The Ethyl Controversy
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Ethyl The Ethyl Controversy How the news media set the agenda for a public health controversy over leaded gasoline, 1924-1926 William J. (Bill) Kovarik Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland DAI 1994 55(4): 781-782-A. DA9425070 © 1993, 2013 Prof. William J. Kovarik, Ph.D. All rights reserved 1 Ethyl Title page 1 Table of Contents 2 Introduction - 2013 3 1. The Ethy Controversy 11 2. Literature Review 30 3. Discovery from Dayton 65 4. News from Bayway 105 5. Ethyl's internal controversy 139 6. Confrontation in Washington 166 7. Ethyl & the News Media 203 8. Science news in the 1920s 234 9. Authority & perspective 282 A1. Chronology (improved) 301 A2. Glossary 320 A3. Cost of Octane (table) 323 A4. Alternatives to TEL 326 A5. Bibliography (original) 339 A6. Research notes 356 2 Ethyl Introduction and historiographic notes December 2013 Twenty years after I defended The Ethyl Controversy dissertation at the University of Maryland's College of Journalism, it's time to make the dissertation available as an easy-to- distribute file for other historians. Although the dissertation is already public, the delay in wider distribution has involved hoped-for releases of additional industry documents which have not yet taken place. Even so, a few historiographic notes are in order. To begin with, an important origin of this dissertation was my desire to follow up on 15 years of active journalism in environmental controversy, from about 1977 to 1992, particularly with respect to the oil industry and its products and alternatives. Before the dissertation, I had been privileged to write two books about biofuels and ethanol: one for the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development in 1983 and another with two friends, Hal Bernton and Scott Sklar, in 1982. I'd been especially interested in the role of the press in reporting the controversy and in providing information that helped (or sometimes did not help) to unravel the mysterious technical and political fog that surrounded the arcane but environmentally significant topic of "octane" boosting additives for gasoline. Ethanol was well known as one of these additives, but was also considered to be the stepchild of the oil industry, at best an "alternative" to leaded gasoline's tetra-ethyl-lead (TEL) additive, which was always depicted as the standard, economical and most logical choice. Yet there were a host of anomalies and omissions in this hegemonic depiction of the "standard" fuel additive TEL throughout its 90 years of life. One of the most interesting was an apparent Soviet-style erasure of history in a paper by Graham Edgar, an Ethyl company chemist. The paper depicted the benefit of tetra-ethyl lead in volumetric terms as compared to other substances. A chart and its caption claimed TEL was technologically the best option because it took the least amount of the substance to obtain the same octane-boosting results. There were 11 alternatives depicted, but the chart left room for 12. It occurred to me that a non-political chemist wouldn't line up 11 of anything and leave the twelfth place free. Could someone have cut something out of the picture? Given the volumetric progression, this twelfth additive would very likely have been ethyl alcohol, an octane booster that had to be added at higher volumes to achieve the effect in gasoline. 3 Ethyl From: Graham Edgar, "Tetraethyllead," paper to the American Chemical Society, Division of Petroleum Chemistry, New York, Sept. 3-7, 1951. Clearly room has been left for a mysterious twelfth substance, a hydrocarbon, whose properties would mirror benzene or isooctane as a fuel additive. The lacunae is not likely to be anything but ethyl alcohol. Alcohol as a fuel had been so well known to engineers from the earliest days of the automobile that European engineers created their own special "muse of biofuels," the adaptation of Polyhymnia, on this dissertation's cover (Also see additional note in Appendix 8). Yet, apparently, the American oil and chemical industry considered ethanol so politically dangerous 4 Ethyl that it could not even be acknowledged in a scientific paper 50 years later. How was that possible? The contrasting images, and many similar misrepresentations from the American oil industry, stayed with me through years of research. At the time, I was one of a handful of researchers who understood that dozens of refinery workers had died writhing in straight jackets, and hundreds more severely damaged for life, and that millions of consumers had been adversely affected by TEL and leaded gasoline.1 So what this missing twelfth image represented, it seemed to me, was in its own way as Orwellian, as sinister and as deadly as those old Soviet era photos in which a missing person had been assassinated or shipped off to Siberia. My own research was taking place in the 1980s against the backdrop of the prevailing wisdom