Ed

Hey all, this is Ed.

Kara

And this is Kara.

Ed

And this is your day's dumpster fire. Look at us. Dumpster firing it in the morning.

Kara

I know it's weird. Normally it's not like dying.

Ed

Normally we're uh recording like at eight, nine o'clock at night, and we're just trying to stay awake through the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Ed

But this time, yeah, we're it's it's like 10 o'clock, right? Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. My left eardrum is blown out, but that's okay. I had a uh my wife's bird decided to scream into my left ear. So I hear a ringing noise. I really hope you don't hear a ringing noise. If you do, that's coming from my ear.

Kara

So that'd be pretty impressive if anybody heard the ringing in your ears.

Ed

Yeah, it's it would either be me missing a lot of medications or a lot of people in the audience missing their medications. So but uh yeah, we got a uh we got kind of a humdinger of a story here, and it's probably gonna be a two-parter. And I would love to be able to get both parts done today, if possible. If not, we'll figure it out. But uh I kind of want to uh jump into things, but real quick, I I have the uh the uh trash can fire for this episode. So we have a guy, and then and and if you're listening to this now, at our time, it is right around New Year's Eve. It's you know, we're like two days away. And every year we have a guy uh who lives across a busy street. He so he's like in a whole nother neighborhood. And every year, this guy for the 4th of July and for New Year's Eve, I don't know where he goes, but he he doesn't get fireworks that you could buy in a grocery store, right? He you know, the ones that just kind of stay on the ground and throw sparks all over the place, especially in Arizona.

Kara

We tend to get very nervous with those kinds of fireworks, like the ones that go way up in the air because it's dry and things catch on fire, and um it could potentially start like a giant, huge wildlife fire.

Ed

Uh yeah, yeah, like especially if it's super dry out here, one spark in all of Arizona goes up like a powder keg, it's just an instantaneous flash, and all fauna and wildlife is gone.

Kara

Correct. It's we don't want that.

Ed

No, but but this guy, I don't I don't know where he goes, and it's really sketchy, but he goes out somewhere and he comes back with ordnance. We're talking, you know, you you see those professional demonstrations of fireworks and uh like in in Phoenix, we had the Phoenix Fabulous Fourth. We you see the ones in like New York where the big apple drops, and then they have this giant fireworks display. This is this is a guy that goes out and somehow manages to source that kind of material. So he's coming home with like four inch, six inch, eight inch, ten, twelve inches, and he literally puts on a legit fireworks show in his backyard, and my my home office faces across the way, and I can see it. It it's pretty impressive. It is legit. The guy kind of knows what he's doing. Well, that all kind of blew up in his face literally last year, and last year he was doing his yearly show, and by the way, this is insanely illegal. Like, this is in Arizona, this is like you you can't get a permit for this. Like it like to get a permit, it takes six months in it, and you have to go through all the federal and state regulators, and you have to show all the safety parameters and insurance, and uh yeah, it it is a huge process. So, what this guy is doing is just beyond illegal. But it's funny because I'll sit outside and like this guy is like just doing his own firework show in his backyard, and you can see like four squad cars parked out there watching it. Like, like they'll arrest him after the show, kind of a thing. So, so last year something happened, and I was watching it, and there was an explosion in the backyard. One of the fireworks detonated without being launched up in the air, and so I saw that, and it was like this boom, right? And you see the fireworks embers kind of just making like a tiny little mushroom cloud in its backyard, and then after that, it was this massive explosion of everything detonating at once. And I don't know how many fireworks he had, but I remember watching it, and you just see one right after another, one explosion after another, and you see all these embers and different colors, and the little whistles, and the streamers shooting out, and you can hear the people screaming in the backyard, it's running around, and there's like people in surrounding houses, they were screaming because you know, like their their neighbor's backyard is is turning into a uh mushroom cloud, and it lasted for about 20 seconds, and that was it. Like, all you could see was this smoke billowing out of this guy's backyard. I don't know what that guy did. Like, how do you do do you call 911 after something like that? Like, you call 911, you're going to jail. Like, that's that's all there is to it. So I I think he had, I think the guy was smart enough to have a ton of fire extinguishers and and all that stuff. I've because his house didn't burn down. But I remember the following morning and I looked in his backyard because I'm on a second story, so I can kind of see over the street and a little bit over the wall. His whole backyard, if you could zoom down from like satellite view, would have been a perfect black rectangle. Everything was covered in soot, or it was burnt or charred or whatever. He had like a canopy that was melted, uh, he had a pool covering that was gone. Uh his pool was had like soot all over it, yeah, both on the surface and and below. It was it was glorious. And I'm actually looking at his backyard to this day, and he has a similar paint job as his neighbors, and his backyard has got a slightly darker tinge to it than his neighbors. So we're going on a year you know with monsoon storms and dust storms and stuff like that, and it still has that little patina to it.

Kara

Yeah, man.

Ed

So I don't know. Uh I don't recall this guy doing anything for the 4th of July. I think he went up north, like a lot of people do here in Arizona. They just get out of the heat. But I'm curious to see what's gonna happen on the 31st. I I I'm really wondering if this guy is gonna try to do another stunt like that again. A part of me really wishes he does, but a part of me is like, bro, like, don't do it again. Don't don't risk it. But yeah, all the all the people screaming, running around, and you hear the fire extinguishers go off, and all the cussing and swearing.

Kara

Oh god, what a mess.

Ed

It's a typical guy thing. That's I guess that's that's what men do.

Kara

Still a mess, though. Yeah, still a mess.

Ed

I I've learned over the years that men tend to make the messes, and women have to like follow behind and be like, oh my god, guys are so stupid. Yeah. So speaking of stupid, uh, I got I got like I said earlier, I got a kind of an interesting segment here. And if you've been staying up to speed on previous episodes, uh, especially like the Hubble one that we just finished, I I was I was wanting to explore the radium girls. And yeah, and and it's a really common uh story, it's an extraordinary story where these women were coming down with like throat cancer and jaw cancer because they were licking radium paint off of brushes in the 1920s to paint watch dials, which would glow, you know, 24-7. And there's a book that came out uh not too long ago. I I heard about it on uh cautionary tales, which is a another fabulous uh podcast. It there was a book that came out uh by a lady who wrote a play about the whole thing, which kind of really re-sparked my whole interest in it. And I wanted to do something like that, but I like, you know what? I need to read that book first, and then let's approach it because like we know the story of what happened with those girls, but we don't know too much about their lives and what the women had to go through and the criticisms, criticisms that they endured while speaking up and all that kind of stuff. So it's one of those things I want to do it justice, and if there's new research that's come out on it, I I want to be up up to speed on it. But at the same time that the whole radium thing was going down, there was another issue that a lot of people I don't think really pay attention to. And I don't know, are are you old enough, Kara, to remember going to a gas station as a kid and the gas station pump would say unleaded gas only?

Kara

Yeah, it still says unleaded.

Ed

Does it really?

Kara

Uh-huh.

Ed

Wow, I guess I haven't really paid attention to it.

