Toxic Monopoly: Professor Bill Kovarik on the hidden history of leaded gasoline

Chapter 1: Introduction

Mike: Welcome to Misaligned Markets. I'm your host, Mike, and today we're looking at one of the most devastating examples of industrial scale harm in human history. With me today is Bill Kovarik, an environmental historian and journalist who had spent years documenting the hidden history of leaded gasoline. So in 1920, DuPont, General Motors, and Standard Oil, today's Exxon Mobil, conspired to dominate the anti-knock additive market. The goal was to have a sole additive in gasoline to maintain rents over every gallon of gas sold. So they settled on lead not because it was the best solution, but because it was patentable. There were many safer and viable alternatives already available, but unfortunately, they could not profit from these. And so they chose to literally maintain a toxic monopoly over offering a safer alternative. The human cost of lead and gasoline is staggering. Thomas Midgley, the man who invented the process for creating lead and gasoline, was actually poisoned by his own creation. And yet he spoke from the public, promising that it was a safe substance. The externalities here are not just hypothetical. They are massive societal externalities. We're talking about millions of lives shortened, an entire generation of children with diminished cognitive capabilities and extreme mental health issues, as well as a well-documented correlation between the rise of lead and the rise in crime. I'm honored today to talk to Bill Kovarik about how this happened, how it was hidden, and what this tells us about how we fight for better technologies. So, I want to welcome Bill Kovarik to the podcast. He's a historian and professor at Radford University. His research involves science, technology, and communications, and his professional background involves reporting and editing for daily newspapers, national news magazines, wire services, and environmental publications. In 2021, he was named among the leading pioneers of environmental journalism by the Environmental Health News. And my own interest in Kovarik intersected with learning about the story of leaded gasoline. I noticed that a lot of the coverage of this history, especially pertaining to the work done at GM's research division in the early 20th century, heavily leveraged Kovarik's research. And it's because of scholars like him that we know about this story and its long-lasting effects on human civilization. So I want to welcome Bill Kovarik to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

Bill: Well, thank you so much for having me here. It's good to be here.

Mike: Awesome. So let's begin kind of by asking, you know, for those who aren't familiar, what is tetraethyl lead? And can you tell us why it was such a pivotal chemical in the 20th century?

Chapter 2: Tetraethyl lead (TEL) and its harms

Bill: Sure. Tetraethyl lead was a gasoline additive. So three grams of concentrated TEL in a gallon made what we call leaded gasoline. It was introduced in the 1920s. It was used in almost all gasoline between the 1930s and the 1980s, and then finally phased out worldwide around 2021. The reason that it was used was to raise octane in fuel by about five to seven points and stop engine knocking that you might get with, you know, lower quality fuel. Now, the thing was that making TEL was extremely dangerous and about two dozen people died in refineries in Ohio and New Jersey. They went out violently insane, is the way it was described. This was in 1924 and 1925. And of course, that raised a lot of questions about the public health exposure to lead from auto exhaust and gasoline, even though it was diluted in gasoline. So the workers who died, in fact, there's a book about this called Dying for Work. It's one of the chapters. But it's ironic in a way because at the time, lead was a really well-known poison. It was a neurotoxin. The Romans knew it caused hallucinations. In fact, they sent prisoners down into the lead mines and noticed that the prisoners could see ghosts. That's the way they described it. Benjamin Franklin warned printers about lead. Dickens wrote about its crippling effects in the 1850s. So in the 1920s, when the big controversy first emerged over leaded gasoline, public health experts, especially Alice Hamilton from Harvard and a guy named Yandell Henderson from Yale, warned against leaded gasoline. And Hamilton insisted that there were plenty of other octane boosting additives. And obviously, her hint did not take. But she was on the public health side. And then there was the industry side of this, where they claim to be aligned with scientific progress. So there was the science of public health and there was the science of industry. And these are both, you know, big projects that are clashing in the 1920s in an atmosphere where there's no regulation at all. OK, so today, even with the global phase out of lead in car fuel, and there's still some out there in aviation fuel, the legacy lead in soil and water is really a problem. There's lead in paint and also in food is a big problem. And then you can get more information about that from the World Health Organization. And Stanford University has a project on lead that has to do with food in the developing worlds. Apparently, turmeric had a lot of lead in it. So we know that lead causes really steep drops in IQ, and there's strong correlations between nerve damage and violent crime. And also children are particularly vulnerable to these long-term developmental effects from lead exposure and that research, was made controversial by the lead industry even though there was no controversy really the lead industry fought tooth and nail to keep its you know poison from being banished from the market, so that that's a kind of summing up of the situation that we faced.

Mike: Yeah, there's a lot of interesting threads. I mean, one of the things I found in sort of encountering the story and learning about you was we actually have, you know,accounts going back as far as the Greeks in terms of how dangerous lead is to,you know, the human mind. But something else that stuck out to me, and this is, I think, mainly from your reporting, but perhaps you got it elsewhere, is that other countries like Belgium were exploring alternate fuels. And I believe some of the researchers themselves who would invent leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley among them, were interested in ethanol as a sort of substitute. So what kind of happened between this notion of, you know, obviously having a fuel additive is important and basically increased the fuel economy of cars. But how did they go from looking at non-toxic alternatives to settling on lead?

Chapter 3: Known alternatives to leaded gasoline

Bill: That's a very interesting question. The non-toxic alternatives came first at the dawn of the automotive era. Of course, gasoline was the primary fuel because kerosene was a byproduct of the kerosene refining process. So it was very cheap. But at some point, and for various reasons, including national security and environment, every industrial nation substituted part of its oil supply one time or another, especially in the 1920s and 30s. In Europe, it was very popular. There was a guy who invented the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, Harry Ricardo, and he had a Discol blend that was part ethanol and part gasoline. And, you know, it was for racing cars, and then it became a standard fuel. So the Europeans never had alcohol beverage taxes like the U.S.did, and they also had a lot more control through antitrust laws, competition laws, over what the oil industry did. So their chemical industries were very far ahead of the U.S. In the 1900s, you know, at the dawn of the automotive age. There's a paper on one of my websites, but you can find it in...Uh, environmentalhistory.org, uh, about, you know, ethanol's, uh, first century. And this goes, it goes way back and there's lots of it. But the interesting thing was when I started doing the, um, uh, around 1980, 79 and 80, when the great Persian Gulf crisis was happening for the first, for the second time, uh, the oil crisis, I went down to the, basement of the library of Congress and looked through the card catalog, and there were hundreds, hundreds of entries about alcohol as a fuel, and they all stopped around 1925 or 26. So it was as if everybody knew there was an alternative, but now the oil industry has picked its path. They're going to do what they're going to do, and there's no point in working with this anymore. This is in the U.S. Library of Congress.In Europe, on the other hand, like I say, there was a lot of interest, and it continued through World War II and through the 50s and 60s.Um, so it's just a very different approach, the Europeans and the U.S. Approach. We are totally dominated by, not only by the oil industry, but, but the history of petroleum and also the technologies that are associated with that.

