Lead culprits: Profiting from poison
Almost a century ago, at a Main Street service station in Dayton Ohio, the world’s first gallons of leaded gasoline were pumped into the cars of customers who filled their tanks at the Refiners Oil Co. The company prominently announced its new Ethyl gasoline as a “product of the General Motors Research Corporation.” It was February 1923.
Engineer Thomas Midgley and his associates at the General Motors Research Laboratory discovered in 1921 that tetraethyl lead, a compound of metallic lead, could make internal combustion engines run more smoothly and reduce engine knock.
But in the fall of 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service’s William Mansfield Clark, then the division chief of the agency’s hygienic laboratory, wrote a letter warning the agency’s assistant surgeon general that tetraethyl lead was a “serious menace to the public health.”
The U.S. Public Health Service then requested that its Division of Chemistry and Pharmacology investigate, but the division director suggested that the agency should instead obtain the data from the industry itself.
https://thinkprogress.org/lead-villains-profiting-from-poison-dec14d75bfc0
