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Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented (2016)

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Article URL: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-invented-180961368/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873893

Points: 130

# Comments: 74

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133 points · 77 comments · 查看原帖

  1. louky

    The major proponent was also known as Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0] Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1] [0] https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr .

  2. FuckButtons

    There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.

  3. JumpCrisscross

    > countries where leaded gasoline was—or still is—used Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021

  4. hunmernop

    Gas itself is poison. Just take a deep huff at the gas station. EVs are the only way to go. At least the pollution is localized, not down every inner city street with exhaust and other vapors.

  5. leoc

    Lucas Reilly's Mental Floss article on Clair Patterson https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... is a much better piece. I'll also recycle https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo 's old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 on this article from its 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 (again, what follows is his or her work not mine!): > Two beliefs became entrenched: 1. that lead is natural to the human body, and 2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1] A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/ass

  6. dnemmers

    A good Veritasium video on the subject: https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?is=MorITIg_MvFrKtvR

  7. meristohm

    For an animated version of this story, see Cosmos, season 2 (I forget which episode, but it was helpful in teaching about this in high school)

  8. culi

    Yes and the toxic effects of asbestos had been known for thousands of years before popcorn ceilings became a fad