Mike: Yeah. I think a lot of my readers and listeners are going to be familiar with the story of a sort of industry dominating, um, sort of the regulatory landscape. I mean, that just sort of is true in a lot of, um, a lot of industries in the U.S. This is the way we started to approach markets. But what strikes me about this story is that some of the same players who would, inevitably delay climate change solutions are the same ones at the turn of the century, kind of promoting leaded gasoline as a primary solution to this engine knocking problem. And so for me, it could be good to give us a sense of who exactly these players are. I noticed that what would become Exxon Mobil, for example, was playing a role here, Standard Oil. But in terms of the way you tell this story, who are the big players here?

Chapter 4: Responsible parties

Bill: Well, sure. So engine knock was considered to be a mechanical problem early on. So imagine, you know, you've got these, in fact, if you probably will hear it in old movies, you know, you'll see these old cars and the engine is really loud, even with mufflers and other things that they would have had done. And part of it is that the fuel and the, you know, the metal weren't really matched very well. So they started off with this mechanical problem, and then they started trying to alter the fuel at General Motors Research Labs, which themselves were actually brought into General Motors from another company called Delco, Dayton Electric Light and Power Company. And so Charles Kettering was the head of both of those. He was an invented genius, the head of the U.S. Society of Automotive Engineers, a kind of a fun person to work with. But had a blind spot or at least a weakness when it came to having to do things that he was told to and not really standing up to Detroit and corporate headquarters of General Motors. So they wanted something that would be cheap, and you could just use quickly, like the pill approach is what they called it, that you could just add to gasoline and it would make cars run smoother. And by smoother, I mean, they could have more power with higher compression engines is the goal. So that's why octane comes into this. You want higher octane in your fuel so that you can have higher compression in your car. And, you know, that's great for consumers, but it's absolutely essential approaching, uh, aviation and, uh, the war in the air in World War II. So this is all part of the, um. What I call the great octane race. So alcohol is part of it. It's far more benign than tetraethyl lead or any of the other things that they were putting in gasoline to raise octane at the time. The other players were Exxon and known at the time as Standard Oil. And they were very interested in anything that would take away part of their markets. So ethanol was not a good idea, you know, because you'd blend 10,15, 20% of alcohol, usually agricultural alcohol. And that would take away part of the market. So they didn't like it and they were on the hunt for new stuff. And then DuPont was, DuPont Chemical Corporation was also involved in designing. Relatively, relatively safe, not very safe, manufacturing processes. But Standard Oil, and General Motors were absolutely reckless in the way they approached making tetraethyl lead. And that's why after a month of the process line being opened up, most of the 50 people on the process line there in New York Harbor near Elizabeth, New Jersey, the refinery there, most of the people in that particular unit went violently insane. And the image of people being dragged away from work in straitjackets, that's what we're talking about. These were people that had completely lost it very suddenly. At least 17, but we think quite a few more died. The records are very unclear. And many people were put into psychiatric institutions, many of them for the rest of their lives. And we know of one for sure that we have proof of, but all these records have been sanitized, and have been deleted from the archives. And I don't know if anybody even kept track of it secretly inside the big, inside Ethel Corporation. Ethyl Corporation, by the way, was a joint venture between General Motors, DuPont, and Standard Oil. And it was its own thing. It existed only to sell gasoline additives, and through the sale of gasoline additives, they controlled the market. Because everybody wanted ethyl, it was heavily promoted, and it did give your car a little bit more of a charge. Ethyl was found guilty of antitrust violations in a famous 1940 U.S.versus Ethyl case that went to the Supreme Court. So that's a bit of the outline. This is a big industry and with a very profitable product against big public health, you could say, Harvard and Yale. But those efforts of the faculty, especially Alice Hamilton at Harvard and Yandell Henderson at Yale, were undercut by other people on the faculty who were more industry-friendly. So it wasn't really a united, you know, opposition to the introduction of lead and gasoline. But they knew each other very well in the 1920s. This is very dangerous stuff. And it, you know, it goes, you know, way back to antiquity. Everybody knew that lead was a poison. And everybody knew that there were plenty of alternatives, but they couldn't really stand up to Detroit. And, and profits for the industry. That was, that was the problem. And there were no real regulations at the time. The regulations that came in started coming in with the Clean Air Act in the 1970s. And now, of course, today, this is the exact thing that's being undercut. And I expect any day to hear, well, why don't we put lead back in gasoline? What's wrong with that? That's, you know, those damn environmentalists, what are they thinking? They're, they're making our gasoline less efficient. Uh, but big agriculture, uh, they actually came out of, uh, the big, um, um, um, ethanol producers were actually part of what was called the whiskey trust. So it was the oil trust versus the whiskey trust. But today big agriculture and, uh, it promotes ethanol from corn and there's,you know, there's good parts to it, especially clean air.Uh, and some other things that are questionable, like, uh, over drawing water from the Ogallala aquifer, or, you know, there's, there are other things that make, uh, corn ethanol questionable.Uh, and then we could go down that road too a little bit because,you know, the idea originally was that you would have a far more renewable fuel made from biomass.And then that would be a possible source of income for, you know. Biofuel plantations in the developing world instead of oil.And that would be far more, you know, environmentally sane, especially with regard to climate change.So we'll see. A lot of those threads have to be picked up now,again, by scientists. The scientific work has been ongoing and it's quite admirable because they don't get much support.But the political side, the policy side of this is a train wreck, as you can imagine.

Mike: Yeah.

Bill: So.

Mike: Something that strikes me and a lot of my readers, listeners know that a big focus at misaligned markets is information asymmetry. And, you know, as you tell the story and as the records tell the story,you know, despite the image of men in straitjackets being carried away and the public asking questions, asking for accountability, you know,some way, somehow, you know, the industry was able to control the narrative.Can you talk a bit about that I mean I know the story for example of Midgley uh, Thomas Midgley was the inventor of lead to gasoline the actual scientist who kind of uh came up the concoction there's this story of him dipping his hands in in Ethyl,um kind of showing that it's safe you know i don't know exactly what the implication is you know it's not like if you expect something dangerous you know that it'll kill you in five seconds of touching it, but um you know that image, you know, kind of stuck with me as throughout the story of how kind of crafty the industry was in trying to, kind of control the narrative as it were. And even with the backing of the U.S. government, can you talk a bit about that?

