ETHYL: The 1920s conflict over leaded gasoline & alternative fuels

In short,  technical research into ethyl alcohol as a fuel tended to be extremely positive, with few if any negative findings. By 1925, an American researcher speaking at the New York Chemists Club said:

Discovery of  Ethyl Leaded Gasoline

The discovery of tetraethyl lead as an antiknock additive has long been seen  as a fine example of scientifically driven research. Thomas Hughes saw the discovery as “a beautiful [piece] of pure, or at least deliberately planned, research” and a systematic approach to the “reverse salient,” — a key problem in the broad front of technological progress. Engine knock  was a key problem because it occurred at the upper limit of efficiency , power and cylinder compression in the internal combustion engines of the early 1920s. General Motors (G.M.)  researchers Charles Kettering and  Thomas  A. Midgley “tried out all elements possible in a so-called Edisonian style,” Hughes said. By overcoming knock,  they opened the door to engines with almost twice the power and fuel efficiency.  Hughes saw  the discovery of Ethyl  as closer to the heart of generic questions about invention than most other stories about  other discoveries, that have often been “simplistic and adulatory.”(Hughes, 1979).

Historians Joseph C. Robert, Stuart  Leslie, Joseph Pratt and David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, along with biographers T.A. Boyd, Rosamond Young and Owen Allen, tended to focus on leaded gasoline as the final successful step in a progression of discovery. They focused on Ethyl brand leaded gasoline as a “success story” and paid little or no attention to the alternative possibilities in their historical context. Most, aside from Pratt and Rosner & Markowitz, minimized the controversy surrounding leaded gasoline.

In recent years,  the need for a revised interpretation of the discovery has become evident. In the first place, tetra-ethyl lead was not a “success,” and the seeds of its failure are perfectly evident in the controversy surrounding its birth, as we will see.  In the second place, the abundance of literature concerning the anti-knock properties of ethyl alcohol would argue for at least an broader view of GM research. Kettering and Midgley  did not “try out all possible elements” to find the single solution.  In fact, they stumbled on quite a few solutions before they found one that could be profitably marketed.

Context of the Discovery

 The  discovery of tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) as an anti-knock additive took place in the context of post World War industrial expansion and new consumer expectations. The auto and oil industries were at an important crossroads. Experts all believed that oil was running out. Fuel quality was declining and engine knock was an increasingly important problem. Detroit had to chart a long-term development plan with some contingency for oil shortfalls.

From its early years, the American automobile manufacturing industry has worried about the possibility that oil would run out.  As early as 1906, for example, representatives from the Detroit Board of Commerce told a U.S. Senate hearing that auto manufacturers worried “not so much [about] cost as … supply” of fuel. (US Senate, Free Alcohol Hearings,1906). Similar fears of oil shortages have occurred in other periods during the 20th century.

At the end of World War I, demand for fuel advanced quickly while the quality of fuel declined as lower quality reserves were brought into the market. Geologists estimated that  only 20 or 30 years worth of oil were left in the U.S. and a “gasoline famine” was possible or even likely. (White, 1919; Smith, 1920). The USGS estimated US oil reserves at seven billion barrels while consumption was at 330 million barrels per year and rapidly increasing. (Scientific American Sept. 20 1919).  Automotive engineers worried about “a calamity, seriously disorganizing an indispensable system of transportation.”  (Scientific American March 8 1919). One solution was to import foreign oil. Some would even suggest fighting for it. (Denny, 1928).

Another solution was to search for an engine that was more tolerant of low-grade fuels. This would  mean lower compression ratio engines that were less fuel efficient.

According to a March 8, 1919 article in Scientific American ,:

Kettering proposes high and low percentage solutions to the fuel problem

In 1919, General Motors decided to hire Charles F. Kettering, inventor of the electric starter  motor for automobiles and then president of the Society of Automotive Engineers. Kettering would not only head GM’s research division, but Kettering’s entire organization, the Dayton Metal Products Co (DMPCO – formerly DELCO), would become the core of GM’s new research division.  The entire research team, including fuel researchers Thomas Midgley and T.A. Boyd, came along with Kettering.

Kettering had already put Midgley and Boyd to work on the problem of anti-knock fuels in collaboration with the US Army and the US Bureau of Mines.  (DMPCO, July 27, 1918, GMI Archive).  Their report found that ethyl alcohol, benzene and a cyclohexane fuel they called “Hecter” could be used in high
compression engines without knock. Details of the tests showed that ethyl alcohol had the best performance.

Kettering urged engineers to avoid compromising engine design by lowering compression ratios and adapting engines to less volatile fuels, as Scientific American suggested (above). In an undated (c. 1919-22) speech entitled “The Fuel Problem” Kettering said:

“Geologists tell us that at our present rate of consumption the domestic supply of crude oil will be exhausted in less than 15 years. If we could sufficiently raise the compression of our motors … we could double the mileage and thereby lengthen this period to 30 years.” 

But where would automotive engineers find a fuel that would allow them to raise engine compression? With oil running out, the better quality crude oil stocks were being sold off, leaving lower grades of crude oil. 3

Kettering  had two approaches in mind: the “high percentage” and the “low  percentage” additives to gasoline. Forty percent benzene was an example of a high percentage additive which “makes an engine operate entirely satisfactorily,” Kettering said. The low percentage solution was represented in 1919 by an accidental discovery that one percent iodine solution in gasoline could cut engine knock. It was too expensive and corrosive, Kettering said, but it pointed the way to a possible low percentage solution. (Scientific American, Oct. 11, 1919).

Iodine was impractical, but Midgley  stumbled across aniline, which also had an anti-knock effect. In October, 1920, Midgley filed a patent application on an aniline injector for engines.4 Still, the pungent aroma of aniline exhaust clung to the air in the Dayton labs, magnifying the sense of failure. “I doubt if humanity, even to doubling of fuel economy, will put up with this smell,” Midgley wrote C.M. Stine of du Pont. Stine had been asked to develop plans for a full scale production effort for aniline. Kettering conceded that du Pont was “out of sympathy with our point of view,” and that they would have to do something “to stimulate interest in what is today the only known solution to the problem.”

