Three Inventions and a Funeral

Today is Thomas Midgley Day — definitely not the Saviour of the Human Race

Today is Tom Midgley Day, celebrating the 133rd anniversary of the birth of Thomas Midgley Jnr, the American engineer and chemist, on 18th May 1889.

Who Tom Midgley you ask? He is the man who, despite always having the best intentions, unwittingly unleashed two major health hazards on an unsuspecting world. J. R. McNeill, the environmental historian, said that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history,” while Bill Bryson has…