Good morning.
Sunday brings rain or snow to Whitewater, intermittently throughout the day, with a high of thirty-six.
On December 9, 1921, an engineer at GM made a momentous discovery about gasoline:
…a young engineer at General Motors named Thomas Midgeley Jr. discovers that when he adds a compound called tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline, he eliminates the unpleasant noises (known as “knock” or “pinging”) that internal-combustion engines make when they run. Midgeley could scarcely have imagined the consequences of his discovery: For more than five decades, oil companies would saturate the gasoline they sold with lead–a deadly poison.
In 1911, a scientist named Charles Kettering, Midgeley’s boss at GM, invented an electric ignition system for internal-combustion cars that made their old-fashioned hand-cranked starters obsolete. Now, driving a gas-fueled auto was no trouble at all. Unfortunately, as more and more people bought GM cars, more and more people noticed a problem: When they heated up, their engines made an alarming racket, banging and clattering as though their metal parts were loose under the hood.
The problem, Kettering and Midgeley eventually figured out, was that ordinary gasoline was much too explosive for spark-ignited car engines: that is, what we now call its octane (a measure of its resistance to detonation) was too low. To raise the fuel’s octane level and make it less prone to detonation and knocking, Midgeley wrote later, he mixed it with almost anything he could think of, from “melted butter and camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride…[but] most of these had no more effect than spitting in the Great Lakes.”
He found a couple of additives that did work, however, and lead was just one of them. Iodine worked, but producing it was much too complicated. Ethyl alcohol also worked, and it was cheap–however, anyone with an ordinary still could make it, which meant that GM could not patent it or profit from it. Thus, from a corporate point of view, lead was the best anti-knock additive there was.
In February 1923, a Dayton filling station sold the first tankful of leaded gasoline. A few GM engineers witnessed this big moment, but Midgeley did not, because he was in bed with severe lead poisoning. He recovered; however, in April 1924, lead poisoning killed two of his unluckier colleagues, and in October, five workers at a Standard Oil lead plant died too, after what one reporter called “wrenching fits of violent insanity.” (Almost 40 of the plant’s workers suffered severe neurological symptoms like hallucinations and seizures.)
On 12.9.1844, our state saw its first daily:
1844 – Milwaukee’s First Daily Newspaper Published
On this date Milwaukee’s first daily newspaper, The Daily Sentinel, was published. David M. Keeler served and manager and C.L. MacArthur was the editor. [Source: History of Milwaukee, Vol. II, p.49]
Google-a-Day asks why “[o]ne place has more hail than any other location in the world. What did a 1978 study suggest is likely the cause of this phenomenon? ”