Why American Finally Got The Lead Out

The first automobiles that were produced, used a variety of fuels. Anything that would turn over an internal combustion engine was fair game for fuel. These fuels included gasoline, benzene from coal, synthetic gasoline and alcohol from farm crops.

As early as 100 BC, the Romans knew that lead could cause insanity and death. If the toxicity of lead was common knowledge, why in the 1920s, was lead added to gasoline in order to make it a more efficient fuel? At that time, it was already well known that lead caused neurological harm, especially to children, in which it lowered their IQ. The answer is simple, profit. A number of European countries used blends of alcohol as their primary fuel and at that time, alcohol was predicted to become the choice of the future. But it was more expensive than oil, which made it less attractive and the oil tycoons wanted to sell their products.

Once the high compression engine was invented, car manufacturers started running into performance problems. General Motors diagnosed the problem, realizing that the problem originated with the fuel.
Large amounts of money was invested to figure out how to raise the octane level to reduce engine knocking. General Motors tried about 15,000 different combinations of substances to find a solution to the problem.

Adding benzene from coal to gasoline was found to work as was adding grain alcohol. Adding 10% alcohol to gasoline raised the quality of the fuel, causing less knocking. It also had other benefits, including cleaner combustion, which decreased soot emissions and increased horsepower without engine knocking.

But as research continued, General Motors determined that adding lead to the gasoline produced “an ideal anti-knock fuel.” It was ideal because manufacturing the lead additive, tetraethyl lead, would allow them to make the greatest profit.

They were very careful to avoid using the word “lead,” a known poison. Instead they created a rather benign sounding euphemistic chemical derivative from tetraethyl lead and called it “ethyl.” They even branded it with a female named Ethyl. This is similar to the dental industry calling mercury and silver fillings amalgam.

Standard Oil, the biggest oil company in the US, partnered with General Motors, creating a joint corporation known as The Ethyl Corporation.

Ironically, the lead researcher at General Motors ended up with lead poisoning from the experiments, yet he still marveled about the profits the company stood to make.

Public health officials did object to the addition of lead to gasoline. They were greatly concerned about the idea of adding hundreds of thousands of tons of a well-known industrial poison into the environment every year.

There were ominous signs that leaded gas was a huge mistake right from the start. During the fall of 1924, the year the first tetraethyl lead facility opened, reports quickly emerged of workers getting ill, suffering hallucinations, and even dying.

The process used to manufacture tetraethyl lead was so hazardous that within the first month of operation, five workers went “violently insane” and died, and another 45 were severely injured by lead poisoning.

The US government was urged to conduct an investigation, and a number of cities banned the sale of leaded gas. Months later the Surgeon General, Hugh Smith Cumming, invited industry leaders and independent experts to a conference to assess the situation. Six months later, the US health authorities concluded that “there are no good grounds for prohibiting the use of ethyl gasoline,” and the ban on the sale of leaded gas was lifted. I wonder how many government officials were paid off in order to make that happen?

The US Public Health Service also reached out to other nations saying they’d studied ethyl gasoline, and since no ill effects were found, these other countries should consider using it too. After that, the use of leaded gasoline spread across the world after a recommendation from one of the highest health authorities in the world.

Clair Patterson, PhD may have seemed like an unlikely candidate to save the day in this story. He was a geochemist who received his PhD, from the University of Chicago and then worked at Cal Tech, one of the most prestigious universities in the US. He worked on the Manhattan Project but is best known for his pioneering work in 1963 for establishing the age of the earth as being 4.5 billion years old. He was able to do this by analyzing certain isotopes of lead.

He struggled for many years with conflicting results from his research when he finally realized the problems were the result of massive environmental lead contamination.

Initially he couldn’t determine the source of the lead contamination. The answer became apparent when he analyzed ancient pristine ice core samples taken in Greenland. He could clearly show how the lead levels in Greenland’s ice layers corresponded to eras such as the Roman era, the industrial revolution, and then, following the advent of leaded gasoline in the mid-1920s. Major spikes in lead concentrations occurred during these specific periods.

He also found that the amount of lead in the environment was about 80 times the amount deposited in the ocean sediments, which explained his research discrepancies in the age of the earth determination. He was the first to fully appreciate that leaded gasoline had polluted every last corner of the globe, even the most remote of areas and as a result, everyone on the planet was being exposed to industrial lead pollution with very serious health consequences.

Then came another piece of shocking news. Animals in the Staten Island Zoo were poisoned. Some of the animals died and one black leopard was paralyzed. The investigation revealed the poison was lead and that it was coming from the environment. At that time, an estimated 200,000 tons of lead were being deposited into urban environments each year and certain animals were suffering the repercussions, just like a canary in a coal mine.
In 1965, Patterson tried to draw public attention to the problem of increased lead levels in the environment and the food chain due to lead from industrial sources with the publication of his book, Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man. In his effort to ensure that lead was removed from gasoline, Patterson ran up against the lobbying power of the oil and auto industries.

In an effort to preserve their profits, these industries used their powerful influence to launch a massive discrediting campaign against him and his research. Patterson was refused contracts with many research organizations, including the supposedly “neutral” United States Public Health Service. In 1971, he was also excluded from a National Research Council (NRC) panel on atmospheric lead contamination, even though he was the world’s foremost expert on the subject at that time.

Despite these massive discrediting efforts, he pursued the elimination of lead from gasoline. Finally, in 1975, the US mandated the use of unleaded gasoline to protect catalytic converters. It took another 11 years but in 1986, Patterson’s persistence caused the removal of lead from all gasoline in the US and as a result, blood lead levels in Americans dropped by 80% by the late 1990s.

This one substance, tetraethyl lead, added to gasoline, has had huge repercussions to the health of the global community. Children exposed to lead were found to have significantly decreased IQ, In one study, there was a six point difference in average IQ scores between children with the highest levels of lead in their teeth and those with the lowest levels.
By the end of the 1990s, lead was completely phased out of gasoline, replaced instead with the original alternative, alcohol.

From beginning to end, lead was used in gasoline for nearly 80 years, causing unimaginable harm to the health of everyone across the globe, especially to the children. This happened because the oil industry didn’t want to forgo a portion of its potential profits. We could have used alcohol to boost the octane level all along.

Unfortunately, this is not the only time that corporate greed has harmed public health.

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