A Brief History Of Gasoline: Better Things For Deader Living ... Through Chemistry

[mahatmakanejeeves]

This is a long article. The author takes a long time getting to the point. I never did find it.

TECH

A Brief History Of Gasoline: Better Things For Deader Living … Through Chemistry

How does a company grow so callous, so numb to and invested in death that it puts lead in gasoline?

By Jamie Kitman | Today 12:15PM

As we will see throughout this series, the business of adding known deadly toxins like lead to an already dangerous product like gasoline would take a special kind of amorality and disregard for human life and the environment. America’s new corporate form proved uniquely suited to such reckless commercial endeavors. Like Standard Oil, with its long years of ruthless acquisition and gross pollution, an even longer history of antipathy to human life prepared DuPont, which would come to control General Motors for more than half a century, for its next assault on the world’s living things – the manufacture and marketing of leaded gasoline. Today, we look at the chemical giant’s past and the essential prologue for great misdeed it provided.

People had been blowing things up happily enough for more than a thousand years before greatly expanded use of gunpowder during the 18th and 19th centuries arrived to catapult the explosive arts forward in dramatic fashion. Central to their development and expansion were the efforts of Eleuthére Irénée du Pont de Nemours, a French émigré to America. The organization he founded was to the low explosive which came to be known as black powder (a blend of charcoal, sulfur and nitrate, or saltpeter) and its many incendiary successor — up to and including atomic bombs — what John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was to petroleum.

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DUPONT AND GM

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“Our interest in the General Motors Company will undoubtedly secure for us the entire Fabrikoid [leather substitute], Pyralin, paint, and varnish business of these companies, which is a substantial factor....t is the writer’s belief that ultimately the Dupont Company will absolutely control and dominate the whole General Motors situation.” But Raskob’s 1917 gushing missive, however accurate, would come back to haunt DuPont and General Motors when antitrust actions against them were brought in the 1950s.

Jamie Kitman is a NY-based lawyer, rock band manager, picture car wrangler, and automotive journalist. Winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary and the IRE Medal for investigative magazine journalism, he has a penchant for Lancias and old British cars, and is a World Car of the Year juror. Follow him on Twitter @jamiekitman and on Instagram @commodorehornblow.

[NNadir]

1. There is no point. It's a journalist, an automotive journalist to boot, trying to talk about...

...science, a subject about which she or he clearly knows nothing at all.

Why people publish stuff like this is beyond me. It's not good science; it's not good history; and it's not even close to being good writing.