Kara

Um says unleaded or regular, something like that.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. And that may be a a forced federal thing where you can only have unleaded gas, which is kind of a weird statement because, like, why would we not have unleaded gas? Like, what where did this come from? And so we we gotta go all the way back to October 30th, 1924. There was a press conference. There was kind of a stuffy room, cigarette smoke everywhere, flashbulbs flashing, and there was this middle-aged mechanical engineer. He he approached this horde of reporters with like a single goal on his mind, and he stood in front of this lightning storm of flashbulbs and an ocean of heads, like asking indiscernible questions, like everybody was speaking at once. And before him was a table with a simple glass jar, it was more like an open glass container, uh, filled with a pungent chemical that, like, given the heat of the room, like everybody was starting to get a whiff of this stuff. It it smelled vaguely like a really, really strong cucumber smell. And a lot of people kind of quickly recognize that, oh, this guy is standing in front of a jar of gasoline, which was the topic, the hot topic at that at that uh moment. So without saying a word, his engineer proceeded to dunk his hands into the jar of gasoline and swirl them about.

Kara

That's real smart.

Ed

Uh yeah.

Kara

Good idea.

Ed

Yeah, no, it's uh even even by today's standards, not the best thing to do. Uh, I've actually done it. It feels really weird because when you pull your hands out, like what this guy did, uh, because he he like he like slosh his hands around like a kid getting too familiar with a bowl of holy water. He was just just swirling his hands in there, and then you pull them out, gasoline evaporates really fast. It's like yeah, you can try this by pouring rubbing alcohol on your hands, and the faster that something evaporates, it re it removes the heat from your hands quicker. And so your hands get really, really cold. So, what this guy did is that he continued when he pulled his hands out, he he pretended like he was washing his hands, like he was swirling his hands like palm inside palm, fingers between fingers.

Kara

Oh my god.

Ed

And he was just mashing this gasoline into his hands until it completely evaporated.

Kara

That makes me cringe.

Ed

Uh yeah. Yeah, it's like that's a gutsy move. Uh by today's standards, it won't do anything to you, but back then it was a different story. The next thing he did is he picked up the jar and he put the jar up to his nose and he held it there for 60 seconds, just taking in big giant sniffs of this stuff. Like he was just inhaling the fumes coming off of this. Again, the crowd was like, whoa, what what is this? So afterward, he set the jar down, peered out into the press conference, somewhat dizzied, like obviously he's probably a little high, uh, because he just you know sniffed gasoline for a full-on minute. Eventually, he kind of came to, and there was a reporter asking kind of the same question over and over and over again. He's like, Mr. Midgley, how do you feel, sir? How do you feel? Are you okay, sir? How do you feel, Mr. Midgley? And Midgley said nothing for a while, but then once he got some oxygen back into his brain, he said softly with any sense of disarray or concern or like even terror or whatever, it's like, you see that, everyone? I can do that every day without succumbing to any problems.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

Ed

That this little stunt, it was marketed as ethyl. In fact, the jar has a the has a sticker on it of this beautiful woman holding this jar of this ethyl, and it was marketed so that when you think of ethyl in your gasoline, you're thinking of this beautiful woman, and and what kind of harm can a beautiful woman cause? And you know, he was kind of touting that this ethyl is is really, really, really safe. But what Midgley didn't tell the crowd was that he had just gotten back from Miami, Florida. Uh, it was in 1923, he took like a year off. He took a year off because he had acute lead poisoning that nearly killed him while he was in the development process of making ethyl. And he came back and the public was getting really, really concerned because this ethyl contained something that Mudgley and his company he was working for decided to leave off in the marketing. It contains lead. He did this demonstration after he had just gotten treated for lead poisoning. He needed to show the audience that this stuff was in fact safe, knowing in the back of his mind that this is lead that he just ground down to his hands, which will eventually make its way into his digestive system, as well as he breathes into fumes, which now puts lead into his bloodstream.

Kara

Right. I I have a hard time believing this guy's intelligent.

Ed

Yeah, it I I I think this is a case of stupid courageousness, like stupid bravery, right? I mean, it takes a lot of courage after you just got done being treated for lead poisoning to go out and actively perform a stunt like this because there was literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. So by today's standards, this is absolutely insane. But as I dove into this story, I kind of discovered that there's many different avenues upon which you can look at this whole thing. Is it's one of those things is like you can look at it in terms of is this ignorance? Yeah, you have you'd have a sound argument saying this is ignorance. This is is it is it greed? Yeah, there's a lot of greed here. Is there necessity? Yeah, there's a lot of necessity here. I mean, the events here kind of tie into some of the events that pertaining to like the great molasses flood, right? Where America was trying to produce alcohol free munitions and they had a molasses tank explode in the middle of winter in Boston. Like, it there's so many events here that kind of coincide with each other. Uh a lot of it ties back to prohibition, but we gotta go back a step further. We need to ask the question: why in God's green earth would anybody want to put lead in their gasoline? So, early 1900s, right? Uh, very, very early internal combustion engines. Believe it or not, these engines work the same as they pretty much do now today. You have a piston and the piston comes up. So, as the piston goes up, the fuel injectors and the air injectors have already injected in a very prescribed amount of air and gasoline. Then those ejectors close off from the airtight. The piston comes up and it compresses that mixture. It compresses and compresses and compresses, and then when that piston is at the very, very, very top part of that stroke, like there's just a tiny fraction of an inch of a gap in there. Like it is, there's that much pressure in there. A spark plug fires, making uh causing a spark, and it then ignites that air and fuel mixture, and it makes a full-on explosion, right? If you were to just take gasoline, pour it on the ground, and light it, it like it burns dirty. Like there's all this black smoke that comes out, and it's just it smells horrible and it's it's kind of disgusting. But if you were to spray like pure oxygen onto it while that was burning, then it kind of goes up like a quick flash, like it's gone. So imagine that, but you compress everything into a tiny little area, and it's almost like a gunshot, like it it makes an explosion that then just jams that piston down with a tremendous amount of force. And if you have a four-cylinder engine, you would have two pistons firing. Well, you have two pistons pulling or pushing out ox or pushing out the exhaust, and then they're pulling in air and then injecting fuel and then coming back up. So you'd always have, say, in a four-cylinder engine engine, you always have two pistons that are firing, and then you have two pistons that are exhausting. It's a it takes four strokes. That's why they call it a four-stroke engine. The issue was that these early engines were terrible, like they were very dirty, and they wanted they they wanted more power, right? This is the most American thing ever, right? We need more power, right? The only way you can get more power is by increasing what is known as compression. So, like I said before, compression is that phenomenon where the piston is coming up and it's squeezing together all that air and all that gasoline, then you light a spark, and then that makes that explosion and it sends the piston down. The more compression you have, the more power you get out of each piston.

Kara

Right, makes sense.