In the spring of 1921, Kettering chanced across a newspaper article on selenium, a potential “universal solvent.” Kettering laughed, remembering a joke about a farmer who asked a chemist what on earth would hold a “universal” solvent. He pocketed the news clip. When he returned to Dayton, out of the blue, Kettering gave it to Midgley and asked him to try selenium. On April 6, 1921, at the threshold of abandoning the project, Midgley  discovered that selenium had  an antiknock effect greater than aniline, although it smelled worse and was highly corrosive.

The research effort shifted into a somewhat more systematic and scientific  approach.  Guided by Robert Wilson of MIT, Midgley began focusing on groups of elements with potential antiknock effect.  He pasted a chart of 20 elements in four groups onto a peg board and mapped the antiknock values of each element as it was tested.   By August, 1921, preliminary  tests pointed to lead as the best “low percentage” antiknock additive. By Dec. 9, 1921, a compound of lead suspended in alcohol had been found to be highly effective. Historians would later see the  peg board method as a turn from raw empiricism to a reasoned scientific method and as marking the broader industrial transition from the “heroic” style of invention in the mold of Edison to the more scientific, less personal corporate inventive approach.[ii] 

The unstated flip side of this analysis is difficult to ignore. How does a corporation arrive at a public health disaster while ignoring the existence of a perfectly useful alternative?  Would a heroic style of invention have avoided the pitfalls that a corporate style could not?   In  any event, the individualistic nature of the GM research was not yet fully submerged. Midgley and Boyd continued working on ethyl alcohol and other “high percentage” solutions as well as TEL.

Experiments on alternatives continue at GM   

If oil was running out, what was the point of creating anti-knock fuels? There were two motives — one public and one private.  The public was to increase engine compression and improve fuel efficiency.  Early press releases about TEL indicate a possible doubling in fuel mileage.

But the private motive, and Kettering’s long term strategy, involved the high percentage solution and protection of General Motors over the long term. It is most clearly stated in the unpublished 1936 du Pont study, “The Origins and Early History of Tetra Ethyl Lead” by N. P. Wescott of du Pont’s legal staff.
According to the study:

” … An important special motive for this research was General Motors’  desire to fortify itself against the exhaustion or prohibitive cost of the gasoline supply, which was then believed to be impending in about twenty-five years; the thought being that the high compression motors which should be that time have been brought into general use if knocking could be overcome could more advantageously be switched to [ethyl] alcohol. ”

The du Pont conclusion is supported by internal memos in the Midgley files and by public reports by researchers Midgley and Boyd.  Alcohol was the “most direct route … for converting energy from its source, the sun, into a material that is suitable for a fuel…” Midgley and Boyd said in one internal memo. Advantages included cleanliness and high antiknock rating, but disadvantages included supply problems. In 1921, about 100 million gallons of industrial alcohol supply was available. Overall, enough corn, sugar cane and other crops were available to produce almost twice the 1921 gasoline demand of  8.3  billion gallons per year.  But the possibility of using such a large amount of food acreage for fuel “seems very unlikely,” (Boyd, 1921).  In a speech about anti-knock fuels made around 1921, Kettering noted that “industrial alcohol can be obtained from vegetable products … [but] the present total production of industrial alcohol amounts to less than four percent of the fuel demands, and were it to take the place of gasoline, over half of the total farm area of the United States would be needed to grow the vegetable matter from which to produce this alcohol.” (Kettering, GMI Archives, c.1921).

This skepticism about ethyl alcohol  supply sources is anomalous. If the goal was to create antiknock additives  at the “high percentage” level, why frame the question in terms of totally replacing gasoline? Anti knock blends of ethyl alcohol in gasoline  would not strain farm resources nearly as much as a total replacement of gasoline. British researcher W.R. Ormandy estimated that five percent of the US grain crop would be sufficient (Ormandy, 1919). Using Boyd’s figure, a 20 percent blend of ethyl alcohol in gasoline would have involved about nine percent of existing grain and sugar crops. Yet it is  interesting to note that grain was in surplus after World War I and many farmers would have welcomed new markets. Ethyl alcohol was also in surplus after the adoption of the 18th Amendment, which enforced Prohibition of alcohol beverages.5

Ethyl alcohol from cellulose as the fuel of the future

Around 1920,  GM became interested  in the conversion of cellulose to fermentable sugar being performed by Prof.  Harold Hibbert at Yale University. Cellulose is a chain of glucose monomers that is the primary component of cotton, wood, straw, paper and many other natural fibers.   The concept of breaking down the alpha linkages between the glucose molecules to produce food, fuels and chemicals was not novel in the 1920s.

Hibbert pointed out that the 1920 U.S.G.S.  oil reserve report had serious implications for his work with cellulosic fuels. “Does the average citizen understand what this means?” he asked. “In from 10 to 20 years this country will be dependent entirely upon outside sources for a supply of liquid fuels… paying out vast sums yearly in order to obtain supplies of crude oil from Mexico, Russia and Persia.”  Chemists might be able to solve the problem, Hibbert said, by making ethanol from abundant cellulose waste – materials such as seaweed, sawdust, corn stalks and wheat straw. (Hibbert, 1921).

In the summer of 1920, GM researcher T.A. Boyd and his family moved to New Haven so that he could study with Hibbert. Boyd found Hibbert impressive but the volume of scholarship concerning breakdown  of cellulose linkages through hydrolysis was overwhelming. The problem was apparently more complex than Boyd and his boss Thomas A. Midgley realized. When Midgley came east in late July, he was more interested in meeting Standard Oil Co. officials than with Hibbert, and Boyd left without a clear sense of where the cellulose research could go. (Boyd to Midgley, July 8, 1920, GMI Archive; also Howard interview, 1960).

