By Eddie Pipkin
Image by Carlos Lincoln from Pixabay
I was reading last week about the inventor, Thomas Midgley, Jr. His name was unfamiliar to me, but his inventions. He was responsible for two of the developments that made the Twentieth Century as we lived it possible: the CFCs that made air conditioning affordable and the leaded gasoline formulation that, likewise, made the automobile accessible and useful for all. Of course, each of those two technological advancements led to notorious planetary-wide environmental disasters. It’s hard to look into the future and see the way a seemingly sound idea might morph into an unanticipated disaster. It’s hard, but we have to have the guts and foresight to fearlessly anticipate what might go wrong if we want to be the best leaders we can be.
Thomas Midgley, Jr. was a mechanical engineer, self-taught chemist, and inventor who had a frenzied burst of creativity, particularly in the decade of the 1920s, that had impacts around the world. His idea of adulterating the gasoline of that era with lead additives made car engi