Ed

So, for example, like you know, I drive I drive a Civic and I drive a Civic SI, and the engine on that has a stupid amount of compression because it's just a four-cylinder engine, but what they designed it is that the compression on that V Tech engine is much higher than what you would get on a normal four-cylinder Honda engine. And so, like, you don't get anywhere nearly the fuel efficiency if you just run 87 octane in it. So the higher the octane, the more compression you can get before it detonates.

Kara

Okay, yep, makes sense.

Ed

And back then, gasoline at best was like 50 octane. And therefore, if you tried to compress that too much, what will happen is that the gasoline will want to ignite prematurely. So if 50 octane, like good god, if we tried putting 50 octane in in any car today, I don't think it would run because the the lower the octane rating, the less compression you can have. And it like the piston would come up like two-thirds of the way of where it's supposed to be, fire, and then it's gonna throw the timing off all on all the other pistons. And so that was the problem that they were having. The issue was that the gasoline was igniting too early. And back then the the engine still worked, but when the piston can't go up all the way, it's not compressing as much as it wants to, but it's kind of like as it's still coming up, it's being told, nope, you gotta go down. And then that just puts a lot of wear and tear on on the componentry, like the uh the crankshaft and and all that stuff, right? Timing an internal combustion engine is everything. So yes, increasing the compression in the early 1920s or late 1910s, early 1920s was a great way to get power, but it introduced a problem that gasoline does not behave well when it's being compressed. So uh or compressed to beyond a certain point of its octane rating. So I was supposed to I wanted to queue up what these engines sounded like from the 1920s. I heard like a quick five second clip of it. And it is a very raspy, constant knocking noise, not like a diesel engine. Uh this is louder than a diesel. This is like a four-cylinder engine that is unbearably noisy and it it does not sound right. But I wanted it to get more like a 20-second clip, and I wanted a clip that was more from today. But the problem is that the gasoline that we have today works perfectly in these engines, even 87 octane. So it's like even if we if we were to take a Model T engine out and run it in our cheapest gas that we have today, the 87, it runs fine. And it's because we have an additive in there and it's a higher octane. Um, so I'm like, crap, I cannot find an example of what they call engine knock. But imagine like a diesel engine, but way louder, higher pitched, and that knocking noise is so fast and and so violent that it just causes anxiety. Like an engine noise. What's that?

Kara

I know I would have a lot of anxiety if I heard Y Engine freaking out like that.

Ed

Uh yeah. Yeah. So so this is the problem. This is the problem that America was trying to solve. It was the famous engine knock. And this is where we get Thomas Midgley. Thomas Midgley is he he's an interesting figure because you argue like this guy, there's no way he's smart. And I I'm inclined to agree. Um, but he's also a great deal of other things. He is responsible for at least two of the worst ecological uh disasters in in human history. Uh this guy, if if you so choose to look at it, is probably responsible for a hundred million deaths.

Kara

Yikes.

Ed

Yeah, I I thought it was more than smallpox. I was wrong. Smallpox was like 500 million. Um this guy is hovering around the territory of the plague. So the plague was between 75 million and 200 million. Uh this guy is right in the 100 million range, so like Hitler would be like I I'm surprised Hitler didn't try to recruit him.

Kara

Jesus.

Ed

So, um, so okay, uh Mr. Midgley here, born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, May 18th, 1889. Uh, to Hattie Louise and Thomas Midgley. His family had a history of uh inventing, with his father, uh was the inventor of the field automobile tires. So he's the guy that kind of created automobile tires. I think they were solid rubber, which my grandfather remembers as a little kid. Solid rubber tires were the worst thing in the world because yes, they lasted forever, but they had no suspension. It was you bounced all over the place in those things. You don't realize how much your air tires actually provide in terms of comfort, even though they don't last as long. And his uh and his grandfather, in uh James Emerson, he invented the uh inserted tooth saw. So I think that's a saw that you can replace the the teeth on it. I think. I'm not sure. I'm I'm just I'm just assuming that an inserted tooth saw means that you can insert the teeth on the saw.

Kara

I'm gonna look it up.

Ed

Yeah, you look it up. I'm gonna keep going here. Uh he graduated from Cornell University, so that's not a half-bed education, in 1911 with a degree in mechanical engineering. It's funny because most of his work involved chemical engineering, but yeah, we won't we won't get into that. Uh Midgley would go on to be the most famous for his development of the formula of tetraethyl lead, or as we know it today, is leaded gasoline. Uh in 1916, he was hired at General Motors, and in 1921, he began working under a guy by the name of Charles Kettering.

Kara

Did you find it? Yeah. Sorry, my I apologize for all the listeners. My dogs are being absolutely obnoxious today. So if you can hear weird whining or chewing on things, that's what that is. Um as far as the inserted toothsaw goes, yes, I will send you a screenshot.

Ed

Okay.

Kara

Because I don't want to explain it incorrectly with what I'm seeing. I don't know why I care, but I do.

Ed

I mean, it I mean, it was popular for a reason.

Kara

So Well it basically what it is is it's um the cuts in the blade go it's a circular saw blade, and the cuts into the blade go into the blade instead of like a saw being made um with the blades going out. The blades are are be are cut opposite.

Ed

Oh, I see. So in a circular saw, so the teeth kind of curve inwards, like you see like on a table saw.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

Interesting. Okay, okay, that makes sense. Okay, yeah, but yeah, we still use that today.

Kara

Yep. So you can buy them online if anybody really wants to buy one for wood cutting or something.

Ed

I think that's all you would use it for. Or if you needed to dispose of a body or something like that.

Kara

I don't uh you know, yeah. I mean options are there. Yeah, that yeah, that's I'm gonna stick with the wood cutting.

Ed

Yeah, we don't we don't need to give people ideas. We don't we don't need this to we we don't need that kind of uh listener contribution. I don't want to be exhibit A in a courtroom. Um so Charles Kettering, he himself was a is a very interesting guy. So I think it was in the 1915 or whatever, his best friend, and his name is escaping me, but uh in the 1910s to start your car, you would have to crank it over. So you literally had a crank that stuck out of your front bumper, so you insert the crank, and then you would turn it really, really hard. So that would be turning the camshaft, that would be turning the pistons, that would it's it's kind of like giving the car a little bit of momentum, while the person inside the car kind of like tries to hit the ignite button and and you know start the engine, right? Today, our electric starters, what they do is they have a little gear, shoots out, hits the flywheel, and then it spins really, really fast, and it dumps a lot of energy in there. That's why your car batteries are designed the way they are, is to start your engine. Like they have a ton of amps in it, because you need to turn that whole engine, and then in doing so, it will simultaneously start firing the spark plugs, and then it turns over the engine. It it starts running. But back then, you had to stick that crank in there, and somebody had to manually turn that while the person is hitting the ignite button, and then you had to time it just right. So when the engine starts, you pull out the crank instantly. Uh, otherwise, what will happen is that crank will just start spinning on its own with you know 50-60 horsepower behind it. And his best friend uh he helped a lady stuck on a bridge, got up, cranked it over, but he didn't get the uh the crank out in time, and the crank whipped around, caught him in the jaw, and basically ripped his jaw off his head. Oh god. And then and then he died uh like a week later from his injuries.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

So I hope that poor lady tipped him well. Um, you know, gave him something for his efforts. Uh, but this but this Kettering guy, he was really affected by that, as as he would be. So he's the guy that invented the electric starter. So literally, how your car starts today dates back to this guy in the 1910s watching or seeing his friend die from his jaw getting ripped off, and he's like, okay, there's gotta be a better way of doing it. Uh, this is the guy that would it he was the guy that kind of electrified the car, uh, put in you know headlights and and all that kind of stuff, including the electric starter. So this Ketteran guy is a he's he's a pretty cool inventor. I'll I'll give him credit for that.