Boyd thought a source of alcohol  “in addition to foodstuffs” must be found, and that the source would be cellulose: “It is readily available, it is easily produced and its supply is renewable.” The problem was that the process was expensive, he had learned in his stay with Hibbert.  If a cheap process could be found,  “the danger of a serious shortage of motor fuel would disappear,”  Boyd said. “The great necessity for and the possibilities of such a  process justify a large amount of further research.”

GM promotes alcohol fuel to SAE members

To promote the idea of alcohol  blended fuels among automotive and chemical engineers, Midgley drove a high compression ratio car (7:1) from Dayton to an October 1921 Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) meeting in Indianapolis using a 30 percent alcohol blend in gasoline. “Alcohol has tremendous advantages and minor disadvantages,” Midgley told fellow SAE members in a discussion. Advantages included “clean burning and freedom from any carbon deposit… [and] tremendously high compression under which alcohol will operate without knocking… Because of the possible high compression, the available horsepower is much greater with alcohol than with gasoline…” Minor disadvantages included low volatility, difficulty starting, and difficulty in blending with gasoline “unless a binder is used.”6

Another engineer noted that a  seven and a half percent increase in power  was found with the alcohol-gasoline blend  “…without producing any ‘pink’ [knock] in the engine. We have recommended the addition of 10 percent of benzol [benzene] to our customers who have export trade that uses this type of fuel to facilitate the mixing of the alcohol and gasoline.”[iii]

In a formal part of the presentation,  Midgley mentioned the cellulose project. “From our cellulose waste products on the farm such as straw, corn-stalks, corn cobs and all similar sorts of material we throw away, we can get, by present known methods, enough alcohol to run our automotive equipment in the United States,” he said. The catch was that it would cost two dollars per gallon. However, other alternatives looked even more problematic — oil shale wouldn’t work, and benzene from coal would only bring in about 20 percent of the total fuel need. (Midgley, SAE, Oct. 1921, GMI Archives).

TEL  and ethyl alcohol at GM 1921-22

Midgley and Kettering’s  interest in ethyl alcohol fuel did not fade once tetraethyl lead anti-knock was discovered in December, 1921. In fact, not only was ethyl alcohol a source of continued interest as an antiknock agent, but it was still considered to be the fuel that would  replace petroleum.  In May of 1922, as work
continued on developing TEL, Midgley wrote a memo to Kettering in response to an inquiry about a report on a Mexican ethyl alcohol fuel distillery. Midgley said: “Unquestionably alcohol is the fuel of the future and is playing its part in tropical countries… Alcohol can be produced in those countries for approximately 7 – 1/2 cents per gallon from many sources …” (Midgley to Kettering, May 23, 1922, GMI Archives).

While the potential for TEL was  being considered within GM and DuPont,  Midgley and Boyd also continued working on alcohol as the long term fuel of the future.  In a June 1922 Society of Automotive Engineers paper, they said:

“That the addition of benzene and other aromatic hydrocarbons to paraffin base gasoline greatly reduces the tendency of these fuels to detonate [knock] … has been known for some time. Also, it is well known that alcohol … improves the combustion characteristics of the fuel …The scarcity and high cost of gasoline in  countries where sugar is produced and the abundance of raw materials for making  alcohol there has resulted in a rather extensive use of alcohol for motor fuel.  As the reserves of petroleum in this country become more and more depleted, the use of benzene and particularly of alcohol in commercial motor fuels will probably become greatly extended.”  ( Note: bold section indicates a sentence used at the oral presentation at a June  1922  SAE meeting but not published in  SAE Journal, June 1922, page 451; The oral presentation is from Midgley unprocessed files, GMI Archives).

In September, 1922, Midgley and Boyd wrote in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry that “vegetation offers a source of tremendous quantities of liquid fuel.” Cellulose from vegetation would be the primary resource because not enough agricultural grains and other foods were available for conversion into fuel. “Some means must be provided to bridge the threatened gap between petroleum and the commercial production of large quantities of liquid fuels from other sources. The best way to accomplish this is to increase the efficiency with which the energy of gasoline is used and thereby obtain more automotive miles per gallon of fuel.” (Midgley, Sept. 1922).

At the time the paper was written, in late spring or early summer 1922, TEL was still a secret within the company, but it was  announced that summer to fellow scientists. The reference to a means to “bridge the threatened gap” and increase in the efficiency of gasoline clearly implies the use of TEL or some other additive to pave the way to new fuel sources.

As interest in TEL in GM and duPont  grew and ties to the oil industry increased, the original strategy of replacing dwindling petroleum with alcohol seems to have faded.  Still, TEL was not ready and other anti-knock fuels certainly were available, as Kettering, Midgley and Boyd knew.  In  1923, Midgley wrote to Navy Lt. B.G. Leighten warning him not to use TEL  on a round-the-world flight but instead to use a blended fuel.  TEL was giving spark plug and valve trouble, he said, and “the best possibilities are offered by a fuel consisting of a gasoline-benzol-alcohol blend. (Midgley, March16, 1923, GMI Archives).

The refinery disasters 

The story of  how GM’s magic antiknock fluid killed 17 workers in the Standard Oil refinery at Bayway, N.J. and the du Pont refinery in Deepwater, N.J. has been recounted elsewhere (Rosner & Markowitz, 1989, Kovarik, 1993, 1994).  Briefly, five Bayway workers went “violently insane” after working at the new TEL plant and died from severe lead poisoning. The media quickly learned about the mysterious poisonings and wrote articles which reflected concern but hardly seem hysterical, as claimed by Ethyl apologists.

The city of  New York and several states banned leaded gasoline, and after a few weeks, the public outcry forced Ethyl to take leaded gasoline off the market. Public health scientists, especially Yandell Henderson of Yale spoke out against TEL.

