Not enough people are aware that the compound added to gasoline, tetraethyl lead (TEL), was understood to be potently toxic before it was used as a gasoline additive. Effective alternatives to TEL existed, but TEL had the advantage that its use could be patented. It could make some very rich companies even richer.
Short article from Smithsonian Magazine, 2016: Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented
...in February 1923, a filling station sold the first tank of leaded gasoline. [TEL developer] Midgley wasn’t there: he was in bed with severe lead poisoning, writes History.com. The next year, there was serious backlash against leaded gasoline after five workers died from TEL exposure at the Standard Oil Refinery in New Jersey, writes Deborah Blum for Wired, but still, the gasoline went into general sale later that decade.
Long, long article from The Nation, 2000, by way of archive.org: The Secret History of Lead
In March 1922, Pierre du Pont wrote to his brother Irénée du Pont, Du Pont company chairman, that TEL is “a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately.” This statement of early factual knowledge of TEL’s supreme deadliness is noteworthy, for it is knowledge that will be denied repeatedly by the principals in coming years as well as in the Ethyl Corporation’s authorized history, released almost sixty years later. Underscoring the deep and implicit coziness between GM and Du Pont at this time, Pierre informed Irénée about TEL before GM had even filed its patent application for it.
A concise history in timeline format: The Rise and Fall of Leaded Gasoline: An Absurd and True Timeline
1923: GM partners with Standard Oil (now Exxon) and DuPont to form Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. They market the product as “Ethyl,” deliberately avoiding the word “lead” despite known toxicity.
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