MICHAEL ROGALSKI

For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—and how he took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself.

Walter Dymock didn’t mean to jump out his second-story bedroom window. He was queasy, not out of his mind. But on a mild October night in 1923, shortly after Dymock groggily tucked himself into bed, something within him snapped. Like a man possessed, Dymock rose, fumbled through the dark, opened his window, and leapt into his garden.

Hours later, a passerby discovered him lying in the dirt, still breathing. He was hurried to a hospital.

A few miles away, Herbert Fuson was also losing his grip on reality. He’d be restrained in a straitjacket, too. The most troubling case, however, belonged to Ernest Oelgert. He had complained of delirium at work and was gripped by tremors and terrifying hallucinations. “Three coming at me at once!” he shrieked. But no one was there.

One day later, Oelgert was dead. Doctors examining his body observed strange beads of gas foaming from his tissue. The bubbles “continued to escape for hours after his death.”

“ODD GAS KILLS ONE, MAKES FOUR INSANE,” screamed The New York Times. The headlines kept coming as, one by one, the four other men died. Within a week, area hospitals held 36 more patients with similar symptoms.

All 41 patients shared one thing in common: They worked at an experimental refinery in Bayway, New Jersey, that produced tetraethyl lead, a gasoline additive that boosted the power of automobile engines. Their workplace, operated by Standard Oil of New Jersey, had a reputation for altering people’s minds. Factory laborers joked about working in a “loony gas building.” When men were assigned to the tetraethyl lead floor, they’d tease each other with mock-solemn farewells and “undertaker jokes.”

They didn’t know that workers at another tetraethyl lead plant in Dayton, Ohio, had also gone mad. The Ohioans reported feeling insects wriggle over their skin. One said he saw “wallpaper converted into swarms of moving flies.” At least two people died there as well, and more than 60 others fell ill, but the newspapers never caught wind of it.

This time, the press pounced. Papers mused over what made the “loony gas” so deadly. One doctor postulated that the human body converts tetraethyl lead into alcohol, resulting in an overdose. An official for Standard Oil maintained the gas’s innocence: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard,” he said.

One expert, however, saw past the speculation and spin. Brigadier General Amos O. Fries, the Chief of the Army Chemical Warfare Service, knew all about tetraethyl lead. The military had shortlisted it for gas warfare, he told the Times. The killer was obvious—it was the lead.

Meanwhile, a thousand miles west, on the prairies and farms of central Iowa, a 2-year-old boy named Clair Patterson played. His boyhood would go on to be like something out of Tom Sawyer. There were no cars in town. Only a hundred kids attended his school. A regular weekend entailed gallivanting into the woods with friends, with no adult supervision, to fish, hunt squirrels, and camp along the Skunk River. His adventures stoked a curiosity about the natural world, a curiosity his mother fed by one day buying him a chemistry set. Patterson began mixing chemicals in his basement. He started reading his uncle’s chemistry textbook. By eighth grade, he was schooling his science teachers.

During these years, Patterson nurtured a passion for science that would ultimately link his fate with the deaths of the five men in New Jersey. Luckily for the world, the child who’d freely roamed the Iowa woods remained equally content to blaze his own path as an adult. Patterson would save our oceans, our air, and our minds from the brink of what is arguably the largest mass poisoning in human history.

The tragedy began at the factories in Bayway, New Jersey. It would take Clair Patterson’s whole life to stop it.

In 1944, American scientists raced to finish the atomic bomb. Patterson, then in his mid-20s and armed with a master’s degree in chemistry, counted himself among the many young scientists assigned to a secret nuclear production facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Tall, lanky, and sporting a tight crew cut, Patterson was a chemistry wunderkind who had earned his master’s in just nine months. His talents in the lab convinced an army draft board to deny him entry into the military: His battlefield, they insisted, would be the laboratory; his weapon, the mass spectrometer.

