Is over 50% of the damage done to the o-zone layer due to one man?

Thomas Midgley, Jr. (May 18, 1889 – November 2, 1944), was an American mechanical engineer turned chemist. He developed both the tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). By putting lead into the petrol, the engine would run a lot quieter and more powerfully but was ultimately very damaging to the ozone layer, while CFCs having a number of applications are most commonly associated with the use in fridges and asthma inhalers, and although mostly phased out, are still used today in some heat pumps. The use of this chemical compound has been argued to be one of the largest contributors to global warming.

Thomas Midgley, Jr. died at the age of 55 without knowing what kind of effect his contributions made on the environment; probably thinking that he had made the earth a better place, with a higher standard of living. One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history."

It is widely accepted that if we do not dramatically lower our annual carbon footprint, or come up with another solution within 8 years, the earth will be uninhabitable within 50. If Thomas Midgley, Jr. or anyone else had not had these “breakthroughs”, we would have perhaps another 8 years to decide what to do and this could very well be the difference between our extinction and our survival.

Although coming from an age when environmental awareness was not so keen, it is clear that it is very difficult to foresee the repercussion of our inventions. So as designers, do we have some kind of moral duty to design for ecology? and what kind of impact will our work have on the future?


McNeill, J.R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2001) New York: Norton, xxvi, 421 pp

Bryson, B., A Short History of Nearly Everything. (2003) Broadway Books, USA