My Favorite Inventor

I'm not sure if he is actually my favorite inventor of all time, but Thomas Midgley Jr.'s story of being an inventor is definitely the best. He was born in 1889, just to give you some time frame.
While working for GM, he essentially invented leaded gasoline. This was an amazing discovery at the time, because it stopped those old engines from pinging. Lots of debate arose around the dangers of lead poisoning. Remember when Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant to death to prove the dangers of DC power? Well, Midgley kinda did the opposite to prove how safe lead was. This guy poured tetra-ethyl lead all over his hands and breathed it in directly under his nose for a whole minute. Nothing spectacular happened, except he had to secretly take a year off to recover from health problems. Funny how you could get away with something like that back then. Nowadays, if you somehow managed to convince a few people that a toxic substance was safe, you most certainly could not hide being sick for an entire year as a result of a similar public demonstration.

So he invented leaded gasoline: the indisputably most environment-damaging invention ever. Big deal, right?

Well, he also happened to invent chlorinated fluorocarbon. That's CFC. He called it freon, and it had a whole lot of benefits. He even won some awards for it. People loved it!

Turns out, CFCs have basically been considered the second most environment-damaging invention.

But there's more! His very last invention was a rope and pulley system to help disabled people out of bed. He first made it for himself, because he had contracted polio and become quite sick. This wonderfully helpful invention - which actually had no negative effects whatsoever on the environment - proved to be his last. He got tangled up in the ropes and died. Irony? I'm not quite sure, but it does make a good story.

A few years ago, I read about this in a book called "A Brief History of Nearly Everything." It's a great book. There is, of course, a wiki on him. He died almost 63 years ago if my math is right.