A mass spectrometer is like an atomic sorting machine. It separates isotopes, atoms with a unique number of neutrons. (An isotope of uranium, for example, always contains 92 protons, 92 electrons, and a varying population of neutrons. Uranium-235 has 143 neutrons. Its cousin, uranium-238, has three more.) A mass spectrometer is sensitive enough to tell the difference. Patterson’s job was to separate them.

“You see the isotope of uranium that [the military] wanted was uranium-235, which is what they made the nuclear bomb out of,” Patterson told historian Shirley Cohen in a 1995 interview [PDF]. “But 99.9 percent of the original uranium was uranium-238, and you couldn’t make a bomb out of that … [Y]ou could separate them using a mass spectrometer.”

The machines in Oak Ridge consumed the room. The magnets were “like a football track,” Patterson recalled. “They had little collection boxes … So you could take a bunch of this stuff and put it in, and then when you got it out, you had the enriched 235 over in one box.”

In August 1945, the United States dropped some of that enriched uranium on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing upwards of 105,000 people. Six days after a mushroom cloud swallowed Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. Patterson was horrified.

After the war, he returned to civilian life as a chemistry Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. He’d continue working with mass spectrometers, but no longer would he use the technology to edge the planet closer to the End Times. Instead, he’d use it to discover the Beginning of Time.

The age of Earth has invited speculation for millennia. In the 3rd century, Julius Africanus, a Libyan pagan-turned-Christian, compiled Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian texts to write one of the first chronologies of world history by tallying the lifespans of Biblical patriarchs such as Adam (a ripe 930 years) and Abraham (a measly 175 years) and matching them with historical events. Africanus concluded the Earth was around 5720 years old, an estimate that stuck in the west for 15 centuries.

The first glimmers of The Enlightenment shattered that number, which eventually bloated from the thousands, to the millions, to the billions. By the time Patterson stepped onto the Chicago campus, scientists pegged the Earth’s age at 3.3 billion years. However, an aura of mystery and uncertainty still surrounded the number.

After years of working on military projects, researchers at the University of Chicago were itching to do science for science’s sake again. The university accommodated science’s most celebrated minds: Willard Libby, the pioneer of carbon dating; Harold Urey, who’d later jolt our understanding of life’s origins; and Harrison Brown, Patterson’s advisor. Brown was no slouch himself. A nuclear chemist with an appetite for Big Questions, he enjoyed “cantilevering out into the lonely voids of protoknowledge,” Patterson recalled. He liked dragging his grad students out there with him.

For one, Brown pondered new uses for uranium isotopes. Over time, these isotopes disintegrate into atoms of lead. The process—radioactive decay—takes millions of years, but it always occurs at a constant rate (703 million years for half of a uranium-235 isotope; 4.5 billion years for half of uranium-238). Uranium isotopes are basically atomic timepieces. Brown knew if somebody uncracked the ratio of uranium to lead inside an old rock, he could learn its age.

That included Earth itself.

Brown worked out a mathematical equation to nail the age of the Earth, but, to solve it, he needed to analyze rock samples 1000 times smaller than anybody had ever measured before. Brown needed a protégé, somebody experienced tinkering with a mass spectrometer and uranium, to make it happen. One day, he summoned Patterson into his office.

“What we’re going to do is learn how to measure the geologic ages of a common mineral that’s about the size of a head of a pin,” Brown explained. “You measure its isotopic composition and stick it into the equation … And you’ll be famous, because you will have measured the age of the Earth.”

Patterson mulled it over. “Good, I will do that.”

Brown smiled. “It will be duck soup, Patterson.”

Harrison Brown, let’s just say, had a habit of stretching the truth: Solving one of mankind’s oldest questions was not remotely “duck soup.” Patterson joined another graduate student, George Tilton, and together they analyzed rocks with a known age as a test run. Wanting to ensure that Brown’s formula—and their methods—were correct, the duo started each experiment with the same routine. First they’d crush granite, then Tilton would measure the uranium as Patterson handled the lead.