Bill: Sure. That was a very dramatic moment in the history of this whole thing. So we are in New York City in late October of 1924.Uh these guys at the um Standard Oil refinery over in Bayway across the bay from from Manhattan um started one by one going violently insane, and uh by the time uh five or six days you know there's stories every day on the front page of all the newspapers in the city the New York Times you can find it in the New York Times in 1924 uh pretty easily, and, you know, it's an odd gas. It's a mystery gas. It's who knows what they're up to out at Standard. Maybe this is some kind of, you know, new kind of mustard gas that they might use in a war or something. So they call a press conference at 26 Broadway, which is the headquarters of Standard Oil, and they trot out this guy, Thomas Midgley, who is really only a few years out of grad school at Cornell as a mechanical engineer. He doesn't know what the heck he's really been doing, but he's been consulting with a lot of chemists, and he's been working with Charles Kettering. But Kettering is off in Europe trying to sell the technology to the Germans, who are not buying it, by the way. So it takes Midgley, and so Midgley has this brilliant brainy idea. He's going to put some on his hands and rub it around and show people that it's safe. But I doubt that he actually did that because he was already poisoned. He already had a number of laboratory accidents making this stuff.It's really hard to make and it's really dangerous.So I imagine he just probably poured some glycerin on his hand and figured that counted as being honest because he had been exposed to leaded to tetraethyl lead.But, you know, tetraethyl lead is described as a creeping and malicious poison, if you can imagine that. Not just something that hits you all at once and you stop doing it. You know, you don't know how bad you have it, It's sometimes called painter's colic. Printer's used to get it, and they would have the dangles, which meant that their hands dangled from their wrists. They couldn't use their hands anymore, so. But tetraethyl lead came on like gangbusters. It wasn't a slow creeping and malicious poison. It was just a malicious poison that just hit people really hard.So Midgley was probably already poisoned. I don't think he would have taken a chance of rubbing the stuff all over his hands. Very dangerous.But, you know, a lot of people did.The guys on the production line would, it had a very thick consistency.So they'd grab a handful and throw it at each other, kind of snap it off their fingers.Standards were just not the same back then, and a lot of them ended up paying the price for their ignorance. None of that had to have happened. DuPont was appalled.The engineers from DuPont, who were used to dealing with difficult chemicals, were themselves appalled at what Standard Oil and General Motors were up to in Bayway. They had their own process going, and they had lost some of their own people.But at least they had tried to contain the process and try to figure out, you know, how to do it safely.So, I mean, at the time, this is what finally comes out over time in the newspapers.The New York Times did the best covering all this. And we can recover, you know, it's interesting. This is one of my sort of historiographic interests here. We can recover a lot of these, environmental historical problems through the news media when a lot of the archives have been sanitized.This is what is so extremely valuable about the news media is that it does give us a history that we can go back to at least a little bit.Anyway, a little sidelight.

Mike: Yeah, no, I know you're a journalist by training and you talk about the history of journalism through your own work. And so obviously that's a very good through line.What strikes me here, though, is, you know, maybe maybe I'm partially guilty of this as I've kind of retold the story, reading your writing and other writing,is, you know, DuPont being the responsible party here.Normally, DuPont is, you know.

Chapter 6: Robert Kehoe and DuPont

Bill: The irresponsible party.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, DuPont had Robert Kehoe right, who was, you know, going around kind of lying about.

Bill: Well, they did, yes, employ him. I would say he was at the University of Cincinnati.But, yeah, General Motors, Ethyl Corporation, and DuPont did employ a doctor who continued.So every big corporation like this has medical officers that are out there looking at the occupational safety issues for their workers.And so, by the way, all those reports, which were done monthly, they're all missing too. Nobody knows where those are.But Kehoe was brought in after the public health service in several states shut down ethyl, tetraethyl lead production, to get a better idea over the long term of how bad lead was. Well, so what he figured was there was a normal lead body, this burden, and it's not normal at all. He kind of, he fronted for the industry.It's disgraceful, actually. And he wasn't called out on it until the 1960s,until the beginnings of serious environmental public policy in Congress.

Mike: There's still buildings named after him, right?

Bill: I'm not sure. There might be in Cincinnati.He wouldn't be my choice for a public health hero. I would say he's kind of an enabler.

Mike: Yeah. So, yeah, I found it interesting. You know, DuPont had standards and they kind of, you know, maybe there is a world where, you know, if they were the ones who were kind of implementing this process, maybe it wouldn't have been as disastrous. Although, obviously, they had it strong.

Bill: Their standards did become the standards because the disaster took place through extraordinary recklessness.And they realized not only did they have to contain the process, but they had to go up a couple of levels in terms of containment.So they learned a lot from it.But the person who was, I would say, the most influential in seeing through the problem was a Caltech professor named Claire Patterson, who...Could not get a clean reading on lead isotopes for dating the Earth.He was a geologist, and he was trying to see what different geological samples had, small bits of uranium being decaying into lead, and that was a way of dating the Earth. Back at that point, we figured out that the Earth was at least 2 billion years old, and it's a very controversial area, but he realized that even with a regular, you know, with regular precautions in his lab, he couldn't get away from lead.There was so much lead in the air and everybody's hair and their clothes and just all around from leaded gasoline spewing everywhere that he ended up having to do triple acid washes, for his specimens and for all the work product there.And so he was the one who testified in, um, a 1966 public hearing on Capitol Hill that,um, uh, about this problem and that Kehoe was obviously not working in the public interest. So it was Kehoe versus Patterson in this particular confrontation.

Mike: Yeah, that's very interesting. There are a lot of, obviously, players in this story.And I mean, I think the through line for me, obviously, is the incentives that aligned Standard Oil, DuPont, and GM together and their desire to,they were explicitly trying to solve for an anti-knocking agent that would corner the market, right?I mean, is there a world where if they weren't trying to maximize profits in that way that they maybe wouldn't have settled on, on, on TEL?