“Breathing  day by day of the fine dust from automobiles will produce chronic lead poisoning on a large scale…”  The problem  was “… the greatest single question in the field of public health which has ever faced the American public …  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 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 … that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold that can only run on that fuel before the public and the government awaken to the situation.”  The question is whether “commercial interests are to be allowed to subordinate every other consideration to that of profit. It is not a matter of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, but literally billions.” (NY Times April 22, 1925)

In response,  Midgley said that Henderson was confusing pure TEL with diluted TEL, which had no immediately poisonous effect on people. Henderson was merely a disappointed consultant who didn’t get an Ethyl contract. Henderson shot back that he had warned Midgley and GM years before that any investigation “would scarcely fail to show that the public use of leaded gasoline would involve an intolerable hazard to public health.” (NY Times, April 24, 1925)

Thus, claims  (eg, Robert, 1983) that GM was not aware of the potential danger fail in the face of evidence of dire warnings from Henderson and from other scientists  (Boyd, 1943), from the Public Health Service (Rosner & Markowitz, 1989) and from du Pont engineers (US v. E.I du Pont). One du Pont attorney, reflecting the bitterness of the internal Ethyl controversy, severely criticized the Standard Oil / General Motors design and operation of the Bayway plant.

“They 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 this material without the permission  of the state of New Jersey…”  

Even Midgley  had lead poisoning from attempts to manufacture small batches of TEL in Dayton Ohio. By the spring of 1925, two refineries were half closed and the Ethyl issue had created chaos in GM, Standard and du Pont.  Kettering, who had been in Europe, returned and started tests on an I.G. Farben additive called iron carbonyl and another GM fuel additive called “Synthol.”

GM  Contradicts Its Own Research

Despite the many examples of research pointed in the direction of the “fuel of the future,”  GM researcher Thomas Midgley and his boss Charles Kettering categorically denied the existence of alternatives to TEL after the refinery disasters.  The statements were not equivocal. No mention or admission of any alternative whatsoever is given, with the small exception of Kettering’s PHS statement.

As noted above,  in 1923, Midgley  wrote in SEJ Journal: “ It is well known that alcohol … improves the combustion characteristics of the fuel.” In 1925, he was a featured speaker at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. He said:

“So far as science knows at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to  the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard exists in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified.” (New York Times, April 7, 1925; also Midgley Aug. 1925).

At the Public Health Service conference  on the dangers of leaded gasoline on May 20,1925, Kettering also denied that any viable alternatives to TEL existed:

“We  could produce certain [antiknock] results and with the higher gravity gasolines, the aromatic series of compounds, alcohols, etc. [to] get the high compression without the knock, but in the great volume of fuel of the paraffin series [petroleum] we could not do that.” (US PHS, 1925, p 6).

Dr. Robert  Kehoe, medical consultant to Ethyl from the University of Cincinnatti also spoke at the PHS conference:

“…when a material is found to be of this importance for the conservation of fuel  and for increasing the efficiency of the automobile, it is not a thing which may be thrown into the discard on the basis of opinion.” (US PHS, 1925, p 70).

Kehoe also said that there was no real difference of opinion at the conference  between industry and public health because the fate of TEL was not in the  hands of industries but rather “in the hands of medical men who have the public interest at heart”  — such as himself. And he promised that he and Ethyl would protect the public interest:

“If  it can be shown … that an actual hazard exists in the handling of ethyl gasoline, that an actual hazard exists from exhaust gasses from motors, that  an actual danger to the public is had as a result of the treatment of the gasoline with lead, the distribution of gasoline with lead in it will be discontinued from that moment. Of that there is no question.”  (US PHS, 1925, p 70).

The testimony of Frank Howard of Standard Oil was most dramatic and emphatic about the need for TEL and the lack of alternatives:

“Our continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilization… Now,  after 10 years research … we have this apparent gift of God which enables us to [conserve oil] … We cannot justify ourselves in our consciences if we abandon the thing.” (US PHS, 1925, p.105) 7

These claims drew strong rebuttals. Alice Hamilton of Harvard told the PHS conference:  “I am utterly unwilling to believe that the only substance which can be used to take the knock out of a gasoline engine is TEL.”  (US PHS, 1925, p 99) “Our best hope is that some non-poisonous substitute for TEL be found,” she said a month later (Hamilton, June 1925). Yandell Henderson also noted that “lead is not by any means the only substance which, on theoretical grounds , or even on the basis of experiments, can be used as an antiknock medium…[Researchers at Yale University] believe that there are other chemical and engineering possibilities.” (US PHS, 1925, p. 63).

Information about alternatives could have emerged with more force at this moment to contradict Midgley, Kettering, Howard and Kehoe. In the first place, news reports in advance of the PHS conference noted that it was to last several days in order to consider alternatives to TEL (Kovarik, 1993). This is partially corroborated by Surgeon General’s opening statement that the conference would last several days, even though the conference ended on the first day. In the second place, a report published but not released by the Dept. of Commerce only a few days before showed that alternative antiknock additives (mostly ethyl alcohol blends in gasoline) were being used routinely in two dozen other industrial nations. (Fox, 1925). And in any event, anyone familiar with Midgley and Boyd’s papers of 1921 and 1922 would see that they were flatly contradicting their own published research.

The New York World newspaper also said:

Original plans had called for presentation to the Public Health conference of claims of various persons that they have discovered dopes [additives] for fuels which are as efficient as lead but lack the danger. The conference decided at the last minute, however, that such things were not in its province,  since it was called to consider only the danger of lead and not the lack of danger of any other chemical or mineral. For this reason, the conference adjourned  after only a one day meeting, where it had been thought at first that four or five days might be taken. Many of the delegates to it held informal conferences today, however, at which fuel dopes were discussed. (NY World, May 22, 1925)

However, for reasons unknown, information about alternatives did not emerge except in a few statements by public health scientists and hints in the media. No record of any dissent exists, even though the industry flatly contradicted its own previous research.

