Ok, so some things in the golden era were not too cool...

[Stanley Doble]

I'm not saying leaded gas never made anybody stupid. But if you ask me liquor has done at least a million times more damage.

I know what you mean about coming from a violent impulsive family. My father was one of 4 brothers. He was the only one who didn't drink (at mother's insistence). He was also the only one who never had to skip town or do time, and the only one who didn't die broke. Our home life was no bed of roses but I'm sure it would have been worse if he drank.

PS none of them had anything to do with the gasoline industry and all grew up in the country or in the same small town with no major hiways nearby.

 

[Stanley Doble]

The kid in the Amoco ad looks like he has been swigging the Ethyl or maybe they were adding Alcohol to the blend.

 

[Stearmen]

To show you how bad tetra-ethyl lead was, the men that worked at the Deep Water, New Jersey DuPont plant, dubbed the building that they made it in, "The House Of The Butterflies," a grim joke about all the workers who saw butterflies because of their hallucinatory dementia from their exposure. 80% of the employes were poisoned, many spent the rest of their lives confined to psychiatric hospitals. There were several cases of workers jumping out of windows, probably chasing butterflies.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not saying leaded gas never made anybody stupid. But if you ask me liquor has done at least a million times more damage.

I fully agree. Humanity seems to have a deep instinct for finding ways to stupefy itself. I can't think of any other creature on the planet with such deeply-ingrained self-destructive tendencies.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The kid in the Amoco ad looks like he has been swigging the Ethyl or maybe they were adding Alcohol to the blend.

Amoco used a high concentration of benzene to improve the octane level of its gasoline instead of using lead -- with the result that a lot of groundwater near Amoco stations ended up severely contaminated. We used to have a public spring near the town where I grew up, famous for the quality of its drinking water, until they discovered it was full of benzene. There had been an Amoco station just a ways up the road. Imagine that.

 

[HudsonHawk]

To show you how bad tetra-ethyl lead was, the men that worked at the Deep Water, New Jersey DuPont plant, dubbed the building that they made it in, "The House Of The Butterflies," a grim joke about all the workers who saw butterflies because of their hallucinatory dementia from their exposure. 80% of the employes were poisoned, many spent the rest of their lives confined to psychiatric hospitals. There were several cases of workers jumping out of windows, probably chasing butterflies.

The product was known as "loony gas". In 1924 alone, five workers from the building died screaming and struggling in straight jackets. Everyone knew from the onset that leaded gasoline was bad for people and bad for the environment. There was plenty of research proving that. Leaded gasoline was even banned in places like New York City and Philadelphia. However, the US Surgeon General, under pressure from the automotive industry and President Coolidge, released a report in 1926 saying that the current levels were safe, though it acknowledged that pollution levels would likely go up and then who knew what would happen. By 1934, levels had almost doubled and by the early 50's, lead levels in the environment and in the blood of the people were an order of magnitude higher than they were prior to TEL usage in gasoline. It was estimated that lead poisinging from gasoline accounted for an overall 10-12% drop in IQ points across the board and killed thousands of people a year.

 

[vitanola]

I think Dupont, in this case, was blameless -- if I recall correctly the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation was a partnership between Standard Oil of New Jersey and GM. So add the lead debacle to the tally against Esso/Exxon/ExxonMobil

.

Well, the DuPonts were the principal shareholders in GM, and also held large blocks of Standard of NJ. Midgley, the chemist working for Kettering who developed Tetraethyl Lead, investigated other anti-knock compounds, and in fact found that ethanol was quite effective for this purpose, but was unacceptable because it's use in this application was not considered to be patentable by GM's patent attorneys.

At least one major oil company, Amoco, made a big deal of selling "pure, unadulterated" lead-free gasoline long before the advent of catalytic converters, and they stressed this in their advertising -- suggesting, but not stating outright, that lead was unhealthy for both cars and their drivers.

Now we know how bad TEL was for automobile life. GM's research department realized as early as 1928 that the combustion of TEL (or more accurately the compounds used to make TEL soluable in fuel) produced copious quantities of corrosive compounds. Remember how quickly exhaust systems used to rust out? The Hydrochloric Acid vapor in the exhaust of an engine burning TEL just rotted the steel.

