Lead culprits: Profiting from prison
“Almost a century ago, at a Main Street service station in Dayton Ohio, the world’s first gallons of leaded gasoline were pumped into the cars of customers who filled their tanks at the Refiners Oil Co. The company prominently announced its new Ethyl gasoline as a ‘product of the General Motors Research Corporation.’ It was February 1923. Engineer Thomas Midgley and his associates at the General Motors Research Laboratory discovered in 1921 that tetraethyl lead, a compound of metallic lead, could make internal combustion engines run more smoothly and reduce engine knock.”