Public Health  Service Appoints Expert Committee

The result of the May 20, 1925  PHS conference was the appointment of a committee of experts to study the  problem. The committee was composed of independent scientists from Johns Hopkins,  Harvard, Yale, Vanderbilt and the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota.8  Hamilton and Henderson were not asked to join the committee, but senior colleagues at their institutions were. The Ethyl Corp. agreed to stop marketing Ethyl gasoline until their report had been completed.

The committee did not directly supervise the study and voiced some objections at the end of the course of the study which were never made public. The committee  met June 14 and June 28 to consider the design of the study and corresponded with the P.H.S. on the plan of investigation during the summer. [iv]

The study began in October, 1925,  conducted by J.P. Leake of the P.H.S. Hygiene Laboratory. The site of the study would be two garages in Dayton, Ohio — one using leaded gasoline and one not using leaded gasoline — were to be selected and the employees tested for blood stippling and fecal lead accumulation. Two more garages in Washington, D.C. were to have been added to the list “if time and personnel permit,” according to the preliminary plan. It did not. Two groups of Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio workers (one of drivers and one of mechanics) who had been exposed to leaded gasoline were compared with two similar groups that had not been exposed. A control group of men working in lead industries was also examined.

Researchers found that drivers exposed to leaded gasoline showed somewhat higher “stippling” damage to red blood cells, while garage workers exposed to leaded gasoline showed much more damage to red blood cells, and one quarter of those exposed had over one milligram of lead in fecal samples. In comparison, over 80 percent of the industrial workers showed large amounts of lead in fecal samples. Although techniques for measuring lead levels were primitive in contrast with today’s standards, it is probable that workers with blood damage and high amounts of lead in fecal samples had absorbed amounts of lead that would today be considered dangerous, according to toxicologist and lead historian Jerome Niragu.9

TABLE I
SURGEON GENERAL’S COMMITTEE
ETHYL TEST RESULTS

*mg per gram of ash, fecal test
**of lead poisoning such as blue lines on gums, tremors, etc.

Source: Anon, (probably J.P. Leake), Draft report to Committee on Tetra Ethyl Lead, December 22, 1925, C.E.A. Winslow papers,  Box 101, Folder 1801, Yale University Library, New Haven, Ct.

The most important finding of the committee was that none of the garage workers and drivers had any of the outright symptoms of lead poisoning that killed 17 refinery workers and poisoned at least several hundred more between 1923 and 1925. As a result, the committee concluded that there were “no good
grounds for prohibiting the use of Ethyl gasoline.”

Not all the committee members agreed with that assessment. In a meeting on December  22, 1925, committee member David L. Edsall of Harvard objected that “we would be presenting a half-baked report” unless the committee studied “the effects this is going to have on others.”  Reed Hunt of Harvard  noted that the “big question” was whether the committee should absolutely prohibit tetraethyl lead or not. “If we say we shouldn’t absolutely prohibit it, then we should say that money should be appropriated to study any further hazard.” C.E.A. Winslow of Yale insisted on and got the following statement inserted into the report:  “A more extensive study was not possible in view of the limited time allowed to the committee.”

In the end, the report warned that the uncertain danger and the incomplete data did not lead it to a definite conclusion:

Owing to the incompleteness of the data, it is not possible to say definitely whether exposure to lead dust increases in garages when tetraethyl lead is used. It is very desirable that these investigations be continued… 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 exposure may show that even such slight storage of lead as was observed in these studies may lead eventually in susceptible individuals to recognizable lead poisoning or chronic degenerative disease of obvious character… The committee feels this investigation must not be allowed to lapse.

Winslow also recommended that the “search for and investigation of antiknock compounds be continued intensively with the object of securing effective agents containing less poisonous metals (such as iron, nickle, tin, etc.) or no metals at all.”  The recommendation was based on correspondence with Ford Motor Co. that Winslow forwarded to  L.R. Thompson of the Public Health Service, asking that a file be established on alternatives. The letter to Winslow reads as follows:

Meanwhile, Ethyl officials announced that they had been vindicated, and after  agreeing to warning labels on leaded gasoline, began to market it again in the spring of 1926. These warning labels would become familiar to three generations of motorists and would appear in virtually every gasoline service station in America: “Contains lead (tetraethyl) and is to be used as a motor fuel only. Not for cleaning or any other use.”

Other sources of competition with TEL

Ethyl alcohol was not the only competitor for the anti-knock additive market.  Public claims about a lack of alternatives notwithstanding, Frank Howard of Standard privately wrote Kettering of Ethyl / GM that “there are three major types of Ethyl Gasoline substitutes now on the market, as follows: 1. vapor phase cracked products 2. Benzol blends. 3. Gasoline from napthenic-base crudes.”  The competition from benzene blends in gasoline was so strong in the Baltimore
area, Howard said, that they “were not able to get out of the [benzene  blended gasoline] market entirely even when we had Ethyl gasoline, since some of the trade demanded this blend.” He did promise, however, not to aggressively market benzene blends. (Howard to Kettering, Sept. 25, 1925, GMI Archives).

Kettering’s interest in  potential alternatives had not waned in 1925, as shown in his announcement about “Synthol” fuel blend. (NY Times , Aug. 7, 1925). The  substance was described as TEL and benzene made from coal, shale or oil. At the time, Kettering may have been reacting to his dismissal from his position as president of Ethyl Corp. in April, 1925 and possibly as well to news that the Ethyl Corp. would set up a separate research division. In any event, by Oct. 1, Kettering had changed his tune, saying that there was no economical substitute for gasoline on the horizon.  (NY Times , Oct. 1, 1925).