We had a 1969 Lincoln Town Car that went through one every nine or ten months.

The HCL in blowby gasses would condense in the oil sump and amuse itself in eating away at the main rod and camshaft bearings.

Then of course we hav the problem of lead fouling of spark-plugs, valves, and piston rings.

Next to this, lead's benefits in limiting erosion of the exhaust valves (by the prevention of micro welds between straw-yellow hot valve lips and their associated seats) is a rather minor advantage, all of the "Oh, My! Now that I cannot get leaded gasoline I will have to throw away my antique car!" hysteria notwithstanding.

When I think of all of the Yahoos who have spent large amounts of their hard-earned cash having their pre-war cars refitted "to allow them to run safely on unleaded fuel" I realize that Barnum was right on both counts.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I'm a Chrysler fan, so I can tell you that all Chrysler products built before the mid fifties had hardened exhaust valve seats and hardened exhaust valves as factory equipment. So did most other cars.

The first engine to have no valve seats and no valve guides was the Chev V8 in 1955. This was about the time heavily leaded gas of 85 octane and higher became available.

I know leaded gas was made from 1928 on, but at first it was only in the more expensive, high octane blends and before 1954 the amounts used were relatively low.

In other words ALL engines from before 1955 will run fine on today's low lead or no lead gas, it is the kind of gas they were made for.

The only cars that suffer are the ones made between 1955 and 1970, and then only the high performance models with 9.5:1 compression or higher.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I know lead is toxic, the question is how toxic and how much is a toxic dose? I find it hard to believe that large numbers of people were poisoned or went crazy because of leaded gas between 1928 and 1970, but nobody noticed. Then when they STOPPED selling leaded gas, all of a sudden it became a big deal.

The number of lead bashing articles that have appeared since leaded gas disappeared, seems suspicious to me.

 

[vitanola]

I know lead is toxic, the question is how toxic and how much is a toxic dose? I find it hard to believe that large numbers of people were poisoned or went crazy because of leaded gas between 1928 and 1970, but nobody noticed. Then when they STOPPED selling leaded gas, all of a sudden it became a big deal.

The number of lead bashing articles that have appeared since leaded gas disappeared, seems suspicious to me.

Well, low dose toxicity of any compound varies over a population, and can often only be seen in retrospect, using methods of statistical analysis which have proven to be quite reliable and have been used by Public Helath physicians since the 'Twenties- the Eighteen-Twenties.

The arguments that are made against lead as a major public health problem are not at all new. They were used back in the Eighteen-Fifties and 'Sixties against the idea that contaminated water supplies were responsible for Cholera and Typhoid.

There were a great many articles about the dangers of lead in motor fuel published in the scientific and even the popular press in the 1920's and 1930's. One might find it interesting to note that articles critical of leaded fuel disappeared from the literature at around the time that it became a very profitable product, not to reappear until after it was of no commercial value.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The thing that stood out in the original article to me was that lead poisoning from fuel has its greatest long term impact on young children. The generation of children who grew up in the late forties thru the mid sixties -- the heaviest period of leaded gasoline use -- grew up to be the generation of violent thugs and punks who committed all the violent crime in the late sixties, seventies and eighties, or so the article postulates. The curve correlates very closely, which certainly seems to support the argument. And lord knows we talk here enough about how lousy a time 1965-85 was to live in culturally speaking. There is no other rational explanation for the popular culture of that era other than a sudden, unnatural wave of mass stupidity.

On the other hand, though, nobody in my family ever turned out *stupid* even though we practically bathed in leaded gasoline. We're cranky, but we aren't dumb. Except for all that money my grandfather wasted on harness-racing bets.

 

[vitanola]

It is interesting to note the changes in violent crime rates in different populations, in different countries, where leaded fuel was banned at different times. The correlation is practically universal.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I know lead is toxic, the question is how toxic and how much is a toxic dose?

It depends. There are various concentrations that are considered acutely toxic, depending on the route of exposure. However, like other metals, lead also bioaccumulates.