But the numbers always came out goofy. “We knew what the amount of lead should be, because we knew the age of the rock from which it came,” Patterson said. But the data was in the stratosphere.

A lightbulb moment rescued them when Tilton realized that the lab itself might be contaminating their samples. Uranium had been tested there previously, and perhaps tiny traces of the element lingered in the air, skewing their data. Tilton moved to a virgin lab, and when he tried again, his numbers emerged spotless.

Patterson figured he had the same problem. He tried to remove lead contamination from his samples. He scrubbed his glassware. Too much lead. He used distilled water. Too much lead. He even tested blank samples that, to his knowledge, contained no lead at all.

Lead still showed up.

“There was lead there that didn’t belong there,” Patterson recalled. “More than there was supposed to be. Where did it come from?”

It started as an attempt to save lives. In 1908, a woman’s car stalled on a bridge in Detroit, Michigan. In those days, cars didn’t sputter awake with a twist of the key. Drivers needed to step out and crank the engine by hand. So when a good Samaritan saw the woman stranded, he kindly offered to help. As he wound the crank, the engine kicked alive, and the crank cracked him in the jaw—shattering it. Days later, he died.

The man’s name was Byron Carter, a prominent car manufacturer and a personal friend of Cadillac’s founder, Henry Lowell.

Distraught, Lowell committed his company to building a safer, crankless car. He called upon the inventor Charles Kettering to invent the 1912 Cadillac, which would boast four sleek cylinders, a top speed of 45 mph, a newly invented automatic starter … and a deafening engine. The car clanged and banged, pinged and clacked. When it chugged up hills, it might as well have been performing Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus.” The crankless car had a new problem: engine knock.

When pockets of air and fuel prematurely explode inside an internal combustion engine, you’ll hear a boisterous ping that not only torpedoes your eardrums, but also prevents the engine from operating at full tilt. That’s engine knock. With the Ford Model-T walloping Cadillac in sales, Kettering was hell-bent on stopping it.

In 1916, Kettering melded minds with a young scientist named Thomas Midgley Jr., and the two assembled a team to search for a gasoline additive to silence the racket. They added hundreds (possibly thousands) of substances to the gas, with little luck. Even Henry Ford chipped in, supplying a concoction he dubbed “H. Ford’s Knock-knocker.” (Test results returned with a resounding “meh.”)

In 1921, a breakthrough came in the name of tellurium, an element that reduced knock and—as historian Joseph C. Robert describes in his book Ethyl—smelled like Satan’s gym locker. “There was no getting rid of it,” Midgley said. “It was so powerful that a change of clothes and a bath at the end of the day did not reduce your ability as a tellurium broadcasting station.” The smell was so noxious that Midgley’s wife banished him to sleep in the basement for seven months. When Chevrolet built a test car running on tellurium fuel, engineers nicknamed the automobile “The Goat,” partly because it climbed mountains like magic, and partly because the exhaust spat out a perfume reminiscent of a ruminant’s posterior.

The search continued until December 9, 1921, when Midgley’s team poured tetraethyl lead into an engine sloshing with kerosene.

The knock was silenced. The engine purred. The scientists rejoiced.

Leaded gasoline promised everything Kettering and Midgley hoped for. It was plentiful. It was cheap. It didn’t smell. The group marketed the product as “Ethyl” gasoline—deliberately omitting any mention of the word lead—and General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey kickstarted a new company, the Ethyl Corporation, to produce it.

In February 1923, a gas station attendant in Dayton, Ohio, ladled a teaspoon of tetraethyl lead into a vehicle’s tank, recording the first sale of leaded gasoline. Months later, a handful of racecar drivers competing in the Indianapolis 500 tried leaded gasoline and took first, second, and third place. Word spread that a miracle liquid made car engines stronger, faster, and quieter.

As the gas hit the market and excitement mounted, Midgley retreated to Florida.