Chapter 7: TEL to maximize profits

Bill: Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, if they hadn't settled on tetraethyl lead, which was by far the most profitable, um, there would have been, um, three or four different, very strong alternatives that were well known at the time, by the way, and also show up in the antitrust case, uh, that, you know, that I mentioned before us versus Ethyl.Um, one of them was ethanol and, you know, alcohol for fuel.It was very well known, um, early on.In fact, the very first internal combustion engine in the world was created by a guy, um, who lived in Vermont in the 1820s, 1820s. He had a carburetor, he had a piston. It was a real actual internal combustion engine.And he used alcohol because at the time gasoline was almost impossible and they didn't even have much kerosene.Available what they were using at the time for lamp fuel, was a combination of alcohol, turpentine, and other things, and that's the original uh fuel the know when we move beyond candles and needed to get brighter lights to work and to read at night, um that's the stage that um that sort of set the stage for the oil industry to come in and then claim there was nothing but oil, if you look at the history of the oil industry, it's like this miraculous discovery that comes down from on high, and thank God for oil and all this. And, and it's, it's as if the, the previous history of the previous, I don't know, 70 or 80 years of lamp fuel and development just never happened.So there's a lot to be made up for here. I'm still working on some of this historically.Uh but uh oil power is a lot like gravity it'll bend sunlight gravity you know the gravity of the sun will bend starlight behind it, you know and that's been that's part of the effect here, the gravity of uh oil power will bend the truth, And they do. They have no compunction about it. They'll just tell you to think like that, and this is one of the things Midgley did in the famous press conference. He said, there are no alternatives.There's nothing out there that does what tetraethyl lead can do. Well, it was a lie.It was not at all true. There were plenty of other things. Alice Hamilton was right.At one point, Alice Hamilton, in a famous confrontation with Charles Kettering at a different time, you know, said, you are nothing but a murderer because people were already dead because of his recklessness. These are lessons that we need to remember environmental history.These aren't the, you know, this isn't the only, you know, environmental history lesson, but it's one of the big ones.

Chapter 8: Information asymmetry and ethanol as an alternative

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I think this is a lesson that generalizes well beyond,um, beyond environmental history to just the history of markets,in my view, our technology, we need to manage responsibly.And when we kind of defer power to, to industry without sort of consulting the public or consulting experts, this is kind of what we end up with.And so there's so many domains where you could look at the influence that information asymmetry has had on nudging people towards less valuable alternatives,not because there were no alternatives, but because,the corporate interests basically directed the public to where their profits would be highest, right?

Bill: Sure. And I love your term, information asymmetry. That's exactly what happened, the propaganda overwhelmed the truth. It still does. Most people, if you ask them about ethanol today, they go, oh, that's bad stuff.And you ask them, well, compared to gasoline, well, it's obviously, you know, ethanol is far worse than gasoline. You know, you can't drink gasoline.

Mike: Yeah.

Bill: I mean, so on the face of it, on the face of it, it's, it's the propaganda ridiculous, but you know, there are issues. So I'm not saying there aren't anyway.There's issues with all kinds of things. I started on this, you know, with the idea I was covering energy and environment on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.And I work for Jack Anderson in a business publishing group.And everyone, and especially the Congress and the defense intelligence community, was petrified that the Strait of Hormuz would get closed down. Absolutely petrified because it would be a disaster. So what they wanted to do was, and you know, this was the policy at the Department of Energy,everything possible to bring new fuel sources online.And the fastest and the cheapest and the most environmentally friendly was ethanol from grain.So, Jimmy Carter and his Department of Energy, which by the way was being run by the former CIA director because they put a person like that in charge of energy because of how difficult the situation was. We were getting two thirds of our imports, and that was 30% of overall daily consumption out of the Strait of Hormuz.And it was, boy, we were sweating that.Today, we don't get anything. The US does not have to have the Strait of Hormuz.So, that's why Donald Trump can do what he does there. But at the time,there was no way. I mean, how can you.Anyway, there was, there was no way to protect it. No one thought Admiral ThomasMore, who was at the time head of the CIA and Jim Schlesinger and some of the others had no idea about what could be, you know, how they could defend the, the, um,um, Strait of Hormuz. And other oil sources around the world, Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela,Mexico, were still more or less in development because the Saudis had absolutely dominated world oil.And then they got us to the brink and we managed to back away from it.And ethanol is part of the picture there.So strategically, you know, there was a lot of support for ethanol, even at the time.Now, by the 1980s, the oil industry absolutely tanked the market.They deliberately pushed prices way down. So they actually pushed these alcohol plants into bankruptcy. Only a few of them really survived that,but they were the strong ones. And nowadays, there's companies like POET and others that provide ethanol all over the country, and it's cheaper than gasoline now.It used to be much more expensive. Anyway, I could rattle on about this for a long time. I mean, interesting problem,and it is, and there's an information asymmetry because, you know, they're...Ethanol is considered to be kind of taboo oh god nobody believes in that stuff anymore I've had people say what are you doing talking about this that's all bad Well, sometimes you have to go,you know go over that horizon and see what it is that they're telling you you shouldn't be looking at.

Mike: Yeah I mean I think I think maybe it's a generational thing because you know in NASCAR don't they use mostly ethanol blends for performance and stuff like that? So like I think, you know, my hope is that the taboo,has kind of waned over the decades.But yeah, I mean, obviously, Midgley and his ilk, I should say rather, Ethyl Corp and GM and their ilk kind of put us in a situation where we have to unravel the lies over the course of decades, right?

Chapter 9: Midgley's complex role and archival research

Bill: I totally agree. I mean, that's information asymmetry. It's a great example of information asymmetry.

Mike: Oh, no. I mean, the reason why I'm drawn to this story is sort of Midgly, you know, among my friend group is kind of a joke that I'll say mildly in any conversation.You know, the story itself is actually just, it's like, you know, paradigmatic of, you know, the exact failure modes that markets under capitalism have and the incentives of the actors.One of my core theses at misaligned markets is that information asymmetry actually is the core driver of market success.In a lot of cases, if information asymmetry is limited to the competition within the market, i.e. someone has a better process than someone else, that's fine. But if information asymmetry is about the rules of the market and the rules of the game, so to speak, then obviously we get into trouble where people are kind of gaming the system, as it were.And I am very deeply drawn. I have a security background. I'm drawn to instances of people who game systems and what the outcomes are when you turn a system against itself. And the story, again, is fascinating to me for that very reason.

Bill: There's a bunch of these, yeah. AI is another one.

Mike: AI is another one, yeah.

Bill: At a certain point, the darling was the absolute darling of Silicon Valley.And suddenly, these data centers and AI technology have a pretty serious public relations black eye, to put it in older terms.Yeah, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes right now.

Mike: Yeah, if you're interested, I've been writing about AI on Misaligned Markets, and I started a second podcast called The Last Enclosure, where we've been talking about the AI story in extensive detail. So I'm very familiar with the intricacies of the AI story.

