A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Buoyed by the success of leaded petrol, Midgley now turned to another technological problem of the age. Refrigerators in the 1920s were often appallingly risky because they used insidious and dangerous gases that sometimes seeped out. One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed more than a hundred people. Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, non-flammable, non-corrosive and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air-conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this was not a good thing.