An Ocean of Air by Gabrielle Walker

Author:Gabrielle Walker [Walker, Gabrielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)

In 1947, three years after Midgley's death, his former boss Charles Kettering made a similar point during an address to the National Academy of Sciences. Kettering recalled the words of the minister at Midgley's funeral: "We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out." "It struck me then," said Kettering, "that in Midgley's case it would have seemed so appropriate to have added this: 'but we can leave a lot behind for the good of the world.'"

Midgley, poor unlucky Midgley, would certainly leave a striking legacy. In his cheerful, pleasant, untiring efforts to improve the world around him, he would be inadvertently responsible for more damage to Earth's atmosphere than any other single organism that has ever lived.

Midgley himself never lived to see how much trouble he had accidentally caused. In autumn 1940, he suffered an acute attack of polio, which left him paralyzed in both legs. As soon as the worst was over, Midgley calculated the statistical probability that a man of fifty-one would catch the disease, and concluded that it was "substantially equal to the chances of drawing a certain individual card from a stack of playing cards as high as the Empire State Building." It was, he added, "my tough luck to draw it."

Still, he continued to direct research work from his home, giving speeches by telephone and even devising a harness and pulley to lift him out of bed. But on the morning of November 2, 1944, age fifty-five, Thomas Midgley somehow became caught up in the pulley's ropes. He was strangled to death by his own invention.

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