Background

Thomas Midgley Jr. was born on May 18, 1889, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, United States to the family of Thomas Midgley, a successful inventor, and Hattie Louise Emerson. His mother was the daughter of James Ezekiel Emerson, who invented the inserted-tooth circular and band saw. His father, born in London, England, and reared in Worcester, Massachusetts, was also an inventor; after serving as superintendent of a steel company in Beaver Falls, he began his own wire-goods business and then, in 1896, moved to Columbus, Ohio, where he worked as factory manager of a bicycle company and afterward manufactured wire wheels and rubber tires of his own devising.

Education

Young Midgley attended the Columbus public schools and Betts Academy at Stamford, Connecticut, where he prepared for college. Through his chemistry course there he first became interested in the periodic table of the elements and the orderly natural relations it represented. In 1911, he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Career

After graduating from Cornell University, Midgley worked for a year as a draftsman and designer in "Inventions Department No. 3" of the National Cash Register Company at Dayton, Ohio. He then left to join his father in research to improve the composition and design of automobile tires, becoming a chief engineer and superintendent of the Midgley Tires Company. The business did not prosper, and in 1916 Midgley obtained a job with the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (Delco), recently established by the inventor Charles F. Kettering (1876 - 1958). The two men formed a close scientific and personal association that lasted until Midgley's death. Midgley's first major assignment for Kettering was to investigate the cause of "knock" in gasoline and kerosene engines, a noisy and sometimes destructive phenomenon that became worse as higher compressions were used in the cylinders and thus seriously limited the development of a more efficient engine. Working initially on the Delco-Light engine, a kerosene-powered generating unit designed to supply electric lighting to farmhouses, Midgley improvised a way of photographing the events that took place in the combustion chamber. Later he installed a quartz window in the cylinder so that he could actually see combustion taking place, and devised a high-speed indicator that enabled him to study the shape of the pressure waves produced. This work showed that the knock was not due to preignition, as had been supposed, but to a rapid increase of pressure after ignition had taken place. By accident, he also discovered that the addition of iodine to kerosene (which he had used to dye the fluid red, thinking this might aid vaporization) greatly reduced the amount of knock. With America's entry into World War I, this problem had to be put aside as Midgley concentrated on two projects: devising systems to control the direction of aerial torpedoes and producing gasoline that would increase the efficiency of the Liberty airplane engine.

Fuel recovered from captured German planes proved to be a mixture of cyclohexane and benzene. Despite the adverse predictions of chemical experts, Midgley, working with scientists of the Bureau of Mines, found a way to produce cyclohexane by hydrogenation of benzene and developed a workable high-octane synthetic fuel, but the war ended before it or the robot bomb had gone into production. Returning to the antiknock problem after the war, Midgley and his associates, working in Kettering's laboratory (which became in 1920 the General Motors Research Corporation), are said to have tried more than 33, 000 different chemical compounds. The few that showed promise were either too expensive or had other disadvantages: tellurium and selenium compounds, for example, even in minute amounts imbued the workers with extremely repulsive garlic-like odors. The experience gained during his war research had now convinced Midgley that knock was caused by the molecular structure of the fuel used. He, therefore, decided to abandon these hit-and-miss attempts and turned to the periodic arrangement of the elements. After a long study, he chose tetraethyl lead as the compound most likely to have the desired properties. Actual tests verified his prediction, and after two more years of research, he found that the undesirable deposit of lead on the valves could be avoided by incorporating ethylene dibromide in the mixture. The first "Ethyl" gasoline went on sale in 1923. There remained the problem of finding an adequate source of bromine to meet the large expected demand for the new gasoline.