He was sick. His body temperature kept dipping. “I must overcome this slight error or I shall soon be classified as a cold-blooded reptile,” he joked to a colleague. He hoped a few weeks of golfing in warmer climes would solve the problem, but when he returned home a month later, his body still couldn’t keep a normal temperature. It was lead poisoning.

Lead makes humans sick because the body confuses it with calcium. The most abundant mineral in the human body, calcium helps oversee blood pressure, blood vessel function, muscle contractions, and cell growth. As the milk cartons boast, it keeps bones strong. In the brain, calcium ions bounce between neurons to help keep the synapses firing. But when the body absorbs lead, the toxic metal swoops in, replaces calcium, and starts doing these jobs terribly—if at all.

The consequences can be terrifying. Lead interferes with the body’s battalion of antioxidants, damaging DNA and killing neurons. Neurotransmitters, the chemical paperboys of the brain, stop delivering messages and start murdering nerve cells. Lead inhibits the brain’s development by stonewalling the process of synapse pruning, heightening the risk of learning disabilities. It also weakens the blood-brain barrier, a protective liner in your skull that blocks microscopic villains from infiltrating the brain, the result of which can lower IQs and even cause death. Lead poisoning is rarely caught in time. The heavy metal debilitates the mind so slowly that any impairment usually goes unnoticed until it’s too late.

Poisoning from pure tetraethyl lead, however, works differently. It moves quickly. Just a few teaspoons directly applied to the skin can kill. After soaking the dermis, it leaches into the brain, and, within weeks, causes symptoms similar to rabies: hallucinations, tremors, disorientation, and death. It’s not a miracle motor drug. It’s concentrated poison.

Midgley would recover, but the same could not be said for his employees. During the spring of 1924, two workers in Dayton, Ohio, died under his watch. Dozens more went insane. Midgley knew the men and, freighted with guilt, sank into depression and pondered removing leaded gasoline from the market. Kettering coaxed him out of it. Instead, he hired a young man named Robert Kehoe to make the toxin safer in factories.

Whip-smart and reticent, Kehoe was a young assistant professor of pathology at the University of Cincinnati. The new gig would change his life. He’d rise to become the singular medical authority on, and scientific spokesman for, the safety of leaded gasoline. He’d supervise a research laboratory that received bottomless funding from a web of corporations such as GM, DuPont, and Ethyl.

Kehoe’s first assignment was to investigate the Dayton deaths. He met about 20 injured workers and concluded that heavy lead fumes had sunk to the factory floor and poisoned the men. Don’t abandon tetraethyl lead, Kehoe advised. Just install fans in the factory.

With that, business resumed. Then came the tragedy at Bayway, New Jersey.

Five men dead and dozens more clinging to reality. That’s how New York’s yellow press painted the scene. A Yale physiology professor named Yandell Henderson took to the media to skewer tetraethyl lead producers, telling The New York Times the product was “one of the greatest menaces to life, health and reason.” Henderson had studied the risks during World War I. “This is one of the most dangerous things in the country today,” he told the Times. Henderson went as far as to say that if he had a choice between tuberculosis and lead poisoning, he’d choose tuberculosis.

Henderson worried about car exhaust. Tailpipes burped lead dust into the air pedestrians and residents breathed. Every 200 gallons of gas emitted a pound of toxins into the air. In an interview, Henderson prophesied that, “It seems more likely that the conditions will grow worse so gradually and the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously (for this is the nature of the disease) that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold that can run only on that fuel before the public and the government awaken to the situation.”

Standard Oil’s response: “We are not taking Dr. Henderson’s statement seriously.” The alarmism, a representative said, was “bunk.” The industry claimed it had the issue all figured out. It had commissioned a study that exposed 100 pigs, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, and monkeys to leaded engine fumes every day for eight months. No signs of lead poisoning were found. (A dog did have five puppies.)

The study was flawed. As journalist Sharon Bertsch McGrayne writes in Prometheans in the Lab, “the Ethyl Corporation also demanded and was given a veto over the study’s content and publication.” Any troubling results, if they existed, could have been silenced.