Kara

There you go.

Ed

We we here at the Days Demsterfire, we really pride on ourselves and our professional audio setups.

Kara

I'm an animal lover. Okay. Sorry.

Ed

We have very, very uh enclosed recording studios.

Kara

I'm getting ready to kick you out, dog. Be nice. Okay. The birds going off in the background.

SPEAKER_01

Wow.

Ed

Yep. It's a good thing I can add in all that.

Kara

I'm gonna separate these these guys. Hold on. Also, since I'm up, I'm very sorry. I'm going to go to the bathroom.

Ed

And we're back.

Kara

Sorry.

Ed

You're the only person I know that would record with a whole room full of pets.

Kara

You know, I really try to be inclusive. And they're also very calming to have when they're not barking at each other.

Ed

Yeah, well, I mean, dogs do that. It's the reason why I don't have a parrot in my office.

Kara

Fair enough.

Ed

This is the reason why I don't even want a parrot next to my ear, but that's besides the point. So, okay. Uh where were we? Oh yeah. Uh Kettering. So uh Charles Kettering, he worked for uh General Motors, and he basically hired on Midgley, and these two had a pretty good relationship for a long time. Um Midgley worked under under Kettering as like he's like almost like a chemist, and he would have had some training in chemistry. I I know when I was in mechanical engineering, I did have to be exposed to material science and chemistry and stuff like that. So uh Midgley would have had an idea of some chemistry, but I just don't understand why they didn't just hire a chemist. But his job was to figure out how to formulate gasoline so that it doesn't jack up the engine, right? Because of the whole knocking problem. So then from there, Midgley got to work. And his workflow was very similar to that of Thomas Edison, where Edison he was more the kind of guy that's like, okay, I gotta make a light bulb. I want to make it last longer, so I'm just gonna scour the world and try to find materials and I can stick inside of a light bulb and we'll see which ones last the longest. Now, the difference is that if you make a light bulb and you use the wrong material, it just burns out and then you just try again. Uh the problem with midgully situation is that you had to concoct a formulation where one, you had to find something that was combustible, two, that would work with gasoline, three, it would react predictably when you introduce oxygen, four, what's it supposed to do under compression? And then ultimately, five, like, does it produce the desired result? And you have to do a lot of ratios. So if you think about it, if if say if you're injecting an X amount of gasoline, then what percentage of that gasoline needs to be the substance that you're putting in? And you know, the sky's the limit. Like you can go 50-50, you know, 45-51, you can do all sorts of stuff. So uh what Midgley did was he actually set up a lab um inside of his his basement, and then he also went to work, and this guy was just non-stop coming up with concoctions, and he he came up with all sorts of wild stuff, just you know, everything from pouring milk into gasoline to using sugar to you know just doing whatever. So instead of like sitting down looking at the chemical equations of empirical chemistry, he's like just trial and error our way through it. Um which yeah, uh he had very mixed results. He did find uh tellurium. Uh so tellurium worked very well. Alright, problem solved. Episode's over. That's it. We got it. Cool, we did it. Only downside is that when you burn tellurium, it's like a mix between a fart and diarrhea smell. Like diarrhea and vomit.

Kara

That's fun.

Ed

And it produces a a smoke that embeds itself into your skin and your clothing, and it never comes out. Especially in your clothing.

Kara

That's great.

Ed

So he he would come home and his wife would make him sleep in the basement because he smelled so bad from burnt telirium. So given that Midgley did have enough forethought to think like, wait, okay, so do we want all of this city and all of the world to smell like diarrhea and vomit?

Kara

Yeah, this is good.

Ed

Yeah, good call. Good call. Um, his next option wasn't much better though. So Midgley noticed that Europe wasn't having this problem. Europe was was seemed to be immune to a certain degree to these engine problems. And yeah, they had Rolls-Royce, they had Mercedes and stuff like that, which I mean they were they were slightly different engine designs, but not because they were designed to get rid of engine knock. He noticed that the Europeans were putting about 10% ethanol in in with 90% gasoline. And the Europeans, like, yep, that fixes everything. And it's true, it does fix everything. Um, that's what we have in gas today. Most cities have between 5 and 10% ethanol, and ethanol is a type of alcohol, and you can make a lot of it via corn. That's believe it or not, uh, I think it was uh I can't remember what time it was within the past 20 years or so, but there was a ton of government subsidies that went to corn farmers to produce corn just for ethanol production to help reduce the uh uh gas prices. So yeah, everybody's seen ethanol. It's a uh um it's an alcohol. So in Europe, Europe, boy, they they know their uh they know their alcohol. Um so there was one catch to it. In America, um there's there's something that I always espouse when I when I really teach American history, is that absolutely nothing happens in this country, whether it's good or bad or neutral, nothing happens unless there is a profit to be had. And if anything hit digs into that profit, it is immediately a financial pariah. It is the worst thing in the world, even if it's for the betterment of the world. Here is the issue. If they stuck with this, that means that the oil, the uh the actually at the time the world's largest oil company in the world, Standard Oil, which GM was heavily involved with. Uh, keep in mind the the auto industry at this time is probably very similar to what it is today, where it's a very select group of men that they all know each other, they're all competitors, but they're all invested into each other. And I don't want to make it sound like a conspiracy, but it's true. Like Ford and GM and all these other car manufacturers out there are heavily invested into oil companies and vice versa. It's the reason why we don't have as many electric cars today as we probably could have, although that does seem to be changing.

Kara

Yeah, that that is the biggest reason why we don't have electric cars. Same thing happened in the um the late 90s, early 2000s when they started to make electric cars again, and then the oil companies were like, nope. And then uh that's why it took even longer to get electric cars to be more mainstream.

Ed

Well, yeah, and uh and the oil companies would do cute stuff like buy the patents for the electric technology.

Kara

Oh, nice, yeah.

