-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- THE SECRET HISTORY OF LEAD PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Hello, Ethyl Meanwhile, Standard Oil of New Jersey had developed a faster, cheaper method of synthesizing TEL. In August 1924 production began in a makeshift works at its Bayway plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. GM still held the TEL patent, but Standard now had the better manufacturing technology and a patent of its own to prove it. To the apparent surprise of some at Du Pont, which had not been producing the fluid fast enough for GM's liking, the oil company (one of twenty-seven companies formed by the 1911 breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust) and the automobile company formed a joint venture, which they called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. Why, one wonders, would GM deign to form Ethyl, a new company, with Standard? "In the first place," Sloan would testify in a 1952 antitrust suit, "I recognized that General Motors' organization had no competence whatsoever in chemical manufacture. We were mechanical people dealing in metal processing." The deaths at Dayton would certainly support this modest assessment. Sloan would also later record his view that management should not get sidetracked on noncore businesses. But there were clearly bushels of money to be made. Sloan had by now fully cottoned to an essential fact about his company's new lead additive patent. As the management expert P.F. Drucker described it many years later, "GM, in effect, made money on almost every gallon of gasoline sold, by anyone." In one of its first official acts, the newly formed Ethyl Gasoline Corporation evinced renewed sensitivity to spin (not to mention a justifiably elevated level of paranoia) by insisting that its contract with the Bureau of Mines be modified yet again, to reflect that "before publication of any papers or articles by your Bureau, they should be submitted to them [Ethyl] for comment, criticism, and approval." Thus, as the public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz have observed, the newly formed Ethyl Corporation was given "veto power over the research of the United States government." Death by Loony Gas Du Pont would supply most of Ethyl's TEL requirements for years to come, but, according to a letter written by Alfred Sloan to Irénée du Pont in the fall of 1924, in an accommodation to Standard Oil that firm had been permitted to maintain a small "semiworks" at its Bayway refinery. Later, Du Pont engineers would express serious reservations about the safety of Standard's facility. An internal 1936 Du Pont history would recount that the company was "greatly shocked at the manifest danger of the equipment and methods [and] at the inadequate safety precautions" at the Standard facility, but their suggestions were "waved aside." Unfortunate it was. On October 26, 1924, the first of five workers who would die in quick succession at Standard Oil's Bayway TEL works perished, after wrenching fits of violent insanity; thirty-five other workers would experience tremors, hallucinations, severe palsies and other serious neurological symptoms of organic lead poisoning. In total, more than 80 percent of the Bayway staff would die or suffer severe poisoning. News of these deaths was the first that many Americans heard of leaded gasoline--although it would take a few days, as the New York City papers and wire services rushed to cover a mysterious industrial disaster that Standard stonewalled and GM declined to delve into. * * * Confusion and panic marked the headlines, with reporters forced to travel to New Jersey to track a story they'd probably have noted in a lightly rewritten press release if Standard had appeared more forthcoming. On October 30, days after the first Bayway death, the press was at last invited to Standard's New York City headquarters for an afternoon session of long-overdue, professionally crafted spin control. Thomas Midgley had been rushed to 26 Broadway from Dayton and would address the corps. But first, Standard's medical consultant, J. Gilman Thompson, presented them with a typewritten statement, supplying the company's most sculpted telling of recent history yet: [TEL's] recently discovered use for greatly promoting the efficiency of gasoline engines has led to its manufacture on a commercial scale through processes still more or less in a stage of development. This has occasioned unforeseen accidents.... One of these has been the sudden escape of fumes from large retorts, and the inhalation of such fumes gives rise to acute symptoms, particularly congestion of the brain, producing a condition not unlike delirium tremens. Although there is lead in the compound, these acute symptoms are wholly unlike those of chronic lead poisoning such as painters often have. "There is no obscurity whatever about the effects of the poison and characterizing the substance as 'mystery gas' or 'insanity gas' is grossly misleading. Asked to assess their liability to families of men who said they were not warned of the dangers, Standard Oil officials said "the rejection of many men as physically unfit to engage in the work of the Bayway plant, daily physical examinations, constant admonitions as to wearing rubber gloves and using gas masks and not wearing away from the plant clothing worn during work hours should have been sufficient indication to every man in the plant that he was engaged 'in a man's undertaking.'" The falsity and cruelty of Standard's position were manifest, the ironies rife. First, Standard wasn't in experimental production. It was making TEL to sell. Second, its stony silence alone had led to stories in the press about a "mystery" gas, because reporters learned that TEL had been dubbed "loony gas" from Bayway workers whom they interviewed after being brushed off by the company brass. Finally, the escapes of gas weren't sudden, as claimed, but ongoing, the poisoning cumulative. The doctors at Reconstruction Hospital had told the Herald Tribune that violent insanity was "brought on by the gradual infiltration of lead in their systems." The day's true highlight, however, would be Midgley's presentation. The celebrated engineer and Ethyl VP, who had only recently been forced to leave work to recover from lead poisoning, proposed to demonstrate that TEL was not dangerous in small quantities, by rubbing some of it on his hands. Midgley was fond of this exhibition and would repeat it elsewhere, washing his hands thoroughly in the fluid and drying them on his handkerchief. "'I'm not taking any chance whatever,' he said. 'Nor would I take any chance doing that every day.'" The New York World cited unbelievable dispatches from Detroit claiming that Midgley "frequently bathed" in TEL to prove its safety to skeptics within the industry. Ethyl Adrift The response of local governments and public health officials to the Bayway disaster was swift and stern. The day of Midgley's peculiar demonstration, the New York City Board of Health banned the sale of TEL-enhanced gasoline, saying that "such mixtures of gasoline, containing lead or other deleterious substances, may be liable to prove detrimental and dangerous to the health and lives of the community, particularly when released as exhaust from motor vehicles." Within a matter of days Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the State of New Jersey would ban gasoline containing the lead additive. Ethyl would continue to be sold in the Midwest, but elsewhere on the East Coast its use was unofficially discouraged by authorities. In early November 1924, after the fifth Bayway worker died, the Bureau of Mines study on TEL was released (remember that GM and then Ethyl had reserved for themselves the right to approve the timing of its release). Not surprisingly, the bureau's report, based on limited animal testing it had conducted, gave the substance a clean bill of health. The New York Times, which had decided as editorial policy to support the use of TEL, served up just the sort of front-page headline Ethyl hoped for: "No Peril to Public Seen in Ethyl Gas/Bureau of Mines Reports after Long Experiments with Motor Exhausts/More Deaths Unlikely." Yandell Henderson of Yale and others assailed the Bureau of Mines study as a hopelessly shoddy investigation financed by an interested party, Ethyl, and bemoaned Washington's antiregulatory climate. The bureau had "investigated the danger to the public of acute lead poisoning," he noted derisively, and had failed even to take into account the possibility that the atmosphere might be polluted to such an extent along automobile thoroughfares that those who worked or lived along such streets would gradually absorb lead in sufficient quantities to poison them in the course of months.... Perhaps if leaded gasoline kills enough people soon enough to impress the public, we may get from Congress a much-needed law and appropriation for the control of harmful substances other than foods. But 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.... This is probably the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public. It is the question whether scientific experts are to be consulted, and the action of Government guided by their advice, or whether, on the contrary, commercial interests are to be allowed to subordinate every other consideration to that of profit. * * * Echoing the fears of PHS lab director William Clark more than two years earlier, Henderson had clearly isolated the greatest threat of leaded gasoline--not the severe cases of industrial poisoning that had grabbed the headlines but the slow, unrelenting low-level exposure that was sure to occur as the use of leaded gasoline spread. As we shall see, the industry would use this dichotomy--accidental deaths at the plant versus insidious poisoning--to its advantage. The former risk could be acknowledged because it could be prevented, while the latter was doubted, denied and endlessly debated. In years to come, the federal government would do much to help the lead interests actively across a variety of fields, but the greatest assistance offered was an act of omission: a signal failure to arrange for independent examination of the effects of automotive lead emissions on the public health. By 1924 the government's allegiance and probity were already in question. As C.W. Deppé, owner of the Lilliputian Deppé Motors, put it in a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work: "May I be pardoned if I ask you frankly now, does the Bureau of Mines exist for the benefit of Ford and the G.M. Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, and other oil companies parties to the distribution of the Ethyl Lead Dopes, or is the Bureau supposed to be for the public benefit and in protection of life and health?" Enter the Surgeon General Three months after the Bayway disaster, a grand jury acquitted Standard Oil of criminal responsibility for the tragedy despite the fact that, as the New York Times stated in summarizing the grand jury's findings: "The report found that the deaths were directly due to poisoning...