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Examples of Inventors - Clair Patterson and Thomas Midgley Jr.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong - John Maynard Keynes -

Index

Clair Patterson's background

What makes Clair Patterson such a great example?

Thomas Midgley Jr.'s background

What makes Thomas Midgley Jr. such a great example?

Clair Patterson's background

Clair Patterson was a scientist who discovered lead pollution and campaigned against the use of lead in petrol, and calculated the age of the solar system from the ratios of certain isotopes of uranium and lead present in the Canyon Diablo meteorite, a rock that was formed near the beginning of our solar system, and which would only have decayed radioactively since then, in certain predictable ways, unlike more recently formed rocks on Earth.

Clair Patterson makes a classic example of the beneficial scientist who, like Alexander Fleming, discovers or invents something of great value to humanity and the World.

What makes Clair Patterson such a great example?

Birth of Clair Patterson

Clair Patterson is a good example of a scientist whose most important discovery was almost a by-product of another: while dating the Canyon Diablo meteorite to fix the age of the Earth, he found his samples were being contaminated by airborne lead from petrol and paint, which led him to spend the rest of his career fighting the lead industry to have the metal removed from fuel, food and consumer products.

It makes a useful chart to test the astrology of a scientist who did two important things at once: settling a major scientific question [the age of the Earth, in 1956] and then, almost by accident, uncovering a public-health scandal that took him decades of campaigning to correct.

The chart shown is Clair Patterson's birthchart, together with transits for his 1956 dating of the age of the Earth, guessed at midday, around the outside. Aspect lines [traditional] are between the transits and his birthchart.

Thomas Midgley Jr.'s background

Thomas Midgley Jr. was a serial inventor of bad things, specifically lead in petrol and CFCs as propellants. He notably promoted such things, and eventually came to a sticky end being killed by his own invention an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys devised to lift himself out of bed. It may have been ruled as suicide, but either way it was still his contraption that killed him.

Thomas Midgley Jr. makes a classic example of the unscrupulous evil scientist who invents awful things that do immense harm to humanity and the world. It has been said of him that he did more harm to the Earth than any other single organism.

What makes Thomas Midgley Jr. such a great example?

Birth of Thomas Midgley Jr.

Thomas Midgley Jr. is a good example of the well-meaning inventor whose ingenuity did lasting, unintended harm: he was specifically asked to find a safer, more efficient anti-knock additive for petrol and a non-toxic refrigerant gas, and delivered both, not realising until much later that tetraethyl lead and CFCs would go on to poison a generation and damage the ozone layer.

It makes a useful chart to test the astrology of an inventor whose triumphs, celebrated in his own lifetime, turned out in hindsight to be disasters, and whose own death in 1944, strangled by a bed-hoist of his own design, has the same ironic, self-inflicted quality as his inventions.

The chart shown is Thomas Midgley Jr.'s birthchart, together with transits for his death in 1944, guessed at midday, around the outside. Aspect lines [traditional] are between the transits and his birthchart.