Ed

And then lock it up. Cool, cool, cool. Yep. Uh like we are so far behind on battery technology that if we were allowed to keep developing battery technology through the 90s, by today, we would have battery technology that would get your Tesla from here to LA in one charge with with room to spare. Like that that's we we would be so far along if it wasn't for oil companies just buying the patents and locking them up. And I'm not talking about stupid stuff like oh, this guy invented the perpetual motion machine, or this guy created free energy and and the oil companies bought that up and locked it away. No, I'm not talking about that, I'm just talking about like legit patents that are now owned by you know BP and ExxonMobil and and all of them. But going back to this issue, if these cars were running on 100% gasoline and they wanted to inject it with 10% ethanol, well, that's not their wheelhouse. Like the oil companies don't make alcohol. There's alcohol companies that make alcohol. And the horizontal vertical integration of Carnegie and Vanderbilt and Morgan and you know Westinghouse and like a lot of these guys didn't factor in alcohol production because people are like, well, you just you you drink alcohol, you don't throw it in your car. The issue is that they would have to pay somebody else that 10%. And of course, that whoever takes on that contract, they're gonna yeah, I'll produce a 10% alcohol, but you're gonna pay me 30% more for it because I'm the only one that can do it. It would be a very, very, very costly hit for that 10% to their profit margins, which would be devastating.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Ed

Because yeah, ethanol, you have to you have to grow the corn, right? Then you have to harvest it, then you have to ferment it with yeast and water, then it has to be distilled, and quite often it needs to be distilled a couple of times because you're not trying to get a flavor out of it, you're just trying to get the alcohol out of it. And none of that was what Standard Oil dealt with. And bringing in outside producers and automotive uh uh in the automotive slash oil companies, it was very shunned upon. You just you don't bring in outsiders. That's all there is to it. There was also another issue, there was Uh the 18th Amendment. 18th Amendment basically stated that you cannot produce, transfer, or sell alcohol. There are cases where you can produce it and sell it to the government for like weapons production, munitions, and stuff like that. But yeah, if you were an alcohol producer, you were effectively out of business. You could not manufacture alcohol. So that means if you were to find a business or a company that was producing ethanol, it would have to be government sanctioned, which means it'll be heavily regulated, heavily taxed. And again, they're going to be like, yeah, I'll give you this 10% alcohol that you need, but I'm charging you 30 to 40% more for it. If they wanted to uh be on the up and up, that's the route they would have to go for to use ethanol. So I often wondered, because I I understand the basic premise behind the movement for the 18th Amendment, but I almost feel like there's more to it. There's there is more about it that I have a funny feeling dealt more with money rather than everybody just drinking alcohol in the temperance movement. I feel like there's that part, but there's more to it. I have to dig into it some more. I I just find it interesting that the 18th Amendment comes out right when right when Europe was using ethanol in their engines, and this was now gonna turn into a hundred million dollar ordeal.

Kara

So Yeah, I mean I think it would take some reading to see what the um what the underlying details would be, I guess. It's because that that would that would take some digging.

Ed

Yeah. Well, and it also involves like who are your sources and what were the intentions of those sources. And it I think it's gonna kind of uh evolve into like what this is, is where if you wanted to look at it from this perspective, you're perfectly justified. If you wanted to look at it from this other perspective, it's perfectly legitimate. I'm I'm discovering that at least with American history, that nothing is black and white, nothing is as simple as it appears.

Kara

That's most, if not all, history.

Ed

Yeah, it's especially recorded history. Like, I know we are where we're teaching, we're teaching like Greeks and the Romans, like we the amount of information that we have from that time period is a tiny fraction of a of a percent of what was actually written, what was actually said. Like, we just don't know the motives and all that stuff. It's not like you know, they had C-span Roman, right, where you can watch the their uh their the Roman Senate work.

Kara

I mean, that'd be pretty cool.

Ed

That would actually be pretty sick. I I would I would purposely try to learn Latin just so I could watch that go down. But yeah, we just don't have that information. So like you know there's a lot of stuff that went down during those years, but we only just have a tiny fraction of information that's verifiable, and even still a good portion of that, right? We just we just got done uh recording uh the uh episode on Thermopylae. We have three different sources all saying three different things about this one battle, which wasn't two different sources.

Kara

We have okay, so we have Herodotus, we have uh that poet guy, and I don't remember his name off the top of my head, and then we have a couple others, and the interesting thing about those sources, uh especially Herodotus, is Herodotus was writing in the sixth century.

Ed

Oh, okay.

Kara

Or so. So a lot of what we have that came out during the classical Greek age or after, um, a lot of that is stories that come about verbally, plus archaeology, plus what they wrote down a hundred years later. So Herodotus got a lot of his information from doing his own historical research, doing his own version of archaeology, and also taking into account the verbal traditions and the the oral stories that he that were around at the time.

Ed

Okay. I mean, and he was only a thousand years removed from from those events, or about about eight, nine hundred years removed, which today, I mean, we're thousands of years removed. So I okay. I I I I would actually wouldn't mind like sitting down and having a drink with Herodotus. I bet he's a good one.

Kara

Oh, I'm sure he'd be a a really interesting and fun dinner guest. I would like to also have that dinner with Herodotus.

Ed

Yeah, well, I'll I'll let you know if he responds to my uh my DM. Cool. So basically, Midgley found something that was cheap, that was affordable, that would would work, and it worked very well. And that was tetraethyl lead or tetralethyl led or TEL for short. Very simply put, TEL was a small additive that could be added to gasoline that when burned, it made the gas burn when it was the correct time for it to be burnt. So no more premature firing of the pistons. The only issue is that when you burn leaded gasoline, that lead has to go somewhere. And since engines do a lot of exhaling, most of that lead is going to go out the exhaust pipe. And Midgley's idea was well received at first because now the old companies, like you know, Standard Oil, could keep 100% of the profits instead of using ethanol. As a result of this progress, Midgley was given the nickels medal for the use of anti-not compounds in motor fuels. So that's kind of like a it's not like the Nobel Prize, but it's it's up there in terms of like chemistry. It's like uh it's like a step before you are in the realm of being considered for the Nobel Prize. And he's got a lot of these, like Midgley has a lot of incredible awards, like he got uh awards for uh chlorophyllocarbons that the CFCs that changed refrigeration forever, but also burned a hole in our ozone layer in Antarctica, which that is a whole nother episode. Cool, cool, cool. Um, in it in its own right. Yeah. In 1923, after this Tell was discovered and he was well received and all that stuff, he wasn't feeling well. And in 1923, he went to Miami, Florida to get treated for lead poisoning. And I don't know what the degree of treatment for lead poisoning was back then. Today you can get some IVs, and there's ways that you can I think it's called chelation where you can you can slowly but surely get it out of your blood. But yeah, it it it back then there I don't think there was much. It was just drink a lot of water, try to pee up what you can, and hope for the best. So it was ironic that they're marketing this tell stuff as such a wonderful substance for the automotive industry that he uh he ultimately had to go get treated for lead poisoning.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Ed

And this is where we get into our first dumpster fire because that same year that Midgley took off uh due to lead poisoning, GM created the General Motors, General Motors Chemical Company or the GMCC. And this company was was solely this supervised production of Tel, which was going to be led by the DuPont company. So you have the GMCC, which kind of owned TEL, but they were contracting DuPont to manufacture it. So it's kind of like how video cards work for computers. Like Nvidia can create the chip, right? The uh, you know, the the 460, 470, 480, 490, whatever. But then you can have different manufacturers put that chip into their own video cards, and but it's marketed as an NVIDIA device, just a different manufacturer making it. Uh, that's kind of how this was is the GMCC owned Tell, and then they were contracting or allowing DuPont to produce it. So Kettering was going to be the president, Midgley was going to be the vice president, and a TEL prototype plant was built in Dayton, Ohio. And right off the bat, two workers died from lead overexposure. Throughout the year, eight more workers died in Deepwater New Jersey facility due to lead poisoning. GM eventually be like, guys, DuPont, you you for a chemical company, you guys are kind of dumb. Like, yeah. And and and the thing is, it's like they blamed everything on the workers. Oh, is the workers' fault for not handling it right? Or is the workers' fault for not manufacturing it properly?