that environmentalism was an anti-scientific pseudo-religion, and that it had sprung up out of the fertile imaginations of the 1960s boomers. The view was widely discussed by people as diverse as radio personality Rush Limbaugh, novelist Michael Crichton and policy analyst Robert H. Nelson. It was an idea that many conservatives deeply wanted to believe for reasons that are rather far beyond this discussion. And yet, despite their claim to the scientific high ground, those who championed this 'environmentalism-as-religion sprung-up out-of-nowhere' idea never made much of an effort to prove it. My own not-so-astonishing historical research had shown just the opposite: that there had been plenty of public environmental controversy in the news media long before the 1960s, starting at least as far back as Benjamin Franklin and the Dock Creek water pollution controversy in 1739, and including virtually all of the other great names in American and European journalism. My research also showed that what we call environmental controversy -- public health, air pollution, water pollution, toxic chemicals, conservation of farm, forest and wilderness land-- was widespread through humanity's historical record. Today this is more or less taken for granted, but at the time environmental history was brand new and hotly controversial. Also, in 1991, I was concerned about how I might narrow my research framework for this dissertation, and kept thinking about the picture of the missing twelfth octane booster as opposed to Polyhymnia. Great historians like Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner had missed this one particular piece of the puzzle in Dying for Work, but I wasn't sure I could find it either. The breakthrough came in 1992, when I checked with what was then the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in Flynt, Michigan. I learned that 80 linear feet of "unimportant" archives from the office of leaded gasoline inventor Thomas A. Midgley Jr had been released only a few months beforehand. No one had taken the time to look through the mass of disorganized unclassified material. A former Marine colonel and US Energy Department official, William Holmberg, thought it might be important and insisted that I spend a week in Flynt going through the archives. Holmberg was absolutely right. Most of what we historians now know about the context of the development of leaded gasoline has come from those archives -- despite a rather large collection of historical information still (as of December, 2013) being withheld by industry. (Specifically, the successors to the Ethyl Corp., such as Afton 5 Ethyl Chemical and New Market Inc.) After this dissertation was completed in December, 1993, the conclusions ran so counter to what was then understood about leaded gasoline that I decided to present papers to a variety of historical and engineering groups and benefit from their reactions. Although confident about my own work, I was worried that I had overlooked something or, possibly, that the political interests around Ethyl Corp., a Virginia company, would find ways to attack me, since I was a Virginia- based academic without tenure at the time. I was aware, for instance, that Ethyl critics had been attacked in past decades, notably Clair Patterson of Cal Tech and Herbert Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh. The first papers from the dissertation went to the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Society of Automotive Historians, and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. The best that can be said of the SAE was that it was technically equipped to understand the problem, but psychologically constrained to avoid its implications. The paper was presented at a conference, and for some engineers, it was a bombshell. I vividly remember one Japanese engineer quickly scanning through it and gasping "this changes everything." Yet the SAE refused to publish the paper in its series for reasons it would not discuss. 1995, at the SAH, on the 50th anniversary of Farm Chemurgy conference, I was privileged to discuss "Henry Ford, Charles Kettering and the Fuel of the Future," which was subsequently published by the SAH in 1998. That paper has been widely cited, for example, by musician and car enthusiast Neil Young, former CIA director James Woolsey, and former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, and many other historians. Branching out, I presented a papers on the topic to the American Society for Environmental History in 2003 and was invited to submit an article to the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health in 2005. Both of these were well received without a word of criticism. The one criticism of the dissertation's thesis took place at the Society for the History of Technology conference in 2007. I presented a paper on the motives of three famous engineers -- Henry Ford, Charles Kettering and Harry Ricardo -- with respect to fuel development.