Bill: I need to go back and read that because there are things along these lines in lots of areas.I love the history of technology. A lot of the themes in history of technology, have to do with not necessarily the triumph of the best technology, but the people who have the best story to tell or the best, uh, you know, financial backing or the best markets, you know, uh, Marconi, Guglielmo Marconi of, um, uh, the telegraph radio telegraph fame actually was only one of about a dozen that had come up with this idea of communicating over the radio, but he had the, by far the worst technology, but the best, um, financial backing and the best story to tell. So that's how he became so successful.

Chapter 10: Best technology doesn't always win

Mike: Yeah yeah yeah I mean all these threads exactly the types of things I'm interested in with my um you know history of technologies and it's typically linked with, um so you have a market system market capitalism and the incentives that market capitalism provides in sort of shaping the environment and so it's kind of funny we kind of praise, markets under capitalism for promoting competition when the story to me is you know how successful have you, know the um the success stories of our time been so good at eliminating competition not through better products but through manipulating the rules of the system the rules of the game in order to eliminate competition right and so.

Bill: Right which is why it's so very important to have a level playing field in a free market so that rather than a chaotic market you have an actual free market with regulations, that make sure that we're not in a race to the bottom.And this is what's been undercut with this anti-environmental stuff that's coming out of the, you know, the, the far right in America.Um, I, all of these, um, industrial, uh, interests, uh, and, and chemists, uh, were thought that they were competing, uh, at least in the latter 20th century after leaded gasoline was, was recognized for the, um, disaster that it was there were other lots of other chemical issues too as you know DDT and things like that with Rachel Carson and what the chemical companies decided they they would do it was their policy especially DuPont and um, Um, geez, some of the, I'm trying to think of the other, uh, based in, uh, in Michigan, um, but, um, would be to accept regulation, find a common baseline that was in the public interest with government, uh, regulation, and then compete on that basis.

Mike: Right. The rules of the game being level, like you said, exactly.Yeah. That's when we have the best technology, right? People who are working with known best practices to promote, you know, actual useful use cases as opposed to whatever is the most profitable regardless of the cost, right?

Bill: Sure. So the government would set a standard like best available control technology for coal-fired power plants.How do you control smoke emissions and particulate emissions from a coal-fired power plant?Well, you know, you can compete for the technology, but let's look at the endresult and then let's set a,best available control technology floor and everybody can compete from that basis.Now, in the regulated monopoly electric utility industry, it's not a lot of competition, but the imposition of regulations had pretty much the same effect,that you were starting with a floor, and it was a public health-oriented floor. So there's nothing wrong with that. That is the, uh, um, uh,that is the way the country was working.And we need to recognize that, you know, in a technological society,if you don't recognize the value of technology and how it helps,um, you're, you know, we are off on a,uh, for a wild ride and it's not getting any easier anyway.

Mike: Completely agree. Yeah.A lot of my retelling of the story, you know, kind of admittedly bastardized,has been focused on Midgley. Midgley is sort of the villain.But, you know, when I look at your reporting more thoroughly,I watched your Centennial Lead Roundtable, for example.I got the sense that Midgley was a small player.But in some ways, even if he was a small player, he's very interesting,right? So one story of yours that kind of struck me is even when TEL was kind of agreed on as the fuel, you know, Midgley had always had an interest in ethanol and other alternative fuels. And so there's this duality to Midgley where it's like, you know,even though he's not a chemist by training, he takes himself seriously,even though his process is just trying random additives, dumping random substances into oil, right?

Chapter 11: Midgley's culpability?

Mike: Can you kind of clarify the role of Midgley and how your personal view of Midgley may have evolved throughout the story and where you place him in the story?Is he important? Is he not important? I know it's kind of a tight question, but...

Bill: Well, no, he's very important in the story and his relationship with CharlesKettering, the boss who becomes General Motors vice president of research, is also very important.Um but and I actually after spending you know a couple of weeks in his archive so he realized that the the only reason we're having this conversation right now is that Richard Scharchburg at General Motors Institute,um recognized what this stuff was made a few phone calls and somebody paid for me to go out touch flint michigan to look at it and i recognize what it was too and it's the only opening we've ever really had in, in this story. So he, um, left 80 linear feet of, uh, of files.So that means, you know, if, if a file cabinet is two, maybe two linear feet,there were 40 different file cabinet drawers to go through.

Mike: I don't know if some of my listeners even know what a file cabinet is, the younger generation.

Bill: Right. Okay. It was a big mountain. A lot of paper, but, um, uh, it was, it was, uh, so fascinating.Um, and there were lots of letters and lots of like, uh, his son, um,uh, sent him a, a really nice, um, drawing of him, uh, and, uh,you know, of dad and the son in a canoe going fishing, you know,and, and he was a real human being.He was a warm-blooded human being, and he definitely saw the variety of approaches that they could take, technologies they could take. But at some point,he got the orders from on high.No, if you want to stay here and work on this, we're not doing this crazy alcohol-fuel thing. We're going to stick with tetraethyl lead. And that's what we're doing. So within two years, two or three years when it was first, really the anti-knock effect was first discovered,Midgley is claiming that there's nothing else on the market.So something changed for him. And I guess they just told him,look, you know, you have a family, you want to make money, you better tow the corporate line here.And he did. And so did Kettering too, by the way.You know, so neither of them were very happy about this.Both of them, so Kettering and Midgley were the president and vice president of the first president and vice president of the Ethyl Corporation. And that was GM and Standard Oil's joint venture.But they were fired and secretly fired and somebody else was put in their place.So they were obviously, there was a lot of conflict in the boardroom.So I would say Midgley and Kettering are people that, I mean,when you're a historian, you get to know people in the past,kind of. And I liked them. They made some mistakes. You know, nobody's perfect.The real hero in the story to me is Alice Hamilton.And there's a recent book by a guy named Daniel Stone called American Poison. And he took kind of a dual approach, the Midgley story and the Hamilton story.And it was it's I think it came off really well I think it was published in 24 uh. You know I to the extent that I could help with some archival access uh you know I did so.

Mike: I mean you kind of like the book like you're one of the first people to break this story right I mean I think there was maybe a little reporting before you but correct me if I'm wrong you know your role in all of this.

