Appropriately, the newspapers dubbed ethyl "LOONY GAS." Coming so soon after the First World War, when poison gases had been used to such murderous effect, news of a creeping, invisible gas made for sensational headlines, greatly alarming public health officials. Midgley tried quelling the controversy by making a show of washing his hands and face in tetraethyl lead at a New York press conference. (Midgley didn't tell the reporters that he himself suffered from lead poisoning, having been exposed to high concentrations of TEL during his research.)

In the course of the leaded gas controversy, new voices of concern were heard. Industrial toxicologists like ALICE HAMILTON, America's first occupational health specialist and the first woman on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, were the predecessors to today's environmentalists --"sanitarians," they called themselves. They argued that it would be dangerous to introduce large quantities of lead into the environment via automobile exhaust.

The sanitarians were easily defeated by the forces of technological progress, however. In the 1920s, there was neither an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nor a Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The U.S. Public Health Service convened a conference in May 1925 for the purpose of hearing all sides in the leaded gasoline dispute, but America was not ready to turn its back on a great and useful invention just because it had some unfortunate side effects. Boss Ket expressed the prevailing Progressive Era attitude succinctly when he said: "The price of progress is trouble, and frankly I don't think the price is too high."