This is so, and crossed my mind at some point during the process, but I seem to have... er... forgotten to include it in the final text. :/

>What bothers me about Midgley as an environmental scientist, is that
>it doesn't ever seem to have thought about the end fate of the
>products he made. And is that simply a product of being a man of his
>time? Modernist culture sure talked a lot about changing the whole
>world for the better -- was it without ever really considering that
>the world wasn't so big that it couldn't be changed by accident?

I believe that was in fact the case, for the most part. It's hard to picture it from our own modern perspective, but in Midgley's day, I think most chemists assumed the world was too big for the efforts of humans to have any really significant effect on it, at least on a global scale. A factory or mine might make the immediate area around it unpleasant, but surely such effects were only local.

I mean, the story of CFCs' downfall is a prime example of the kind of thing that changed that view, first by showing that they persisted in enormous quantities in the atmosphere when most people assumed they would just disperse and decay, and then by showing that when they did finally decay Really Bad Things happened. And that was 30 years after Midgley's death. In his day no one would have believed either thing could even happen.

For that matter, even the people who thought TEL was dangerous in the '30s assumed it would be a problem at the point of manufacture and maybe the point of use, not contaminate the entire atmosphere for generations.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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