Another source of potential competition  came from Germany.  In October 1924, Kettering visited the German chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben and one of its chief scientists Karl Bosch.  During the visit, Bosch gave him a sample of another anti-knock additive, probably nickel or iron carbonyl, to take back to America. Eventually, du Pont would buy patent rights from Farben, but iron carbonyl was never marketed in the US.

Yet another “substitute” for tetraethyl lead known to Kettering and the automotive industry was the I.G. Farben  / BASF Fischer-Tropsche and Bergius processes for making  synthetic fuels from coal.  This was such serious competition that a few years later Standard entered into a “full marriage” agreement with Farben in which Standard agreed to stay out of the world chemical business and Farben agreed to stay out of the world fuel business no matter how World War II progressed (Borkin, 1978, p. 79).

The wide variety of alternatives and substitutes known in the 1920s and 30s were utterly forgotten by the 1960s.  Histories of the oil industry (esp. Williamson & Daum, 1959, but also Giddens 1983 and Yergin, 1992) omitted any mention of alternatives. In 1974, when Thomas Reed of MIT began his path breaking investigating alcohol fuel as an alternative to gasoline in the wake of the Arab oil embargo, he was unaware of any other similar work before him. It was as if, having found in TEL the one solution to the engine knock problem, no other solution – and no other history – was necessary.

Ethyl alcohol versus Ethyl leaded gasoline:
competition and anti-trust in the 1930s

Direct comparison between leaded gasoline and alcohol blends proved so controversial  in the 1920s and 1930s that government studies were kept quiet or not published.  As already noted, a Commerce Department report dated May 15, 1925 detailed dozens of instances of ethyl alcohol as an anti-knock fuel worldwide. The report was printed only five days before the Surgeon General’s hearing on Ethyl leaded gasoline. Yet it was never mentioned in the news media of the time, nor was it mentioned in extensive bibliographies on alcohol fuel by Iowa State University researchers compiled in the 1930s. Another instance of a “buried” government report was that of USDA and Navy engine tests, conducted at the engineering experiment station in Annapolis. Researchers found that Ethyl leaded gasoline and 20 percent ethyl alcohol blends in gasoline were almost exactly equivalent in terms of brake horsepower and useful compression ratios. The 1933 report was never published.

When renewed enthusiasm for ethyl alcohol blends emerged in the Midwest during the Depression, the oil industry  fought to portray the idea as a crackpot scheme to burn corn and to turn gas stations into illegal alcohol beverage “speakeasies.” One service station owner who blended “corn alcohol” and gasoline in Lincoln, Nebraska was undercut in his market and nearly forced into bankruptcy. His case was one of the complaints that brought on the anti-trust case against Ethyl Corp. in 1937.

It is interesting that, in the  preliminary investigation, the Justice Department asserted that the catalytic cracking process was “the only available competing method of increasing the anti-knock rating of gasoline…” [v]  But in a stipulation, Ethyl rebutted with this statement:

At this point, Ethyl leaded gasoline was used in 70 percent or more of American gasoline (90 percent according to Ethyl’s advertising)  and in all but one major brand  — Sunoco. Despite the market success, only 10,000 of the 12,000 wholesale fuel dealers in the US  received licenses to carry Ethyl products. Dealers who cut prices or who used alcohol or benzene in other fuels were not allowed to wholesale Ethyl’s lead additive. “It seems clear that the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation has exercised its dominant control over the use of Ethyl fluid substantially to restrain competition by regulating the ability of jobbers to buy and sell gasoline treated with ethyl fluid and by requiring jobbers and dealers to
maintain certain prices and marketing policies…” a 1937 Department  of Justice memo said.[vii]   Ethyl lost the suit at the Federal District Court level in 1938 and at the Supreme Court in 1940. The company was ordered to make the product available to any  customer who met minimum technical criteria.[viii]

Even so, by the  mid-1930s, Ethyl leaded gasoline succeeded beyond all expectations. Public health crusaders who found this troubling still spoke out in political forums, but competitors were not allowed to criticize leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. In a restraining order forbidding such criticism, the Federal Trade Commission told competitors to stop criticizing Ethyl gasoline since it  “is entirely safe to the health of [motorists] and to the public in general when used as a motor fuel, and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public.” (US FTC 1936).

U.S. ethyl alcohol fuels 1920s and 30s

Ethyl alcohol fuel blended with gasoline was adopted in isolated instances  during the 1920s and early 1930s.  Among the little-known blends were “Alcogas” of New England; “Vegaline,”  from Spokane, Washington;  and an unlabelled alcohol blend test marketed by Standard Oil in Baltimore.  Standard said “difficulties …  of a marketing and car operating nature” involving phase separation of gasoline and alcohol in the presence of water

By the 1930s, with the country caught in the depths of the Great Depression, new ideas were welcome. Corn prices had dropped from 45 cents per bushel to 10 cents, it was only natural that people in Midwestern business and science would begin thinking about new uses for farm products. Many proposals from this line of thinking have been successful.  Ethyl alcohol fuel turned out to be the most controversial. The battle between U.S. farmers and the oil industry in the 1930s over alcohol fuel has  been reviewed by others (Giebelhaus, 1980; Bernton,1981, Elfland, 1995; and Wright, 1995).

Many scientists, businessmen and farmers believed that making fuel from corn  and cornstalks would help put people back to work and ease the severe problems of the Depression. Nearly three dozen bills to subsidize alcohol fuel were taken up in eight states in the 1930s.  Most of the subsidy proposals  involved forgiveness of state sales taxes. Not surprisingly, the incentives had the most support in the central farm states  such as Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois and South Dakota.  Legislation did pass in Nebraska and South Dakota, but the tax break passed by the Iowa legislature was struck down by the state supreme court. The Nebraska legislature also petitioned the US Congress for a law making 10 percent ethyl alcohol blending mandatory throughout the US.  This proposal, along with a national tax incentive and other pro-alcohol bills, were defeated in Congress in the 1930s.