Bill: You know, so it was my dissertation. So when I wrote my dissertation at theUniversity of Maryland, it was partly, you know, about communication and information asymmetries. We didn't have that useful word back then. But, I called it information disjunctions. But that was, so that was my dissertation.Then I wrote a bunch of papers. I just thought this is so contrary to what everybody knows.I went to the Society of Automotive Engineers meeting one time and, uh, I remember this older engineer looking at my paper and reading the abstract and then reading through really quickly and going, oh my God, this changes everything. And I thought, that's great. How? And he wouldn't talk to me after that.He says, get away from me. You know, I don't know who he worked with. He was, he was, um, um, I think a, uh, researcher from, um, uh,from an automotive company. But anyway, uh.So, we're really, oh, I need to mention that Jamie Kittman found my dissertation.He was really interested in this idea. Jamie is working on this new film about Midgley, by the way.He's one of the writers on the film, or one of the researchers on the film.And he's involving me, sort of, with some of the historiographic questions and all that.Uh and i don't know if the if the film on Midgley is ever going to take or not right now it seems to have been stalled aLittle bit impacted by COVID.

Mike: Yeah I was going to ask you about that so anytime I've noticed thatMidgley comes up in reporting almost,uh invariably it's your your actual reporting that they're using um even when it's not named I think there's a New York Times article from 23 that talks about Midgley in the context of technology technological innovation there's a YouTubechannel called Veritasium,that talked about Midgley all the time and talked about the stories that you've kind of gone over.A lot of them seem to admit, though, the fact that, you know,they had patented leaded gasoline, so this was very clearly a deliberate kind of insidious kind of decision as opposed to just a simple accident. But the movie is an interesting idea because, you know, I saw a report about there being a movie and you were consulted on it and wasn't sure if it was a thing or not.

Bill: Well, the, um, uh, I was going to say that after that my dissertation was,was published and they become public, uh, Jamie found it.And, uh, Jamie was a, um, um, the lawyer for a group called,They Might be Giants. You may have heard them. They're sort of the house in New York.And, and so, um, he, uh, wanted to talk it over and, and he invited,uh, me and a couple of friends to go out and hear the Giants.And we got front row tickets and God, it was just a great evening.And um and he he was sort of doing this in the hope that I would cooperate with him and I said: "Jamie I work you know in the public interest I will certainly cooperate with anybody who's interested in this story." You know so um,I figured that I owe that for my um my job is a public interest job but he worked on something that was published in the nation magazine in the year 2000. It was a very good summary of a lot of this with some additional work that he did, but he credited me.And he also went out to General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan,to look at those same archives. They were still there at the time.They're not there anymore. I was very happy not to be the only person working in this.Area because.It's it's kind of you never know I mean I'd often you know drive around Washington DC I'd get followed maybe and who knows you never you.

Mike: Yeah. What about ToxDocs? I mean ToxDocs which is um for the listenersToxDocs is like an archive by several universities to store these documentation from these companies about their chemicals and kind of what they knew at the time about these chemicals.Does ToxDocs have some of these...?

Bill: Yes, they do. As a matter of fact, yeah, that's, the people who started it,Rosner and Markowitz, were the ones who wrote the book Dying for Work at NYU.So yeah, I've known them for a long time.We've all been very supportive. I think Rosner was in one of our,you know, video sessions that you can find on.

Mike: So there's a question for me. Do we know? So obviously the incentives here are kind of perverse.They're actually two questions, actually. Let me ask the first one really quickly.As we're talking about the people, Kettering and Midgley, you kind of indicated,you know, they're human, they're warm-blooded humans, and that they weren't even necessarily happy with the decision.I know that both Kettering and Midgley were obsessed with ethanol and they are kind of made to embrace TEL, ead.Is there any sense that they feel guilty? I think Midgley's Wikipedia page mentionsthat he, maybe his death was ruled a suicide. And I think maybe there's reporting where you've kind of affirmed that particular interpretation of his death.

Bill: Well, I think, okay, yes, it was ruled a suicide by the coroner. In Ohio where he died in Dayton. I think he did feel terribly guilty.He didn't let a lot of that out.And they heaped all of these honors on him and they sort of made a lot of allowancesbecause he had been lead poisoned in the process of doing the research.But yeah, the suicide had to do with,either had polio or he'd gotten to the point where he could barely walk fromthe lead. And both are possible.But he had a little rig in his bed to help him pull himself up out of bed.And he used that to hang himself with. So I think he did feel guilty about it.I know his family feels pretty rotten about it.And I have talked with them and I have told them, you know he seemed like a very good man who got caught up in a bad situation yeah the the people who are the most responsible for this um,you know were the the head of General Motors the head of the heads of the DuPont the DuPont family,um are the ones and and of course the Standard Oil company um all have a lotto answer for here I don't think it was midgley and kettering I think they were pushed into it. And they were pushed into it because the big corporations said,well, which is most profitable? Is it legal? Okay, let's do it.And they didn't really have that public health issue on their minds.So they shoved the public health costs over onto the public,and it wasn't really all that much money.It's not like, you know, tetraethyl lead them. Um, I mean, well,how do I put this exactly?Um, if they had gone with alternatives, nobody would have noticed the difference.

Chapter 12: Best technology doesn't always win (why markets must be managed)

Bill: I mean, in terms of prices, it would have been a penny or two higher or lower at various times.I mean, it's actually much lower now. If you buy E15 gasoline,obviously it's around the $3 a gallon range.Whereas if you buy E10, it's in the $3.50 range. And if you buy non-ethanol-enhanced gasoline, it's in the $4.50 range.You know, if you want to be a purist and have pure gasoline and what you're really buying is benzene, but that's, you know, that's not, that's another information,um, disjunction, so to speak.

Mike: Yeah. The second question is, um, kind of like, so we know that they are,they were maximizing, I think they're trying to corner the market, right.And sort of the incentive is, was literally just to be the only, so, cause you,we started this discussion and your research has brought up the fact that not only was there alternative additives, but they're alternative fuels right and by kind of pegging gasoline to a patentable lead,lead additive they were basically saying hey we're the only ones that could sell the substance were guaranteed income for um the US phased this out in 95 righties that right I think I was born leaded gasoline was still a thing I was born in the early 90s um.