At the request of the Frigidaire division of General Motors, Midgley sought to find a new chemical compound with suitable properties. Many of the compounds he tried were unstable; the inert gases would not do because their boiling points were too low. Again pondering the periodic arrangement of the elements, he concluded that an acceptable refrigerant would be found among the organic chlorofluorides, probably the substituted methanes at first glance a strange choice, in view of the flammability of methane and the toxicity of chlorine and fluorine. He prepared dichlorodifluoromethane (1930) and found that it worked. Once on the right track, it is said, he completed the research in only three days. The product, called "Freon, " quickly came into general use and greatly spurred the adoption of mechanical refrigeration and air conditioning. Midgley also did significant research on synthetic rubbers at a time when natural rubber was in short supply. Though a drop in the price of natural rubber prevented any commercial use of his findings, which were published in nineteen research papers, they helped elucidate the structures of natural and synthetic rubber and the chemistry of vulcanization. Midgley was an able salesman. In 1930, before a large audience, he dramatized the nontoxic and nonflammable properties of Freon vapor by inhaling a mouthful and slowly exhaling it over a lighted candle, which it extinguished. He had excellent business sense and served as vice-president of the Ethyl Corporation, organized in 1921 to prepare and market the new antiknock compound, and of Kinetic Chemicals, Inc. (which produced Freon), and as a director of the Ethyl-Dow Company, which extracted bromine from seawater.

In the autumn of 1940, Midgley suffered an acute attack of poliomyelitis, which left him crippled. He continued for several years to direct work from his home at Worthington, near Columbus, and delivered his last speech, by telephone, to an audience in New York City only a few weeks before his death. He died at his home at the age of fifty-five, by accidentally strangling in the harness of cords and pulleys he had devised to assist him into and out of bed.

Achievements

• Midgley devised a technical procedure for extracting bromine from the ocean, which contains not more than one pound of bromine in ten tons of sea-water, and the process was perfected by the Dow Chemical Company. Midgley also played a part in developing the large-scale manufacturing process for the new gasoline additive, worked out in collaboration with the research staffs of the Du Pont Company and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. His discovery of an effective antiknock agent made possible the widespread use of the high-compression automobile and airplane engines. Midgley's other major contribution lay in the field of refrigerants. During the 1920s artificial refrigeration was coming into widespread use, but the gases used in refrigerating systems ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and methyl chloride were either toxic or flammable and hence hazardous in case of leakage or accident.
  
  Midgley held more than a hundred patents. A skilled if largely self-taught practical chemist, he was elected president of the American Chemical Society in 1944 the year of his death having been chairman of its board of directors for a decade. He received all the most important medals awarded for achievement in chemistry, including the Nichols (1923), Perkin (1937), Priestley (1941), and the Willard Gibbs (1942). He received honorary doctorates from the College of Wooster (1936) and Ohio State University (1944) and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1942).
  
  

Works

More photos

• publication

  • The Journal Of Industrial And Engineering Chemistry: Volume 14, Part 1 1922
  • The Journal Of Industrial And Engineering Chemistry: Volume 14, Part 2 1922

Membership

Thomas Midgley Jr. was a member of the American Chemical Society, National Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Society of Automotive Engineers, and American Society for Testing of Materials.

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  President

  American Chemical Society , United States

  1944

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

  1942 - 1944

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  American Association for the Advancement of Science , United States

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  American Institute of Chemical Engineers , United States

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  Society of Automotive Engineers , United States

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  American Society for Testing of Materials , United States

Personality

Midgley was a jovial, outgoing person, "found of all sorts of people," he had many friends. He had excellent business sense.

Connections

On August 3, 1911, Midgley married Carrie May Reynolds of Worthington, Ohio; their children were Thomas Midgley III and Jane McNaughten Midgley.

Father:

Thomas Midgley

Mother:

Hattie Louise Emerson

Wife:

Carrie Marie Reynolds Midgley

Daughter:

Jane McNaughten Midgley

Son:

Thomas Midgley III

colleague:

Charles Kettering

References

• Professional Amateur The Biography Of Charles Franklin Kettering
  1957
• From the Periodic Table to Production: The Life of Thomas Midgley, Jr., the Inventor of Ethyl Gasoline and Freon Refrigerants
  2001