[and] recommended that before it resumes operations the company try to perfect some machinery by which ethyl gas can be manufactured without endangering life." This was good news for Ethyl's backers, but strangely at variance with the views of Standard's own partners. As Du Pont's internal history of 1936 concluded: "Notwithstanding...foreknowledge at the peril, the precautions taken in the small manufacturing operation at Bayway were grossly inadequate." And GM took a dim view of the Standard operation as well. Ferris Hurd, a GM attorney testifying in the government's 1953 antitrust suit against Du Pont, summarized events: [Standard] put up a plant that lasted two months and killed five people and practically wiped out the rest of the plant. The disaster was so bad that the state of New Jersey entered the picture and issued an order that Standard could never go back into the manufacture of [tetraethyl lead] without the permission of the state of New Jersey. In fact, the furor over it was so great that the newspapers took it up, and they misrepresented it, and instead of realizing that the danger was in the manufacture, they got to thinking that the danger was exposure of the public in the use of it, and the criticism of its use was so great that it was banned in many cities and they had to close down the manufacture and sale of Ethyl. Of course, there was a danger to the public in the use of Ethyl, but the public wouldn't know it for decades, thanks in large part to the institutional inability and temperamental disinclination of the federal government at this time to do anything more than smile upon new technologies and corporate incursions into new and lucrative markets. The wave of publicity surrounding the Bayway disaster had left Ethyl on the defensive, however. The company knew it would be up to government to set matters right. A Gift of God? Today business school students carefully analyze the corporate response to the scare caused by a small batch of tainted Tylenol and widely hail it as a work of genius. Yet it was nothing compared with Ethyl's road back from disaster, skillfully negotiated with a product that was a deadly poison from the get-go. Ethyl, to use the modern argot, had an aggressive plan and made it stick. You might say it was one of the most brilliant exercises in co-branded damage control ever. For on Christmas Eve, 1924, Charles Kettering, Frank Howard of Standard and Du Pont chief engineer W.F. Harrington paid a private visit to Surgeon General Hugh Cumming to request that the Public Health Service hold public hearings on TEL. Cumming readily agreed. As Du Pont's private history of 1936 would note, "In the prevailing state of strong prejudice and excited fears, the new industry was fortunate in having the question of the health risk in the use of tetraethyl lead actively taken up...by the US Public Health Service." On May 4, 1925, in an act exquisitely timed and brilliantly crafted to the right tone of seriousness for the proceedings, Ethyl publicly withdrew its product from the market. On May 20 eighty-seven participants convened in the Butler Building at Third and B Streets, in Washington, DC, along with a dozen reporters, for the Surgeon General's conference. Conspicuously absent was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose agency was charged with oversight of the PHS. Nowhere was it reported that Mellon family interests controlled Gulf Oil, which had recently acquired an exclusive Ethyl distributorship. At the hearing, Standard's Frank Howard (soon to be an Ethyl director) uttered the memorable pronouncement that TEL was "a gift of God" that conscience and the march of human progress compelled GM to exploit. Our problem is not that simple. We cannot quite act on a remote probability. We are engaged in the General Motors Corporation in the manufacture of automobiles, and in the Standard Oil Company in the manufacture and refining of oil. On these things our present industrial civilization is supposed to depend. I might refer to the comment made at the end of the war--that the Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil--which is probably true.... Now as a result of some 10 years' [sic] research on the part of The General Motors Corporation and 5 years' research by the Standard Oil Co., or a little bit more, we have this apparent gift of God--of 3 cubic centimeters of tetraethyl lead--which will permit that gallon of gasoline...to go perhaps 50 percent further... What is our duty under the circumstances? Should we throw this thing aside? Should we say, 'No, we will not use it,' in spite of the efforts of the government and the General Motors Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. toward developing this very thing, which is a certain means of saving petroleum? Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely? Frankly, it is a problem that we do not know how to meet. We cannot justify ourselves in our consciences if we abandon the thing. I think it would be an unheard-of blunder if we should abandon a thing of this kind merely because of our fears. Possibilities cannot be allowed to influence us to such an extent as that in this matter. (Many years later, Howard would be forced to relinquish his Standard post by the Federal Trade Commission for collaborating with Nazi Germany, but he would retain his seat at Ethyl.) Ethyl sales manager A.S. Maxwell got even more carried away, telling a reporter that engines would run so efficiently with leaded gas that GM was developing an engine that "will triple the best mileage a gallon of gasoline will give today." Actually, while the high compression Ethyl permitted--like ethanol or any octane booster--might have offered fuel-economy benefits, average fuel economy in the United States fell steadily from 1925, the year of Ethyl's introduction, through the seventies, when cars shrank and unleaded fuel became the standard. In 1974 GM's corporate average fuel economy had fallen to a near-comical 12.2 miles per gallon. By 1987, after unleaded became predominant and catalytic