Chapter 13: Laying out the incentives

Bill: Oh oh control the market yeah yeah Yeah, that's exactly the point of the Ethyl v. U.S.Antitrust lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court in 1940 and the whole investigation.Now, the Justice Department archives at National Archives in College Park did actually have the investigation and the reports leading up to that lawsuit.And they did find that General Motors and the Standard Oil and Ethyl um had patented a whole bunch of alternatives not just tetraethyl lead there was tetramethyllead there was you know um,an iron carbonyl compound, and they had some various concoctions that blended benzene and ethanol, all as octane boosters. So it was given, stipulated, you know, in the lawsuit by the attorneys for Ethyl and Standard Oil that there were bunches of alternatives.But the point of using the one tetraethyl lead was indeed to control the market,and that's what they were found guilty of so that's that's a finding of fact in a in a in the highest court. Um that's what they did with it um.After the patent expired and i think that would have been so it's 28 years so we're talking about,patented in 1922 but in the early 50s there were a number of other companies that picked up this technology but it's very difficult dangerous technology Innospec was one of them,um and there was some somebody else in Britain that Jamie Kitman kind of ran down as part of his research,uh and then it was picked up all around the world and I started getting whenI when this started breaking I guess in the 2000s especially with the public health papers that were published on um. Uh, the international environmental, um, uh, journals, uh, public health journals,I started getting emails, uh, and calls from people in countries like Jordan and, uh,you know, small developing countries where they wondered if it would be safe to go in.And, um: "The boss says, go in and scrape up the sludge at the bottom of this tank."And in one case, you know, I just really hit the alarm button and got in touch with the embassy and said, this is really dangerous. Don't let those people go in the tank. Uh, the international environmental, um, uh, journals, uh, public health journals,I started getting emails, uh, and calls from people in countries like Jordan and, uh,you know, small developing countries where they wondered if it would be safe to go in.And, um: "The boss says, go in and scrape up the sludge at the bottom of this tank."And in one case, you know, I just really hit the alarm button and got in touch with the embassy and said, this is really dangerous. Don't let those people go in the tank. It's not that much money. They don't make that much more money than they would have if they'd been safer,if they'd taken, if the regulations had been, proper regulations had been in place.But that's the lesson. See, that's why we study history and that,you know, today, this whole Trump administration war on renewables and on the environment is the height of political interference with technology.It's kind of like Lysenkoism on a grand scale. And it really portends a kind of a disaster of unimaginable proportions. You can't put the idiots in charge of a highly technological,highly scientific society.It's very dangerous. And that's the situation.

Mike: The idiots in the Craven, of course, right? People who benefit from it,they may know better, but they benefit from the public not knowing,you know, the information asymmetry, basically, right?

Chapter 14: Midgley and Charles Kettering wanted alternative fuels

Bill: Sure. Well, you know, in defense of the slightly craven, and here I'm talking about Charles Kettering and Thomas Midgley, okay,their idea was, well, let's go along with leaded gasoline because we're going to start running out of oil by the end of the 1930s.That was the well-known, you know, situation that they were in at the time.And with a higher compression engine, we're going to be able to switch over to pure alcohol fuel engines very easily that are also higher compression engines.So alcohol fuel is a very good fuel. It's high compression fuel. And so the idea was, well, let's just go along with this tetraethyl lead thing until the oil runs out.And then we'll have high compression engines and we'll just use alcohol in them that's in the DuPont legal report that is no longer in the DuPont archives but is actually in ToxDocs now.

Mike: Oh wow so they okay yeah I mean I know they were interested in alternative alternatives additives and so they even even as they had even as they had kind of leapt to tell they were always keeping that back in mind,um that's that's so interesting I mean obviously people were multi-dimensional,um but it's kind of interesting hearing that kind of um that that factoid.Semi-craven I think. Maybe yeah I was just thinking purely of the executives at DuPont who knew better but did you know they were fine with this unfolding this way right.

Bill: Oh they they were a case they're down in in South Carolina uh at the um DuPontplantation There were, there was dirty, um,One of, one of the, um, DuPont's, uh, DuPont guys was called dirty somethingDuPont, but the other one, uh, Eugene, uh, was called "Filthy Eugene,"um, because we were, we were well known to be morally baseless characters.

Bill: I, it's, you know, that's, and that's just local neighborhood gossip.I was a reporter on the coast of South Carolina for a while,you know, dirty somebody and Filthy Eugene.The DuPonts, of course, made the American Revolution happen with their gunpowder,and their engineers were pretty responsible people.My dad worked for DuPont for a while, and he was amazed that they wouldn't let him get close to lead puddling without fans and without safety measures in place.We talked about this for a while, and he had a good view of them,but was happy to get away from them, too. Anyway, the human dimension of this is really complicated,but really interesting.

Mike: Yeah, it is. Yeah.I want to be mindful of your time, so I'll just ask you three more questions.The first question is a little complicated. Let me try and see if I could word it correctly.So there's this sense that we know the cost, we know the harms of TEL,but there's some basically defense of this decision in the form of,well, one, lead coating is better for engines.I don't know if that's a story that was part of the media promotion of TEL to justify its usage, but there's also a sense that.You know, well, regardless of what additive we got, TEL increased fuel economy so substantially that, you know, even though it cost us a lot,you know, think of all the lives that were benefited and saved by the fact that we had better fuel economy.

Chapter 15: TEL cost-benefit analysis (attempting a naive steelman)

Mike: And so to, you know, to kind of this idea, what do you say about this cost-benefit analysis? I mean, my view, obviously, is that it's not worth it.If you think about the cost of TEL, tetraethyl lead, it just goes on to the future.It's permanent. We have the substance.As long as there is residual TEL around, people can be poisoned.But, you know, think about all the aerosolization of all this leaded gasoline and all the lives that were harmed. And we know that there are alternative fuels.So the cost-benefit analysis to me is pretty poor. But on the other hand, you have, you know, well, it did increase fuel economy and maybe engines were coated better in the sense that these cars would last longer, the engines would last longer.

