One man is responsible for both leaded gasoline and the hole in the ozone layer. His name was Thomas Midgley Jr. He was an engineer from Ohio, and he may have done more damage to the atmosphere than any other single person who ever lived.

In 1921, Midgley was working at General Motors when he discovered that adding a small amount of tetraethyl lead to gasoline eliminated engine knock. It worked perfectly. It also poisoned everyone who touched it. Workers at the manufacturing plant in New Jersey began hallucinating. They saw insects crawling on their skin. Five of them died. Thirty-five more were hospitalized.

Midgley's response was a press conference. On October 30th, 1924, he poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held a bottle of it under his nose, and breathed the fumes for sixty seconds. "I could do this every day," he told the reporters, "without any problems."

He was treated for lead poisoning shortly afterward.

Leaded gasoline went into mass production. It would not be banned in the United States until 1996. By then it had released millions of tons of lead into the atmosphere. Studies later estimated it had measurably lowered the average IQ of an entire generation.

Then Midgley did it again.

In 1930, General Motors asked him to find a safe, non-toxic refrigerant to replace the ammonia and sulphur dioxide used in early refrigerators, which kept poisoning people when they leaked. Within three days, Midgley synthesized dichlorodifluoromethane. He called it Freon.

At the meeting of the American Chemical Society, he demonstrated its safety by inhaling a lungful of the gas and gently blowing out a candle. The audience applauded. Freon was non-toxic and non-flammable. It was perfect.

Freon was a chlorofluorocarbon. CFCs, once released into the upper atmosphere, destroy ozone. The hole in the ozone layer, discovered in 1985, was Midgley's second gift to the planet.

In 1940, Midgley contracted polio. It left him unable to get out of bed without help. Being an engineer, he designed an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself.

On November 2nd, 1944, he was found dead in his bedroom. He had become tangled in the ropes of his own invention and strangled.

The man whose inventions poisoned the air and tore a hole in the sky was killed by the last thing he ever built.

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