly after, he was made a vice president.

In 1940, at fifty-one, he caught polio and lost the use of his legs. He designed a system of ropes and pulleys above his bed so he could hoist himself upright each morning.

On November 2, 1944, it strangled him.

He finally invented something that only harmed one person.