Kara

Of course.

Ed

Yeah, that's the first thing you do because dead men tell no tales. So eventually GM did break away from DuPont and partnered up with Standard Oil to create the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to produce the market tell. So, in other words, what they did is bye-bye DuPont, hey Standard Oil, let's work together to create gasoline with Tell already mixed in with it, which would make sense because Standard Oil is making the gasoline, you might as well, you know, horizontally integrate and just add in the Tell while you're at it. Make it even easier on people. Even with this new partnership and a new facility in uh Bay Way Refinery in New Jersey, the location was plagued with more lead-induced hallucinations, insanity, and five more deaths. The question is, did Midgley really know how dangerous the lead was? So the short answer is yes. And and this is a very common knowledge, even going back to the Roman times. They were like, this lead stuff is uh, yeah, it's it's it's kind of sketchy. And there was also warning labels everywhere. There was warning labels on anything containing lead, like hey, limit your exposure to this lead that's in this cough medicine. That's literally the the the thinking of the time.

Kara

Right, right.

Ed

Makes perfect sense. I mean, we could get into a whole discussion about very old uh medicines and oh uh snake oil and fish oil and oh yeah, uh uh medical medical dumpster fires.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

That's that would actually be a good one.

Kara

That would be a good one, especially in the 1800s, the Victorian era.

Ed

Oh yeah.

Kara

Oh chalk full of goodies.

Ed

Yeah, where you could drink one elixir that would fix all your problems, and all it was was just morphine and alcohol.

Kara

Yep.

Ed

Which that would fix your problems.

Kara

I mean temporarily, yeah.

Ed

Well, yeah, very temporarily. But I mean, yeah, you drink enough morphine and alcohol, and you don't care that you are covered in second-degree burns. You just like cool. Or it's like morphine and then cocaine and just all sorts of other stuff that uh it's like whoa, okay, this is more powerful than fentanyl. Like a quick word on the symptoms of lead poisoning, because I keep going on about it, but like, what does lead poisoning do to you? So, lead has generally been known to be toxic to some degree since like well, I mean, for hundreds of years for sure, but it even went back to the Romans. So there's a theory out there that like emperors like Caligula and Nero kind of lost their minds because uh they had lead pipes in the palaces that would pump water in. And over time, drinking from lead pipes, that's not gonna do well for you. And the problem with lead is that it's odorless and it's tasteless. If you're starting to show symptoms of lead poisoning, you've already consumed a toxin amount. That's because lead builds up over time, right? I I could we've all handled lead to some degree, like on our hands, and we probably all have lead in our bodies. Over the course, even if you are never dealing with a lead-based industry, like by the time you are like say 10 years old, and by the time you die, the amount of lead in your body will have grown because it never leaves, it it just stays there. And the problem with lead, much like radium, is that it loves calcium, it sticks to the bones, it sticks to the calcium in your bones. And this is the reason why lead affects children so much more than adults, because as the kid is growing, that's where the lead is stored and stored and stored. And then when you get older, that lead then starts leaching out. And what happens is that the other stuff that it loves is nerves, like your brain, and your nerves have these, I think they're called myelian coverings that kind of protect the chemical interactions between uh neurons. And if those those coverings get destroyed by something, then things start firing in all different directions. So it basically alters your brain to function properly. It can't be removed by your liver, uh, it can't be removed by your kidneys. Uh blood transfusions do help, but if it's in your bones, it's in your bones. There's not a whole lot you can really do about that. Um, so like the early symptoms of lead poisoning is, and this is where it's tricky because let me know if you've ever had any of these issues. High blood pressure, probably not. I feel like your blood pressure is probably like 40 over 20.

Kara

Me?

Ed

Yeah.

Kara

I don't remember.

Ed

You seem like the kind of person that doesn't have a lot of high blood pressure. But for me, I have high blood pressure. Um, my family has a history of high blood pressure. So high blood pressure, joint and muscle pain.

Kara

Cool.

Ed

So I don't know if you've ever had that before.

Kara

Oh yeah.

Ed

Uh difficulty with memory or concentration. Off and on.

Kara

Depends on the day, but yeah, sure.

Ed

Depends on the day and caffeine intake, headache, abdominal pain, uh, mood disorders, uh, reduced sperm count and ab in abnormal sperm. I don't know if you've ever had that problem before.

Kara

Me, no, personally, no. I'm good there.

Ed

Yeah, that would be that would be that would be astonishing.

Kara

My sperm count is great.

Ed

As in like zero.

Kara

Yeah, that's correct.

Ed

Okay, that's good because if it if the if you did have one, it would be that would be uh I'm sure there's people out there. Yeah, it would be it would be an interesting kind of like we would pause this episode because I would have some questions to ask. And your husband would probably have the same questions as well.

Kara

Yeah, my husband would um really want to be in on that information.

Ed

Yeah, that would be the the same thing if I ever had a period, like it would be it would be a conversation. It would be it would be a very interesting conversation.

Kara

Yeah, yeah.

Ed

So uh miscarriage, stillbirth, or premature birth in pregnant women. Hmm, that's that that that's concerning. That could be any woman.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

For that matter.

Kara

If it happens over and over again, that's where it would be like, okay.

Ed

Yeah.

Kara

Here's a problem.

Ed

Yeah, that it especially like the stillbirth kind of a thing. That's that's a very big deal.

Kara

And that's hor that's horrible and scary, and all the things that we don't want.

Ed

That checks a lot of boxes of scariness.

Kara

Yeah.

Ed

I I I know a relative who's had multiple stillbirths and miscarriages, and it it takes a toll on you, both physically and psychologically.

Kara

Yeah, it's uh it's a lot.

Ed

Yeah. So like now, if you look at those, that like anybody could have most of these issues at any given time. So how can you tell, like, oh, I have high blood pressure? Oh, it's gotta be lead poisoning. Well, no, anything can cause that. Or I got a headache. Well, either you're a school teacher or you have lead poisoning.

Kara

You're like, all right. Okay, fair, but okay.

Ed

Uh abdominal pain. It could be the sketchy breakfast burrito with too much hot sauce or lead poisoning.

Kara

How about sketchy gas station sushi?