The thinking behind these proposals had little to do with energy substitution. Rather, it was “a form of farm relief and not energy relief,” said Ralph Hixon, who along with Leo Christensen and others in  Iowa State University’s chemistry department, had been testing blends of alcohol and gasoline. “We found that it was one of the very best fuels, it gave a performance greater than Ethyl [leaded gasoline],” Hixon said. The Ames chemists worked with local gasoline retailers to put a 10 percent ethyl alcohol blend with gasoline on sale in Ames service stations in 1932.  The alcohol-gasoline pump at the Square Deal stations operated until the late 1930s,  and the blend sold for 17 cents. It was “in competition with Ethyl,” which also sold for 17 cents at the same  stations.[ix] Some 200,000 gallons of Agricultural Blended Motor Fuel were eventually sold  in an Iowa campaign in the early 1930s.[x]

Similar efforts took place in many regions of the Midwest.  In Lincoln, Nebraska, the Earle Coryell gasoline company marketed several hundred thousand gallons of “Corn Alcohol  Gasoline Blend.” In Peoria, Illinois, the Illinois Agricultural Association teamed up with Keystone Steel & Wire Co. and Hiram Walker distillery to produce half a million gallons of “HiBall” and “Alcolene” blended fuels. In Yankton, South Dakota, Gurney Oil Co. marketed 200,000 gallons of blended fuel.

After legislative setbacks in 1933, the movement for alcohol fuels then came to be seen as part of a broader campaign for industrial uses for farm crops to help fight the Depression. It was called “farm chemurgy,” and it was, in part, a populist Republican alternative to Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s agricultural policies.  Henry Ford backed the idea by sponsoring a  conference at Dearborn, Mich. in 1935.  The conference created the National Farm Chemurgic Council, and annual conferences followed.[xi]

Another key supporter of the farm chemurgy concept was the Chemical  Foundation, quasi-federal agency which administered  German patent royalties as part of reparations for World War I.  The Chemical Foundation, with Ford’s blessing, decided in 1936 to finance an experimental alcohol manufacturing and blending program in the Midwest. The chemurgy movement, with alcohol fuel as a controversial centerpiece, had far outstripping original legislative proposals and had grown into an unprecedented mixture of agronomy, chemistry and Prairie Populism. Many felt that the time had come to compete directly with the oil industry. By 1937 motorists from Indiana to South Dakota were urged to use Agrol, an ethyl alcohol blend with gasoline.  Two types  were available — Agrol 5, with five to seven percent  alcohol, and Agrol  10, with twelve and a half to 17 and a half percent alcohol.  “Try a tankfull — you’ll be thankful,” the Agrol brochures said. The blend was sold to high initial enthusiasm at 2,000 service stations. However, Agrol plant managers complained of sabotage and bitter infighting by the oil industry,[xii] and market prices were also a major influence. Although Agrol sold for the  same price as its “main competitor,” leaded gasoline, it cost wholesalers and retailers an extra penny to handle it and cut into their profit “spread,”Business Week said.  “Novelty appeal plus ballyhoo  provided sufficient increase in gallonage to offset the difference in spread. Now jobbers and dealers, having done their share, are again plugging the old house brands with four and a half cent spreads. Agrol is in the last pump — for those who want it.”

By 1939, the Atchison Agrol plant closed its doors, not in bankruptcy, but  without viable markets to continue. The experiment had failed, but it was not the end of the story. Chemists and agricultural engineers from Midwestern universities who had tried their alcohol production ideas at the Agrol plant would be mass producing enormous quantities of ethyl alcohol for synthetic “Buna-S” rubber and for aviation fuel. From a pre-war peak production of 100 million gallons of alcohol per year, well over 600 million gallons of new capacity was created. The alcohol based system which in 1942 seemed capable of  providing only one-third of the raw materials for the total synthetic rubber demand ended up supplying three quarters and making a significant impact on the war effort. In contrast, petroleum based synthetic rubber technologies had been blocked through patent agreements between Standard Oil and Germany’s
I.G. Farben at the critical moment. Without the previous experience in alcohol fuels production in the 1930s, the war effort might have been considerably delayed.

It was clear at the end of World War II that eventually US oil reserves would be depleted. According to the US Tariff Commission in 1944:

Ethyl alcohol in Europe in the 1930s

Once Ethyl leaded gasoline was back on the US market, international marketing campaigns could begin. But the Europeans were wary since alternatives had been employed as a matter of government policy for many years. In France, the combination of defense needs and farm surplus led the government to require the use of alcohol blends in most gasoline beginning in 1923. Many other European governments supported either farm-based ethanol (ethyl alcohol) or coal-derived methyl alcohol. The support included tax incentives and mandatory blending programs or both.

Ten to twenty five percent alcohol blends with gasoline were common in Scandinavian countries, where alcohol was  made from paper mill wastes; in France, Germany and throughout continental Europe, where alcohol was made from surplus grapes, potatoes and other crops; and in Australia, Brazil, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippians,  South Africa, and other tropical regions, where it was made from sugar cane and molasses.

In some countries, especially France, gasoline retailers were required to blend in large volumes of alcohol with all gasoline sold. Germany, Brazil and others also followed the “mandatory blending” model. In other countries, such as Sweden, Ireland and Britain, alcohol blends received tax advantages

With these programs in place,  Ethyl leaded gasoline had an uphill battle. Charles Schweitzer, a Melle research chemist noted that “the health properties of lead tetraethyl constitute an obstacle in its general use,” and that the French minister of hygiene said using it on crowded streets constituted a hazard.(Schweitzer, 1932)

Conflict also broke out over use of Ethyl gasoline in Britain. The Daily  Mail quoted a number of British scientists as saying that leaded gasoline posed a public health hazard in 1928. These reports were sent by Ethyl Corp. to US Surgeon General Hugh Cumming. “Your courtesy in keeping us informed of such developments is helpful and I am grateful for its continuance,” Cumming wrote Ethyl president Earl Webb.

