Veritasium
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2022–2026
24:57 · 44M views · Apr 22, 2022
Veritasium tells the story of Thomas Midgley Jr., who introduced leaded gasoline and CFCs, and covers the science behind lead exposure and ozone damage. It also touches on isotope geochemistry used to uncover the history.
HN commenters recommend it whenever leaded fuel, toxic chemicals or corporate profit motives come up, praising its storytelling and accessible science.
12 comments from Hacker News
If you want a fascinating story telling video with a lot of sciency stuff for the relative layman, here's an excellent one by Veritasium on how it happened. "The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History" this video
Have you seen this Veritasium video about the man who came up with adding tetraethyllead to gasonline and it's negative impact on humanity? this video Given how dangerous lead is in even the tiniest quantities it is really surprising that there has not been more pressure to change that.
Veritasium did a great video on Midgley: this video And therein they give the reason why ethanol was passed over: a lot of it is required to be effective (~10% of the fuel mixture), seriously dampening the profit margin of fuel sales! It works, but tetraethyl lead is so much cheaper
I don't like how "toxic forever chemicals in the bloodstream" is a normal thing Veritasium has a great YouTube video about this: "The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History"[0] [0] - this video
(2021) Veritasium covers the story behind lead in gasoline in this video , it's a really interesting albeit sad video. If I recall correctly, he mentions this study in the video.