I find it hard to believe that large numbers of people were poisoned or went crazy because of leaded gas between 1928 and 1970, but nobody noticed. Then when they STOPPED selling leaded gas, all of a sudden it became a big deal.

The number of lead bashing articles that have appeared since leaded gas disappeared, seems suspicious to me.

Who says nobody noticed? Again, there was a mountain of scientific evidence about the health effects of TEL going back to its discovery in 1921. Alice Hamilton and Yandell Henderson, two of the leading toxicologist of the 1920's published articles and publically recited the dangers of TEL at public conferences, in writings, etc. Kettering himself warned of the dangers. The problem was 2-fold: 1) there was a huge concern following WWI about the US's dependence on foreign oil, and anything that appeared to increase performance was of huge importance, and 2) the anti-lead movement, like the environmental movement in general, got put on the backburner in 1929 with a little thing called the Great Depression. Move straight into WWII, and following that, we find ourselves at the mercy of the Boys From Marketing. I wasn't until the late 1960's that environmental issues began to appear back on the radar screen.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I have been a history buff and car fan all my life, read everything I could find about the history of the auto industry and don't recall a single book or article about the danger of leaded gas until several years AFTER it went out of production.

This suggests one of 2 things: a massive, totally successful coverup of a major public health issue for 50 years. Or a certain amount of revisionism and exaggeration of the dangers of tetraethyl lead in gasoline.

As a conspiracy buff, and a critic of popular history, I would be happy either way.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I have been a history buff and car fan all my life, read everything I could find about the history of the auto industry and don't recall a single book or article about the danger of leaded gas until several years AFTER it went out of production.

Here's one from 1925 by the aforementioned Alice Hamilton, who was one of the pioneers of what we'd call today "industrial hygiene":

ALICE HAMILTON, M.D.; PAUL REZNIKOFF, M.D.; GRACE M. BURNHAM. Tetra-Ethyl Lead. Journal of the American Medial Association. 1925;84(20):1481-1486

See also:

Proceedings of a Conference to Determine Whether or Not There is a Public Health Question in the Manufacture, Distribution or Use of Tetraethyl Lead Gasoline, U.S. Public Health Service. Washington, DC: U.S. Treasury Department, Bulletin No. 158, Aug 1925: 6.

U.S. Public Health Service. The use of tetraethyl lead gasoline in its relation to public health. Public Health Bulletin No. 163; Washington: GPO, 1926.

Winslow CEA. Recommendations for the drawing up of a report on the use of lead tetra-ethyl gasoline by the public, memo to PHS committee members, Dec 31, 1925, Box 101, Folder 1801, Winslow papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT.

And these are just a few from the 1920's. There are many, many more, especially when you get into the late 1950's and 1960's, decades before TEL was discontinued.

 

[vitanola]

Yet folks don't notice things that try really don't want to see.

I was familiar with the JAMA article when I was in elementary school, back in the days of leaded motor fuel.

 

[Stanley Doble]

You read the JAMA when you were in elementary school?

 

[vitanola]

You read the JAMA when you were in elementary school?

Yes. when I was in fifth grade I wrote a (rather childish) paper about lead use. This was before lead was eliminated from either paint or motor fuel, and my conclusion at the time was that the growing hysteria about leaded paint in residential use was drummed up by petroleum interests. A conclusion which I still maintain. of course, my introduction to the subject came from a neighbor who was a chemical engineer who worked for Sherwin-Williams...

 

[Stanley Doble]

What did the petroleum industry have to do with lead paint?

I know a few chemists and most of them are pretty cavalier about the hazards of the chemicals they work with.

 

[vitanola]

What did the petroleum industry have to do with lead paint?

I know a few chemists and most of them are pretty cavalier about the hazards of the chemicals they work with.

Folks in the paint industry have long maintained at the hysteria about childhood lead exposure in urban settings due to children eating paint ships was largely ginned up by the petroleum flacks to distract from lead poisoning from contaminated soil due to the burning of TEL. This is plausible, for lead poisoning in children is nearly unknown in rural areas and urban areas which are distant from heavily travelled roads, even among desperately poor children who live in filthy, poorly maintained, run-down hovels.