Have you ever read about the results 20 years later after lead was removed from our gasoline. Its been a while and I don't have a readily available link but what I remember is the percent of extreme violence in crime has gone down.

Yes your post is a perfect example of why lead in anything is not good.

They devoted an entire issue to a lengthy article about why lead was introduced into gasoline in the first place. This may come as a shock, but it was because a large corporation had a big stockpile of lead (if memory serves, it was General Motors). Adding lead to gasoline was peddled as a way of preventing engine "knock" and preserving engine life.

After studies conclusively showed that environmental lead had a horrible effect on children and their developing brains, gasoline companies went to incredible lengths to dispute the findings, claim that lead was a naturally-occurring part of the environment (mostly by its introduction into the environment through car exhaust), the price of gasoline would have to skyrocket, and everyone's cars would break down faster. Big Tobacco got a real education about the value of disputing scientific studies from the fight over getting lead out of our gasoline, with the same deleterious effects on the public health.

I can remember people getting all up in arms when their cars exhaust pipe didn't turn white anymore once they removed the lead from gasoline. Stupid people do and say stupid shit.
GM is why we don't have trolleys in our cities anymore too. They bought the companies and let the trolleys go into disrepair and then riders abandoned them for that reason and slowly one by one they went out of business. GM wanted to sell cars and the trolleys was in direct competition with their plan. GM is not a good corporation on so many levels.

Tetraethyl lead actually does actually make low-grade gasoline stable enough to be used in a car engine.

What's going on is the gasoline heats up a lot when the cylinder compresses it. Octane is stable under this compression. Heptane is not - it will catch fire before the cylinder finishes compressing, causing "knock". Octane and heptane are the main components of gasoline, so you're going to have a lot of heptane unless you do a lot of refining. And the gasoline exploding before the engine is in the right position is a rather bad thing for the engine.

Tetraethyl lead stabilizes the heptane so it does not catch fire when compressed. That was a very large part of why gas was so cheap - you could use 28-octane gasoline in a car if it was leaded, but need 80 or higher octane gasoline in a car if it is unleaded. Getting the octane rating up to 80 costs a lot more.

So yes, the price of gasoline did skyrocket because of removing lead, but we're talking about going from an extremely low price to a low price. The claim about break down faster comes from trying to use low-grade gasoline by just removing the lead while not increasing the octane rating. It's true, but a pretty big stretch to assume anyone would buy or sell 28-octane unleaded gasoline.

....about a 1/2 inch under the grass in the suburbs and playgrounds.
It never just goes away.

...and he was awarded in 1941 the highest award of the American Chemical Society, the Priestley Medal,followed by the Willard Gibbs Award in 1942, two honorary degrees and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences, and was elected president and chairman of the American Chemical Society for his "contributions".


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.#Legacy