Tom Midgley could never leave off trying to fix the world. His discoveries ranged from a way of getting salt into popcorn before it was popped, to a method of treating the contents of a swimming pool so that people could swim farther underwater. For years he was interested in the possibility of creating a "long-distance golf ball" that would travel a mile or more off the tee, and only gave up the notion when friends pointed out that such an innovation would require fairways ten miles long.

While he was working for Ohio industrialist Edward Deeds during World War I on methods to improve the performance of aviation fuel, a piece of equipment exploded, splattering the cornea of Midgley's right eye with metal particles. A physician was able to pluck out the larger ones, but almost 50 specks proved inextricable, seriously impairing his vision.

Determined to regain his eyesight, Midgley made a risky presumption based on his knowledge of metallurgy. Mercury was known for its ability to amalgamate readily with other metals. So he used an eye dropper to administer a bath of purified mercury to his right eye, and over a period of two weeks, thoroughly cleansed the eye of all the remaining particles.

Midgley was fond of offering colorful descriptions of how technology would change daily life a hundred years in the future: there would be "mood pills" and "wakefulness pills" so people could modulate their need for rest, artificial-growth hormones to create "cows so big they will have to be milked from stepladders," and modes of telecommunication so efficient the inevitable result would be "the end of visiting."

One of Midgley's pet projects, until he became seriously ill with polio myelitis in the early 1940s, was keeping the grounds of his house lush, green and impeccably manicured. He turned his three-and-a-half-acre lawn into a showplace for a fine grass known as Washington Bent.

The grass was extremely delicate, however, and its proud owner went to great lengths to protect it. When the grass proved vulnerable to the drying effect of the wind, Midgley installed a wind monitor on the roof of his house and connected it to a small bell in his bedroom. Should a wind come up at night, the bell would alert him. He had linked control of the lawn sprinklers to the dial on his bedroom telephone, and by dialing a certain sequence of numbers, Midgley could start up water sprinklers (or insecticide, if the bugs got bad).

Once the polio myelitis began to debilitate him, he was annoyed that he had to call for his nurse each time he wanted to move from his bed into his wheelchair. So he devised a complex lifting mechanism involving a leather harness suspended over the bed by a rope and pulley, to allow him to accomplish the maneuver unassisted. Sometime before dawn on November 2, 1944, Midgley apparently put the apparatus to an entirely different purpose. Entering his room later that morning with breakfast and the newspaper, Carrie Midgley found her husband hanging lifeless in the lifting device, the ropes tangled around his neck. The newspapers reported Midgley's demise as a freakish accident, but friends and family who had witnessed his recent suffering knew better.