A Man Who Accidentally Killed the Most People in History | Hacker News Reader

A Man Who Accidentally Killed the Most People in History

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18 pointspjerem8 comments

The man in question is Thomas Midgley Jr., the inventor of leaded gasoline, for those who don't want to watch a 24min video that buries the lead (pardon the pun).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

Sorry to ruin the pun, but it is spelled "lede" in this context

No it isn’t, that’s a deliberate misspelling. It’s the “lead” sentence, as in first, out in front, etc.

> The spelling lede is an alteration of lead, a word which, on its own, makes sense; after all, isn't the main information in a story found in the lead (first) paragraph? And sure enough, for many years lead was the preferred spelling for the introductory section of a news story.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...

> He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation

Causing death fueled by good motives seems to have been a constant in his life.

It is something that has troubled me for a long time: as individuals the capacity to do harm is unlimited but the capacity to do good is very small in this world.

My own family profited greatly from leaded gas in the 1910s we even had a cottage named No Nox over the success of the sales to gas stations.

I myself have neurological issues and so do many of my peers in my little town in Central Ohio. There is no way to know how and what contributed to so many birth defects in our town and no one is interested in knowing the truth about it.

Thank you for posting this, it was a good presentation.

I find this very hard to agree with, I would say someone like Alexander Fleming the inventor of penicillin has saved lives on the scale of which he has harmed.

Think about Franz Haber and then think what would happen to our world if there was not enough fertilizer (coming soon). Also consider that antibiotics are used more per weight to maximize farm yields and will be a time where they will not be useful. So they were good for their time but in the future it won't last.

Was it really accidental though? The dangers of lead exposure were known at that time. Midgely himself got lead poisoning in 1923 as a result of his tetraethyllead experiments so there's no way they couldn't have known it was harmful even in the very early days of leaded gasoline.

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