Bill: Well, you know, that's what you're talking about there is the hardening,the problem of hardening of the lifters in the valve seats in a modern engine.And there's a lot to that, but it doesn't really come out on the side of leaded gasoline.You wouldn't use lead to have harder, you know, valve seats.The problem, of course, is that, you know, the fuel is going to get a little bit gummy and you have to have certain, you know, detergents in the fuel to keep it moving.And then when ethyl comes along, that makes it even gummier. So then you have to bring in tetraethyl ethylene bromide, which is a pretty serious poison.And all of those things together gave a better seat to the valve train.But it's not like that was so hard to achieve in any other way.That's so a lot of automotive experts, Jamie Kittman's the expert in that. Okay. Um.So that's one of the arguments. You know, the other one is that the very high end of aviation engine production, especially the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that,you know, won the war, basically, or was one of the things that allowed the U.S. And allies to dominate the skies over Europe in 1944.Um, that, uh, you know, maybe there's an argument where that would be a good thing.You know, it's a good thing that we had tetraethyl lead for that particular use, but it doesn't really do that much. It's a, um, it only bumps the octane up by five or six points.What, where we really get our octane, uh, up is through severe,is through, um, uh, catalytic reforming and also severe reforming in the refineries,and then other kinds of additives. So you could make that argument, but it wasn't necessary even for the Rolls-Royce Merlin.But they did design it to use high-test leaded gasoline.But on balance, for general public, you know, use, gasoline,everyday gasoline, I mean, there's a reason why they say that use as a motorfuel only, you have that picture on your.Website, because what people use gasoline for a lot of times was to wash grease off their hands.So, oh yeah, garage mechanics, I mean, I've done that too.And it was apparently better than benzene at one point, of course,which is carcinogenic, right? So you got your choice. You got, you know, cancer or, um, or nerve damage. Yeah. Pick your poison.Right.So, uh, we're, there are, there's other things we use now, like gunk,for example, to, to clean your hands off after a good, um, greasy session with a car engine.But I, I just really, um, that's the whole thing about technology.You know, you, at first it seems like there's this monolithic "boy,they picked the best one."And then later, as you get, you know, deep down into the weeds and you start looking,at the research and what they were thinking and writing about at the time,you find out there are all these other alternatives, some of which,you know, might not have worked out and others that might very well have worked out. There are agricultural historians, for example, who think, wouldn't it have been so much better if our agricultural system was geared to producing fuels and chemicals along with foods and fibers.And, you know, that's, what did we miss out on?Um, and the, the sort of agrarian philosophy is when we got rid of horses and,you know, hay burners and all the hay that they used, what, um,did we replace them with for the farmers?And the answer is nothing, you know, just big, endless fields of grain,which is nice, but, um, uh, a, an integrated multi-product farm operation,uh, became very difficult to pull off because all of the old farm products,transportation from horses and, you know, fuel for the horses,all the hay in addition to the transportation. I'm not saying we should have stuck with horses.I just think, you know, part of the vision was for the people who,the agrarians who wanted to see like Henry Ford, for example,and I'm not going to say he was a great character by any means, but,but what, you know, he saw was that, um, farm prosperity depending,depended on having a variety of products.So he spent a lot of money researching some of those things.But there were others who did that too. The many paths that this technology could have taken might have been much better if tetraethyl lead never existed in the first place as an octane booster.

Mike: Yeah, that's such a great point. I mean, I actually, in my work,I've visualized the history of technology like a set of train tracks, right?And so every technology on the path to another technology is like a station.And a lot of these stations, there are a lot of political fights that end up deciding who wins, who becomes the dominant station for a particular technology.And I mean, you made this point, actually, in your article, Henry Ford,Charles Kettering, and the fuel of the future. Technology is often political, right? And so this question, this problem is just inescapable. It's not something that you solve once and you're kind of done with it.It is sort of us, you know, in dialogue with another, figuring out what actually is best for our needs. And if we don't have those discussions,the industry will make up its mind by choosing the most profitable options and things like that.So I just want to acknowledge that point because it's what has drawn me to my work at Misaligned Markets, too.

Bill: Well, I just would really like to encourage you. I think it's one of the most fascinating areas of history and it's controversial. So that's one reason why it's fascinating, but it's important for the future.The idea, Carl Sagan used to talk about how we need to have people who are well-versed in science and technology and can speak from the public interest point of view about the choices that were made.

Mike: Yeah. I literally wrote a blog post called title to steer the future you know we must understand the past and looking at these past conflicts over technology,in order to inform how we build out you know um future technologies because technology is both you know,um an artifact you know an object but it's also a social implementation and these implementations are where you get the where you run into trouble right if someone deploys the technology in a way that's not safe you know that doesn'tmatter if the technology itself is neutral,it's this deployment is not neutral, right?

Bill: Right you know we used to have an office of technology assessment that was it was uh one of the,uh four sisters at the library of congress you have the general accounting office you have the or now it's called the government accounting office you have the Library of Congress um,Uh, and then there was the Office of Technology Assessment and there was another,but anyway, they, the Republicans were very uncomfortable with the kind of assessments of technology that were coming out of the OTA and they, they killed it in 19, you know, 96. So yeah, that was a, um, we, we need to be much more aware of that.We need to have a lot more people trained in, um, of technology assessment in general, and especially with a historical or the historical perspective.A couple of the areas here that are very useful, I think that there's a society for the history of technology.There is environmental history, and I've got environmentalhistory.org as a webpage that starts people off on that.So I just would encourage everybody who's interested in this to,it's far more interesting than military history. But so much of our history is politics and war.And what about culture? What about development? What about how we envision a positive future? How do we, you know, take care of resource needs in a crazy world and avoid conflict? That's what we need research in. And alternative fuels are part of that.

Chapter 16: What would accountability look like?

Mike: So one last main question. What would accountability have looked like for,you know, TEL? And is it even possible decades after the fact

Bill: Well, you know, if we ever go to court over all this and the court orders Ethyl and Exxon and DuPont to produce these records in public, we might begin to have some accountability. But they're all secret now. I mean, you know that,when you study the history of Edison's electric light or Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen or, you know, isolation of oxygen,their lab notebooks, their day-to-day operations, their diaries,all that stuff is open and you can kind of see the progress of the actual invention taking place and forming in their minds. Nothing like that is available in this particular area.It's a difficult topic.

Mike: Yeah, it's a black hole.

Bill: Well, you know, a couple of, you know, sometimes, sometimes the light slips through the cracks as Leonard Cohen used to say, right?But we do see the problem in outline and it's money, pure and simple.Shift the burden onto the public,make them pay with their poor health and industry rakes in the profits.That's why we have regulation and that's why we need to study the history of these kinds of things.

Mike: I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Bill, for being on the podcast.Before I let you go, do you have anything to plug, any new books,any new articles? And is there a place people can follow you?

Bill: Sure. Environmentalhistory.org is one place.Also, revolutionsincommunication.com. That's my history of media technology,which I just finished the third edition of.And I'm going back to work on this leaded gasoline and alternative fuels problem again because a lot of new stuff has come up recently.And there was a movie coming up and I think it's a very exciting area.So, uh, and it also shows our problem in outline.And I, I don't really think that the people are so much to blame as,as the, um, you know, Midgley, Kettering and those guys as the, um, corporate, um,um, imperatives. You know we we have a system where a corporation has to maximize its money,and what we need to do is have more and and there are corporate structures that are you know benefit corporations I'm sure you know so the public benefit the public health environment and all of those things can be plugged into the calculus of how well the company is doing and so we need more of that sort of thoughtful regulated capitalism if you ask me.Yeah, no,I totally agree.Thankyou very much thank you very much for, uh,for having me on your show and I, and best of luck to everybody out there.