Sunday, July 22, 2007

If ever there were proof...

...that what goes around comes around...then it is the life and death of Thomas Midgley.

Thomas Midgley was the bloke who came up with the idea of putting lead in petrol, or gasoline if you insist on calling it that, to stop internal combustion engines buggering up faster than usual.

As a result products of combustion from leaded petrol, sorry...gas, have had a dramatic impact on the environment. We all know lead is not good, unless you're selling it to a scrap metal merchant after stealing it from a church roof. C'mon; we've all done it.

After realising lead was buggering up his lungs, Midgley took on a variety of other projects, too lengthy to list here, most of which had detrimental effects to the environment and its inhabitants. One of his achievements he never lived to witness was the hole in the ozone layer.

Eventually, the inventor and general candidate for assistant to a James Bond super-villain contracted polio, but it was not this that would be his undoing, or at least not directly. No, what caused his death was actually an elaborate contraption he invented to help his polio-ridden body to get out of bed.

The device in question was made from ropes and pulleys and the poor bastard actually hanged himself after getting tangled up in the ropes. He was 55.

And the moral of the story?

Never make a device for lifting your arse out of bed.

  • Related links:
  1. http://www.timelinescience.org/resource/students/midgley/trouble.htm
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley

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