converters a standard, the sales/registered-fleet average for cars sold in the United States had climbed to 27.3 miles per gallon. Yet TEL defenders to this day cite conservation as its key benefit. The Conference Adjourns America's automotive population was multiplying exponentially, yet the Surgeon General's conference spent six hours and forty-five minutes deliberating on what Yandell Henderson had prophetically called "probably the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public" and reached no conclusion. Instead, it voted unanimously on a motion by Dr. Matthias Nicoll, New York State Commissioner of Health, to place the question of tetraethyl lead in the hands of Cumming and a seven-member committee of experts to be appointed by him, with orders to report back by January 1, 1926. And it commended Ethyl for withdrawing its product while the question of its effect on the public health was still unsettled. Awkwardly for Ethyl, soon after the conference ended but months before the Surgeon General's newly impaneled committee could complete its study, details emerged about eight more TEL-related deaths and more than 300 injuries at Du Pont's sinister Deepwater plant. Six square miles that lit up the sky at night, Deepwater was one of the country's most active ports, yet it was nowhere to be found on nautical maps. Often referred to publicly by Du Pont as a dye works, it was rather a complex of poison-gas works, producing phosgene and chlorine gases as well as the lethal benzol series. Deepwater had no legal government--just Du Pont and its private police force. Dismissing the deaths, a Du Pont spokesman said at the time, "It is a fact that we have a great deal of trouble inducing the men to be cautious. We have to protect them against themselves." (You can still see Deepwater today at the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike, but it stopped producing TEL in the nineties.) Happily for the du Ponts and the other lead interests, on January 19, 1926, the special committee appointed by Surgeon General Cumming found "no good grounds" for prohibiting the sale of Ethyl gasoline: "So far as the committee could ascertain all the reported cases of fatalities and serious injuries in connection with the use of tetraethyl lead have occurred either in the process of manufacture of this substance or in the procedures of blending and ethylizing." The committee reviewed the evidence of studies it had conducted in Ohio on 252 workers exposed to lead in their occupations as chauffeurs and garage men. While the committee noted "a greater storage of lead in the bodies of those exposed to ethyl gasoline" and lead in the dust of garages dispensing ethyl, nothing conclusive could be established in the short time given to it. So, although the newspapers would miss the distinction--the New York Times, for instance, headlined it "Report: No Danger in Ethyl Gasoline"--the committee had merely concluded that TEL could be manufactured without the loss of life. It did not give tetraethyl lead a clean bill of health or settle the question of its effect on the public health. In fact, it cautioned: It remains possible that if the use of leaded gasolines becomes widespread, conditions may arise very different from those studied by us which would render its use more of a hazard than would appear to be the case from this investigation. Longer experience may show that even such slight storage of lead...may lead eventually in susceptible individuals to recognizable or to chronic degenerative diseases of a less obvious character.... In view of such possibilities the committee feels that the investigation begun under their direction must not be allowed to lapse.... The vast increase in the number of automobiles throughout the country makes the study of all such questions a matter of real importance from the standpoint of public health, and the committee urges strongly that a suitable appropriation be requested from Congress for the continuance of these investigations under the supervision of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. While proposing that the sale of leaded gasoline should go forward, regulated by the Surgeon General, the committee passed a resolution calling on the Public Health Service to conduct further studies. Separately, the president of the Society of Automotive Engineers called for additional investigations concerning lead's possible relation to sterility. And the American Chemical Society, which might have been supposed a lockstep supporter of Ethyl, proposed around this time that increased governmental regulation over chemicals "is a subject worthy of further discussion." Thus, even the industry's paid scientists were uneasy about the use of lead in gasoline. Yet none of these calls for further government action were ever acted upon, and it was this failure that gave Ethyl its opening. The PHS never conducted the studies, the Surgeon General never lobbied Congress to pay for them and, for the next forty years, all research on TEL's health impact would be underwritten by GM, Standard Oil, Du Pont, Ethyl and lead-industry trade associations. With the credulity-stretching statement of an Ethyl spokesman that the only purpose of GM and Standard Oil--"two of the largest units in the automobile and oil industry"--was "to conserve a vital natural resource," the company welcomed the committee's report as total vindication. "We plan to resume operations," Ethyl announced without delay the day of the report's release. In May 1926, one year after the sale of TEL-laced gasoline was suspended, signs appeared in gas stations: "Ethyl is back." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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