An old-fashioned hardback book often still beats the internet, doesn’t it? When you can get hold of one. Right now, there’s one, in a package with my name on it, stuck somewhere between a second-hand bookshop in Portland, Oregon, and the UK: the only published biography – that I can find – of Thomas Midgley Jr.
Once a figure of celebrated repute, Midgley is now just the answer to an increasingly obscure pub quiz question. He was primarily responsible for mixing lead with petrol in the 1920s; and then, in one of the 20th-century’s most environmentally ruinous encores, for putting chlorofluorocarbons in refrigerators and air-conditioning systems in the 1930s. Imagine having both on your CV – and still making president of the American Chemical Society.
I’ve been particularly interested lately in the circumstances and context that gave rise to two of the most infamous chemical innovations of the past 100 years or so. Might there be parallels with those surrounding research into battery technology and synthetic fuels right now?
Could the car be due another Midgley moment? Well, having reflected a bit on the subject, I’m relieved to have concluded that no, probably not.
The pressures on electric vehicles – specifically in terms of battery technology, energy density and cost – seem, at first, to be comparable to those that gave rise to leaded petrol. The world has long forgotten what an obstacle to progress irregular combustion – engine knock – once was. The once burning issue prevented petrol engines from being small, powerful, efficient or reliable.
According to an article written by Mark Bernstein, Midgley experimented with more than 100 fuel additives in total. Iodine worked quite well. Aniline even better. But tetraethyl lead worked best of all – and that meant it could be dosed in petrol both efficiently and cheaply.
When ‘ethyl’ petrol appeared on US forecourts in 1923, it added only three cents to the cost of a gallon. It allowed petrol engines to run smoothly and reliably at then unprecedented compression ratios, and from there on out, not least with its impact on aircraft (fun fact: avgas aircraft fuel still widely has tetraethyl lead in it), it helped to shape the history of the 20th century.
Electric cars are already smooth and reliable, of course, but they are for now saddled with the acknowledged challenges of cost and range. But while they don’t make atmospheric tailpipe emissions, that doesn’t mean they could never be a threat to public health.
However, the general naivety in the 1920s to the concept of atmospheric pollution clearly has no equal 100 years or so down the line.
Experience has taught me to treat with contempt the occasional bouts of hysteria arising in the media about EV crash and fire safety. When it comes to engineering and testing fundamentally safe products, whose batteries don’t typically leak, degrade or explode, the car industry has already proven itself capable. The safeguards are in place. I don’t think it’s hubristic to imagine they will continue to work.
And as for the ‘upstream’ part of the equation – well, chemical research these days must, one assumes, mostly be done by trained chemists. Midgley wasn’t one of those, rather a mechanical engineer by trade. Could that have been considered a red flag? Or have you just dyed your handkerchief again, Thomas?
According to Bernstein, our man had to be persuaded, at length, to do his research into ‘Freon’, and would most likely have been happier if left to pursue the synthetic alternatives to natural rubber for tyres, to which he devoted much of the rest of his career. That was a largely fruitless search, though – and CFCs made the cash registers ring.
Perhaps it’s the very idea of ‘the one big breakthrough’ that the EV must avoid. Handy, since it seems to be content with lots of small ones. Solid state is close; new anode and cathode constructions, and nanotechnologies, are coming. The average volumetric energy density of lithium ion cells in EVs rose fivefold between 2010 and 2020 – and it’s set to double again between now and 2030.
It’s the kind of progress that clearly depends on a small army of mini-Midgleys out there right now, just doing their thing very competently and safely, with the right qualifications and without poisoning or harming anything or anyone.
Would they object to being called mini-Midgleys? Perhaps. But here’s hoping we never learn any of their actual names.