Ed

Uh yes. Yep, gas station sushi will get you every time. Oh yeah. So, like, it's it's really tricky to tell, you know, what what is the cause of these symptoms? Is it really lead poisoning or is it just something else? So now we get into the acute symptoms, lead poisoning. So severe mood or personality disorders. So far range of emotions all over the board, and they change on a dime, and it is just yeah, it it's scary or extreme paranoia. Organ failure. Typically, I think it starts with kidney, um, and then you'd have like intestinal, and and so organ failure, that's kind of a an issue. Irreversible brain damage. So we're not talking, oh, you have some swelling in your head and like a concussion or something like that. No, this is damage where like you slowly lose the ability to walk. Yikes. Or you slowly lose the ability to use your hands, seizures, extreme brain development disorders in children. It's a reason why if uh like if you ever take a uh kid to the pediatrician, they always have that questionnaire. Has your child been exposed to a household built before like 1980? Uh has your child ever been exposed to any like tight old white paint? Like you have to do this lead survey every single time you go in because it affects lead, but really affects children. Then you've got unconsciousness, and then you have irreversible death.

Kara

All fun things.

Ed

Yeah.

Kara

I like the irreversible death one.

Ed

Yes, yeah. Because the word irreversible is because I would settle for reversible death, but the irreversible death is like a no-go for me.

Kara

Yeah, that's really permanent, and and I don't know if I like that idea of permanent death.

Ed

Yeah, it is it it and it takes years, it takes time for these to develop, and that's what's so scary. A very, very scary uh disease out there is mad cow disease or Kruzfill to Yaqab disease um in humans, because you can be exposed to the protein that causes your brain to turn into a literal sponge, it eats holes in your brain. You could be exposed to that, have that protein in your body for 15 years and never show a symptom. And then one day over the course of months to years, you you just your brain just turns into a holy mess, and it's a very, very slow and awful way to go.

Kara

Yikes.

Ed

Yeah, that that would be an episode unto itself. So that now we have an idea of what lead poisoning looks like, both the early stages and the acute stages, including irreversible death. So back to Mudgley and Kettering. It's probably understood to some degree that Mudgley and the gang uh had an idea of what lead poisoning was. Most of the population of America uh at least understood that lead is, you know, is a dubious metal to deal with. And there were the deaths of the plant workers, yeah, deaths in the plants that gave room for pause, and the media started to really attack tell. Should I call it T E L or will Tell just work?

Kara

Uh, Tell's fine. I don't care.

Ed

Okay. But the marketers and Mudgley and Ketterman weren't stupid. So they publicly addressed the issues at the factories, x accidental mishandling of Tell in the refining process, and it was the worker's error. They also drastically improved the handling methods, increased airflow of the factory and some of the other safety precautions, which they legitimately did. They had standard operating procedures, they put in equipment, they had the right aprons. I like how they opened up the window so now the lead vapors can go out to the public. That's that's a good touch.

Kara

Yeah, that's that's really nice.

Ed

Yeah, yeah, that's that's solid. Instead of actually putting in lead scrubbers to you know condition the air before it leaves, but we don't need the clouds' issue issue with facts. In other words, they encapsulated the lead scare to a handful of refineries, and there was no room for concern outside of that. So they did a brilliant job. I'm like, okay, guys, it was these idiots' fault, it's not our fault. They were dumb to they were too dumb to handle this properly. We've fixed that, we've increased the or improved the worker conditions there, we're good to go. Everything is cool. And so by focusing in on that, that aspect of it, the question then turned from the factory but to the notion of burning lead and people breathing the exhaust. So what they did is instead of actually addressing that problem, they just changed the name of it. They changed the name of triethyl lead to ethyl and marketed it with a beautiful woman on the box art uh art named Ethel. And you can look it up. It's uh yeah, there's this attractive woman holding this little bottle of ethyl, and they really marketed it as something that like would do you know anybody by the name of Ethel that would harm you?

Kara

Absolutely not.

Ed

Yeah, yeah. You go to any retirement community, I'm pretty sure in and better call Saul, there was an old lady in in Sandpiper that was named Ethel, who was super sweet, and you would never assume she was so sweet and kind.

Kara

I loved her.

Ed

Yeah, it's like that they they did some brilliant marketing there. Um, like because if if if you're designing a uh a laptop that is electrocuting people, the last thing you want to name it is hey, check it out. I got the new shock therapy. No, you you'll change it to like Dell or Apple or HP or. or or or whatever. You're not gonna use you, you know, you're not gonna use a violent name for it like Tetraethyled. So yeah, they changed the name. They also changed the name from from that, what is it, the tetraethylene company. They changed it to Ethyl Corporation to further distance itself from the negative associations with lead. Mud Mudgley concluded that the ratio, and this is I think he was honest. I think he he really thought that this was this was a safe thing because of the ratios. It's not like you're dumping in powdered lead one to one. It's not like one gasoline of uh one gallon of gasoline to one gallon of lead if that could even be a thing. No, it was a thousand to one. So what one thousand parts gasoline you had one part lead.

Kara

Okay. Like that's good.

Ed

Yeah it's solid yeah it it's not it's it's it's it's not that bad. Um that means for every one thousand gallons of gasoline you have you have one gallon I'm doing air quotes because I don't know I don't want to convert this over to pounds because I don't know how much lead fits in a gallon convert that to pounds I just don't have the brain power for that right now but we'll say one gallon of lead.

Kara

Sure.

Ed

Uh that's pretty good ratio but times that by 10,000 cars all burning say 10 gallons of gas at any given time that's 1000 gallons of gas which turns into 100 gallons um oh no I'm sorry that's 1,000 gallons of lead in gaseous form hanging around in the air piling up on the streets uh sticking to clothing and being breathed in all in a day and that's like this 10,000 cars. What if you've got like a massive city where you could have you know a hundred thousand cars or like in the 60s where you have millions of cars across the whole country burning this stuff. Yeah that's rough suddenly that yeah that ratio gets pretty scary and then also too lead since it is heavier it doesn't blow away wind doesn't blow it around like you can't just blow it out in the ocean. It it sticks and my grandfather he told me when he was a little kid uh he would go visit Chicago and he remembered in the 1930s there would be boys sweeping the sidewalks and because the sidewalks were always dusty and he later found out that the kids were actually sweeping up lead dust that piled up on the streets.

Kara

That's healthy for a kid and they've got the immune system for it.