In May 1925, the Surgeon General called a conference in Washington, D.C. to discuss the controversy. As a PR precaution, the Ethyl Corporation suspended sales of leaded gasoline and held its breath. The company’s team, spearheaded by Kehoe, prepared a defense that argued against a ban: Lead companies simply had to make factories safer for their workers.

Months later, a committee appeared to agree. It determined there were “no good grounds for prohibiting the use of Ethyl gasoline.” Ethyl resumed sales. Signs hanging above roadside service stations in 1926 rang in the news: “ETHYL IS BACK.”

The feds gave lip service to critics like Henderson, advocating that independent researchers should continue investigating leaded gasoline. But it never happened. In fact, independent researchers failed to study leaded gasoline for the next four decades.

For 40-plus years, the safety of leaded gasoline was studied almost entirely by Kehoe and his assistants. That entire time, Kehoe’s research on tetraethyl lead was funded, reviewed, and approved by the companies making it.

Kehoe and the Ethyl Corporation would maintain this monopoly until Clair Patterson, scratching his head in a Chicago laboratory, wondered why so much lead was fouling his beloved rocks.

Patterson analyzed each step of his procedure, from start to finish, to pinpoint the lead’s origins. “I found out there was lead coming from here, there was lead coming from there; there was lead in everything that I was using…” he later said. “It was contamination of every conceivable source that people had never thought about before.”

Lead came from his glassware, his tap water, the paint on the laboratory walls, the desks, the dust in the air, his skin, his clothes, his hair, even motes of wayward dandruff. If Patterson wanted to get accurate results, he had little choice but to become the world’s most obsessive neat freak.

As journalist Lydia Denworth describes in her book, Toxic Truth, Patterson went to enormous lengths to rid his lab of contaminants. He bought Pyrex glassware, scoured it, dunked it in hot baths of potassium hydroxide, and rinsed it with double-distilled water. He mopped and vacuumed, dropping to his hands and knees to buff out any traces of lead from the floor. He covered his work surfaces with Parafilm and installed extra air pumps in his lab’s fume hood—he even built a plastic cage around it to prevent airborne lead from hitchhiking on dust. He wore a mask and gown and would later cloak his body in plastic.

The intensity of these measures was unusual for the time. It would be another decade before the laminar-flow “Ultra Clean Lab” (the grandfather of the antiseptic, high-security, air-locked laboratory you see in sci-fi movies) would be patented. Patterson’s contemporaries simply didn’t know that approximately 3 million microscopic particles floated around the typical lab, each particle a barrier obstructing The Truth.

Five years would pass before Patterson finally perfected his own ultraclean techniques. In 1951, he managed to prepare a totally uncontaminated lead sample and confirmed the age of a billion-year-old hunk of granite, an accomplishment that earned him a Ph.D. The next step was to use the same procedure to find the age of the Earth. Funding was all that stood in his way.

Patterson applied for a grant through the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, but the AEC rejected the proposal, prompting Harrison Brown to step in and rewrite it, inflating the language to make false—but profitable—promises: Patterson’s work, he claimed, could help the commission develop uranium fuel.

As Patterson recalled, “He was telling them fibs, actually.” But the lies worked. Patterson got the money, and he eventually followed Brown west to start a new job at the California Institute of Technology.

At Caltech, Patterson built the cleanest laboratory in the world. He tore out lead pipes in the geology building and re-wired the walls (lead solder coated the old wires). He installed an airflow system to pump in purified, pressurized air and built separate rooms for grinding rocks, washing samples, purifying water, and analysis. The geology department funded the overhaul by selling its fossil collection.

Patterson knighted himself the kingpin of clean. “You know Pigpen, in Charlie Brown’s comic, where stuff is coming out all over the place?” he told Cohen. “That’s what people look like with respect to lead. Everyone. The lead from your hair, when you walk into a super-clean laboratory like mine, will contaminate the whole damn laboratory. Just from your hair.”

