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Thomas Midgley Jr. (May 18, 1889 – November 2, 1944) was an American mechanical and chemical engineer.He played a major role in developing leaded gasoline (tetraethyl lead) and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), better known in the United States by the brand name Freon; both products were later banned from common use due to their harmful impact on human health and the environment.
American chemical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., who was working for the U.S. corporation General Motors, was the first to discover its effectiveness as an antiknock agent in 1921, after spending several years attempting to find an additive that was both highly effective and inexpensive.
In his capacity as an engineer with General Motors, Thomas Midgley Jr. experimented with a myriad of different compounds, which he added to petrol in an attempt to prevent engines from knocking. Eventually, he discovered one compound that worked brilliantly: tetraethyllead .
Midgley would go on to leave his mark in history with another destructive invention, also a solution to a problem: the need to replace the noxious and flammable gases used in refrigeration and air ...
Research by the major refiners led to the development of processes involving isomerization of cheap and abundant butane to isobutane, and alkylation to join isobutane and butylenes to form isomers of octane such as "isooctane", which became an important component in aviation fuel blending. To further complicate the situation, as engine ...
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Toluene at 100% can be used as a fuel for both two-stroke and four-stroke engines; however, due to the density of the fuel and other factors, the fuel does not vaporize easily unless preheated to 70 degrees Celsius (Honda accomplished this in their Formula 1 cars by routing the fuel lines through the exhaust system to heat the fuel).
Founded in 1923, [4] [5] Ethyl Corp was formed by General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey ().General Motors had the "use patent" for tetraethyllead (TEL) as an antiknock, based on the work of Thomas Midgley Jr., Charles Kettering, and later Charles Allen Thomas, [6]: 340–41 and Esso had the patent for the manufacture of TEL.