Ed

Uh oh yeah yeah kids and lead go hand in hand. I mean the guy lived about 93 94 years old so clearly it didn't affect him that much but but yeah that's a like if that's what it really was that's a bad deal right there. In 1925 we are introduced to Dr. Arthur Keyhoe which is kind of a funny name. It is who tackled the issue of lead and gasoline in a very very unique way. So in 1925 going all up into the 30s there were more and more claims of lead poisoning from Tell uh had resurfaced and the Surgeon General uh for the uh called for a conference the surgeon general basically told everybody like stop what you're doing we've got to figure this out right and the surgeon general called for a conference shut everything down which GM and DuPont and Standard Oil and everybody was fine like we understand we shut it down by the way when that happened uh for that time period the prices of gasoline skyrocketed and GM DuPont Standard Oil and everybody made millions of profit off of it because there wasn't enough to go around and everybody needed gas so they jacked up the price beyond all recognition that's the reason why they were okay shutting it off for the time being because it's a nice little bonus. Yeah so yeah it worked out well for them uh during this conference the lead proponents argued that they cannot be found guilty of any violation because there were no rules set up for which they had to follow it's a fair point there were no laws saying you can't put lead in gasoline and so they were asking the lead the pro-lead folks were like hey guys like what's what's our part what is how what is our duty in all this what is it that we need to address because you guys are finding us guilty for something that there is no law for yeah uh that that brilliant argument essentially cleared everyone of any wrongdoing that now turned the table it turned everything over it put the ball in the anti-lead groups uh the government side the scientific side it really kind of like messed things up for them this opened the door for Dr. Kiho who charged or who changed the paradigm of policy in terms of lead and gasoline so he stated that to discontinue the sale of of gasoline containing lead if it can be shown then an actual danger is had as a result but he reasoned if it could not be shown on the basis of facts a product this economically beneficial should not be thrown into the discard um on the basis of opinions keyho's offer thus acted as a decision rule hence the keyho rule in other words he's like if there's no laws out there that we are violating then what needs to happen is that we will stop production immediately if somebody can come out with overwhelming compelling evidence to indicate that this is harmful to the environment and to people knowing that this is a kind of like a global thing it would take decades for the scientific community to put this together I mean look how long the argument of global warming has been going around. It's been going around since the 80s and I think most people are on board that there is an issue with global warming but the scientific community is still there's there's pockets of it that are not in alignment with global warming. Therefore it's really tricky to get everybody on board with what they're doing in terms of hey you're causing the planet to heat up because all it would take is that company to be like I don't believe it. I don't I don't believe in global warming and I don't believe the evidence so that's not my problem and that's that's the keyho rule is that we should be able to continue doing what we're doing unless there's compelling evidence that everybody agrees upon then we will we will change our ways which I'm sorry is is absolutely ingenious. So yeah this this keyho guy came up with a uh a pretty interesting argument that you know allowed the uh the industry to continue on unabated but he also took step he took things a little further since the burden of proof now results resided on the scientific community he he bought himself decades because he he no he knew that it took decades and decades for the scientific community to to really agree on anything and he was right because this whole lead thing didn't resolve itself until like 2021 which is wild. Yeah in night in the 1930s Kiyho further messed things up by conducting his own research into uh lead and humanity and we don't know his his testing methods at all in fact it came under a lot of criticism which we'll which we'll get into so he concluded albeit no one really knows how he came up with this figure that every human has a baseline of lead in his or own body to start with I guess that's kind of true everybody also has a baseline of gold in their body everybody has maybe a couple particles of uranium in their body like I I guess okay um so that lead is natural that's that's ridiculous lead in the environment is normal humanity has been exposed to lead forever in fact humanity has evolved with lead in the world because it's natural it's organic it's pesticide free yeah that that's an exaggeration but you you you follow the point um and it and it's based off this scientific idea that lead like kind of like uranium like our ground is radioactive slightly but it is radioactive and humanity has been exposed to radioactive materials since you know it's you know the dawn of humanity but that that uranium though is just blasting you with a couple of neutrons and then you're on your way lead sticks around forever lead is lead is a part of your life forever and ever and ever as opposed to uranium. Mm-hmm so yeah he argued that no guys don't don't freak out lead is everyday thing it's natural it's occurring it's everywhere humanity has been with it since the dawn and it's okay he to lock in the credibility he worked with the U.S. Public Health Service as well as the American Medical Association because of this if leaded gasoline was ever to be exposed it was going to take a miracle of a science experiment to take it down. That's that's cool that is basically part one okay uh that's where I'm gonna leave it off because on our next episode we've got Claire Brown or I'm sorry Claire Cameron Patterson and C C Patterson was the guy that turned Keyhoe and the whole leaded thing completely upside down by like legit science. And uh yeah actually in my notes I have C-L-A-I-R-E. It's actually just C-L-A-R A-I-R. Yeah still it's like a boy named Sue. Yeah and I mean I know a guy named Ashley I've even known a guy who stormed Normandy in the second wave his name was Sally cool and uh you don't make fun of him. No I know there's some of the the the you know coolest guys around oh yeah yeah no that's fair enough so he actually went by CeCe Patterson which that doesn't help matter as much at all yeah right so I think that's where we'll leave off uh because part two is going to focus heavily on how how this got brought down and kind of the scientific method that was used as opposed to like Kiho which used very questionable techniques it it was yeah it was very sketchy um and then like the aftermath of it all and what does this mean for Earth as a whole our whole ecology and and all that kind of stuff so that will be on part duh part duh sounds good so in the meantime make sure you yell at everybody around you physically get up once you like once this is over physically get up go to somebody else's phone and sign them up for the podcast we're on everything we're on Spotify Amazon Google um although I think Google is moving all their podcasts to like just YouTube. I think they're doing that like in April. Didn't know that good to know yeah yeah they're like they're merging everything into one which is cool because that means we'll actually be on on YouTube now. So yeah we're everywhere but yeah once this is over get up go find somebody tell them about the podcast uh if you know somebody who likes podcasts but they may be technologically inexperienced then find it for them and sign them up there you go perfect because then it then it's just like set and forget it they get notified that there's a new episode a lot of these apps will download it automatically for you but yeah that that that's your homework and then of course uh stay away from the don't eat lead yeah that's that's a good call don't ingest it don't wash your hands with it you know don't don't sniff it in for a while yeah don't do all those things and then are we we still on for uh instagrams and and all that kind of stuff yeah cool yeah still up on the inst the old instas so yeah if you have any questions hit us up there email us there's dumpsterfire at gmail.com there's the whole discord thing we gotta get that going yeah yeah once we get a little bit bigger if um if you guys want us to open up a discord shoot us a message send us a dm email us if you want and and if you want us to do that you guys can talk to each other you can talk to us and all of that fun stuff so yeah let us know yeah and and keep in mind the whole heart of the show is is you you see yourself or family or friends or bosses or whatever you see people try to plan something out so meticulously where it could never fail and then invariably it just blows up in your face or their faces that's that's kind of the the heart of all this where try as you might as being the most superior species of animal on the face of this planet we tend to have the most colossal screw ups no one ever that's how we learn that's how we learn it's what makes humans interesting don't be afraid to hit us up shout out to our our listener in the UK yeah shout out to that guy or girl whoever you are whoever we are that human shouts yeah just just let us know man we we we really want to know what's going on over there so uh you you're making us an international podcast which is we appreciate it yeah that's really cool yeah unless it's Kara's mom who's using a VPN hi Kara's mom my mom doesn't know how to use a VPN as far as I know but it's fine. You might want to ask her because it would it would be her thing. I could see her like inadvertently using a VPN I could see that actually so alrighty guys thanks for listening. Hope you keep it a hot mess. And we'll see you next time. Bye.

SPEAKER_01

Thanks