By 1953, the ultraclean lab was ready. As Patterson prepared the sample that would help him find the age of the Earth, he became increasingly prickly. He demanded that his assistants scrub the floor with small wipes daily. Later, he’d ban street clothes and require his assistants to wear Tyvek suits (scientific onesies).

When the sample was ready, Patterson traveled to the Argonne National Laboratory to use their mass spectrometer. Late one night, the machine spat out numbers. Patterson, alone in the lab, plugged them into Brown’s old equation: The Earth was 4.5 billion years old.

Overcome with glee, Patterson sped to his parents’ home in Iowa. Instead of cutting a cake in celebration, his parents rushed him to the emergency room, convinced their overexcited son was having a heart attack.

In 1956, Patterson published his number in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta [PDF]. Critics bristled. “I had some of the best, most able critics in the world trying to destroy my number,” he said. Each time they tried to prove it wrong, they failed. At one point, an evangelist knocked on Patterson’s door to kindly inform him that he was going to Hell.

Discovering the age of the Earth was one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the 20th century, yet Patterson couldn’t kick back and relish it. Lead contamination, he learned, was ubiquitous, and nobody else knew it. He was clueless as to where the lead originated. All he knew was that every scientist in the world studying the metal—from the lead in space rocks to the lead in a human body—must be publishing bad numbers.

That included Robert Kehoe.

After the two deaths in Dayton in 1923, Kehoe became one of the first people in the chemical industry to propose standard workplace safety measures. He stressed that employees needed to be trained before they handled dangerous chemicals. He vouched for improving the ventilation in plants. He tracked the health of workers. He saved lives, and ultimately, the profits to be made off leaded gasoline.

After the disaster in New Jersey, as critics questioned the safety of car exhaust, Kehoe scoffed. “When a material is found to be of this importance for the conservation of fuel and for increasing the efficiency of the automobile, it is not a thing which may be thrown into the discard on basis of opinion,” he said at the conference with the Surgeon General. “It is a thing which should be treated solely on the basis of facts.” The government agreed, and it deferred the expense of future studies to “the industry most concerned.”

In other words, “The research that might discover an actual hazard from tetraethyl lead was in Kehoe’s hand,” write Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter in The Polluters. Kehoe’s lab held a near monopoly on lead poisoning research. The Ethyl Corporation, General Motors, DuPont, and other gas giants bankrolled his research to the tune of a $100,000 salary (about $1.4 million today).

Kehoe’s contract stipulated that, before publishing, each manuscript had to be “submitted to the Donor for criticisms and suggestions.” In other words, as Devra Davis writes in The Secret History of the War on Cancer, “the same businesses that produced the materials Kehoe tested also decided what findings could and could not be made public.” It was a colossal conflict of interest.

Kehoe played along. When data threatened his client’s bottom line, the study gathered cobwebs. During World War II, Kehoe visited Germany with the U.S. military and discovered reports that the chemical benzidine caused bladder cancer. This was an issue—his client, DuPont, made benzidine. But rather than alert American workers to the risk, Kehoe stuffed the report in a box. The moldy records were unearthed decades later when DuPont’s employees, stricken with cancer, sued.

Kehoe also understood the dangers of lead paint. By the early 1940s, many European countries had already banned it, and even Kehoe worried about it in his personal letters, yet, when the American Journal of Disease in Children sounded sirens that lead paint harmed children, Kehoe didn’t use his starpower to stop the Lead Industries Association from suggesting that afflicted kids were “sub-normal to start with.”

Kehoe also made mistakes that might have been caught had his work been subject to independent scrutiny. In one study, Kehoe measured the blood of factory workers who regularly handled tetraethyl lead and those who did not. Blood-lead levels were high in both groups. Rather than conclude that both groups were poisoned by the lead in the factory’s air, Kehoe concluded that lead was a natural part of the bloodstream, like iron. This mistake would grow into an unshakeable industry talking point.

Continue reading “The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of” by Lucas Reilly (mentalfloss.com) →