Cumming was somewhat more than grateful. In 1931, he cabled his office from a conference in Paris: “Have Leake and Bevan send Carriere our and British Reports. Favorable outlook.” Leake and Bevan were PHS employees, while Carriere was the Swiss minister of health, according to a PHS memo attached to the cable.  The memo also said: “Of course, this refers to Ethyl Gasoline.”10 Apparently Ethyl was such a high priority that the Surgeon General could cable home from a European meeting and simply  refer to “reports” and have it be known that he referred “of course” to Ethyl. Cumming had moved from cooperation to enthusiastic boosterism, writing dozens of letters touting Ethyl leaded gasoline to public health leaders around the world and giving his endorsement to the preliminary expert committee report as assuring the safety of leaded gasoline. The fact that Cumming reported to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose Gulf Oil Co. had exclusive contracts to distribute Ethyl gasoline in the Southeastern U.S., may have had something to do with his enthusiasm.

The use of Ethyl in Europe was so strongly backed by the US government that when production facilities were scheduled for Germany, as part of the I.G. Farben – Standard Oil cartel agreement, few in the US government thought to object.

Conclusion

Ancient Greek historians approached their work with two very distinct motivations. Around 430 BC, Herodotus, the “father” of history, wrote in order
to “honor the heroes” of the Trojan Wars. Thirty years later, Thucydides  wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War. He did not write to honor heroes, but rather was interested in helping future generations learn from the past. He wrote history “not … to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”

Most histories of the Ethyl controversy have been written in the style that tried to honor the heroes of the industrial revolution – the Watts, the Morses, the Edisons, the Bells and the Fords. To put it plainly, the saga of Ethyl leaded gasoline was mistakenly pounded into the same mold.

It still is found in this form. In 1996, for instance, an article in Invention and Technology about Charles Kettering had this to say about the Ethyl conflict

“An outcry arose over the possibility that tetraethyl lead could cause lead poisoning… the hubbub died down… and health agencies assured the public that leaded gasoline posed no danger.”

It is remarkable that anyone could write this in 1996. The “possibility” of danger is a proven fact, universally endorsed by medical authorities and enforced by courts. It is remarkable that the tumultuous issues involved could be minimized as “hubbub.” And it is bizarre that health agencies could be calmly seen as reassuring the public about what is now recognized as a dire poison.

Yet even critical histories  concerning Du Pont, Ethyl and Charles F. Kettering’s development of TEL published before 1991 suffer from the serious handicap of being based on secondary memoirs or tertiary documents rather than any primary documents. The detailed documentation historians might expect concerning a discovery of the magnitude of TEL was simply not in the archives. None of Kettering and Midgley’s  primary documentation — lab notebooks, correspondence, reports, minutes of meetings,  expense files, itineraries, diaries and so on —  were available in any public archive until 1991.

In 1991, about 80 boxes of unclassified, incomplete and highly disorganized files from the office of Thomas Midgley were released by General Motors to the General Motors Institute Alumni Foundation Collection of Industrial History (now part of Kettering University) in Flint, Mich.  These files, all over 50 years old, contained letters and draft reports from the 1920s but not any of the final reports or the formal record of the progress towards the discovery of TEL. Most significantly, the Midgley documents did not contain what  Ethyl researcher T.A. Boyd called the “Lead Diary,” a collection of several thousand original documents from which he and founding Ethyl president Charles Kettering refreshed their memories as their memoirs were being written in the 1940s.  

However, the Midgley files are still the largest public source of original primary documents available to historians concerned with TEL and have been enormously valuable in showing some of the research motivations at the Dayton labs in the early 1920s.

These primary documents have influenced,  for example, the Nation magazine (Kitman, 2000) and high level US policy.  For example, in a 1999 Foreign Policy article, US Sen. Richard Lugar  and Adm. R. James Woolsey note that ethanol was ” briefly considered as a large-scale additive to gasoline to stop the knocking of the new higher compression engines.”  Ethanol lost to tetraethyl lead for economic reasons, they said. “Ethanol’s ability to be an effective fuel, however,
was never an issue.” (Lugar, 1999)

Leaded gasoline created enormous profits for a few people at the expense of the health of the many. The history of the Ethyl conflict  shows what can happen when the precautionary principle is ignored and when the absence of negative information about a chemical is mistaken as a “clean bill of health,” as Ethyl claimed it had received.

Ethyl leaded gasoline crashed  through the modest defenses of the American public health system of the 1920s not only through brute force of industry’s political influence over government but also due to the disorganized information resources available to public health advocates.

These advocates, Alice Hamilton and Yandell Henderson especially, believed that the Achilles heel of Ethyl leaded gasoline might have been a better understanding of  alternatives.  Their “best hope” was that a non-poisonous alternative be found. This vague statement shows their inability to directly argue the point, but their insistence on the point shows its importance.

It is ironic, to say the least, that the information resources about the public health objections to leaded gasoline and the alternatives to TEL were forgotten in the 1970s and 80s, or even that those of the 1970s could be forgotten in 1996.  It would be hard to find a more apt illustration of Santayana’s aphorism that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In many modern public health controversies, such as those involving MTBE, severe reforming (air toxics), dioxins, asbestos,  silicosis, pesticides, nuclear power and others, alternative technologies often exist and are well known to the industries in question.  They are frequently within the same cost range, sometimes even cheaper, but for some reason are not as attractive as trading off the costs for the health of workers and the public. The  alternatives are disparaged as absurd or unworthy or crackpot ideas.

All too often, environmental battles  are fought over regulatory schemes for existing products rather than the broader  questions of the roads not taken in developing products for the uses and markets those industries serve.  Examination of these roads not taken is one of the areas where environmental history can serve not only to better our understanding of the past, but also to show how we can be more cautious about our future.