Lead Balloon

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Speaker 1 Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Speaker 1 In the year 1487, in southern Japan, the military governor of the Kaga province returned home to a surprising but inevitable welcome. His people, the peasants of Kaga Province, were in open rebellion.

Speaker 1 The governor, whose name was Togashi Masachika, had spent much of the last 10 years suppressing these sorts of rebellions.

Speaker 1 The Ashikaga shogunate was weakening, and feudal Japan had been erupting in challenges to the shogun's authority, both from rival lords and from bands of peasants like the ones that Masachika faced in the Kaga province.

Speaker 1 These peasants formed themselves into grassroots militia, known as Iki, and were comprised of Buddhist warrior monks, as well as peasants who were dissatisfied with their rulers.

Speaker 1 Masachika hoped that he'd be able to extinguish this rebellion once and for all with the help of support from the shogun, but no such reinforcements arrived.

Speaker 1 The peasant rebellion lay siege to the castle of Kaga. In 1488, as his castle burned around him and with no prospect of rescue, Masachika committed seppuku.

Speaker 1 After that, he was replaced as governor by his uncle, Yasutaka. But the real power of the world knew lay in the hands of the Iki.

Speaker 1 The Kaga region became known as Kaga Iki, or less formally, the province ruled by peasants. And this would hold true for decades, while in greater Japan, the shogun struggled to remain in power.

Speaker 1 The Ashikaga shogunate was weakening, and in Kaga, the pretense of needing a military governor soon outlived its usefulness.

Speaker 1 The Kagaiki would become a primary ruling force in the region by the early 1500s, doing away with the role of governor altogether.

Speaker 1 It was the first time in Japanese history that province was ruled by someone other than a lord or a samurai. It's tempting to see this as a moment of utopia, peasant rule in a feudal system.

Speaker 1 However, as the Kaga Iki grew in power, so too did their disagreements among themselves. Without a common enemy, they began to fracture.

Speaker 1 Some of their members held differing loyalties among their neighboring provinces, and who should be the true power in Kaga province was the big question.

Speaker 1 In 1531, a civil war broke out among the Iki, ending with a man named Renjun in power.

Speaker 1 They successfully fought back expansionist neighbors, consolidated power even further, and seemed on their way to securing their place in the new Japan.

Speaker 1 However, the peasants' kingdom would remain unstable for the rest of its existence. It turned into a dynasty where the ruling class, rather than being samurai, were Buddhist priests.

Speaker 1 And it was in the 1570s, almost a century after the first Iki rebellions, that Kaga Iki would begin to fall.

Speaker 1 Oda Nobunaga, a warlord seeking to unify Japan, sent armies into Kaga province to secure it.

Speaker 1 After a first few waves were defeated by the Iki, Nobunaga deployed a massive force led by his best generals. The siege lasted for 10 years.
It ended not with absolute conquest, but with a truce.

Speaker 1 Nobunaga agreed not to execute the Iki leadership, who in return ceded the province to him. Their main castle at Honganjai was torn down and replaced with Osaka Castle, which still stands to this day.

Speaker 1 Many in the Kaga Iki were not pleased with how this ended and would continue a form of guerrilla warfare into the 1580s against the greater Japanese forces.

Speaker 1 It's difficult to understand the peasants' kingdom by modern standards, though. It was not a democracy or a socialist government.

Speaker 1 The iki were driven by a form of religious fanaticism that overpowered any fear or reverence they had for the shogunates.

Speaker 1 But in a time of instability, known as the Warring States period, any form of community felt more solid than the constantly shifting alliances that characterized their leaders.

Speaker 1 The Kagaiki survived, in a sense, by inverting the power structure that governed their lives. And for almost 100 years, they had a kingdom of their own.

Speaker 1 It may only have been a brief cul-de-sac in the middle of Japanese history, but it's a useful reminder that the power of a king or a shogun is not a law of the universe.

Speaker 1 It's an agreement like any other. One that only holds weight if the people agree.

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Speaker 1 Thomas Midgley Jr. is one of the most controversial men in history.
If you ask some, he was a great mind and a shining example of American ingenuity.

Speaker 1 If you ask others, though, he was a monster with a body count to rival Hitler or Stalin. But he wasn't a dictator or even a member of the military.

Speaker 1 No, he was an inventor and he may have had more of an impact on the world than any other single individual in history.

Speaker 1 One day in early 1921, Thomas's boss, a guy named Charles Kettering, came bursting into his lab at General Motors. He told Thomas that he wanted him to focus on one thing and one thing only.

Speaker 1 inventing a type of gasoline that didn't knock engines. Engine knocking was a major problem for early automobiles.

Speaker 1 The simple gasoline of that time caused tiny explosions in the engine, which quickly wore it down and reduced the speed potential of the car.

Speaker 1 Thomas always liked to perform well for his superiors, so he immediately set about solving this problem.

Speaker 1 He added chemical after chemical to the gasoline, trying different compounds that might stabilize the gas.

Speaker 1 After months of trying, he finally landed on a solution, lead, because adding it to the gasoline seemed to cure the engine knocking problem. But of course, it introduced another issue.
Lead is toxic.

Speaker 1 People had known this since the days of the Roman Empire, when lead was used in everything from cookware to cosmetics.

Speaker 1 Some people believe it actually drove many Romans mad and contributed to the empire's downfall. But Thomas figured it would be fine to use in this case.
I mean, no one would be drinking the gasoline.

Speaker 1 It would all get safely exhausted out the back of the car and up into the atmosphere. What could go wrong, right?

Speaker 1 By 1923, General Motors was fully behind Charles and Thomas's use of leaded gasoline. They opened a plant for producing the gas in New Jersey, with Thomas supervising.

Speaker 1 As Thomas sat in his office above the factory floor going over some paperwork, he was startled by the sudden sound of screams emanating from the work area.

Speaker 1 He got up from his seat, left his office, and stood on the catwalk overlooking the plant.

Speaker 1 And there, on the floor, was a group of workers workers surrounding a man who was screaming and running around the factory wildly. It looked like he was fighting monsters that weren't there.

Speaker 1 He swatted at the air before curling up into a ball. Thomas called for the man's sister to come pick him up and take him home.
But just a few days later, Thomas received distressing news from her.

Speaker 1 The man had died in the hospital from lead poisoning. The fumes from the gas were toxic after all.

Speaker 1 Thomas had a big press conference coming up where he was supposed to show off the wonders of leaded gasoline. The timing could not have been worse.

Speaker 1 What's more, over the next week, more and more of the factory workers began hallucinating and passing out. Four more people died and 35 of the 49 employees at the plant were hospitalized.

Speaker 1 And the press got word of this, and soon Thomas's press conference became less of an opportunity to show off the product and more of a last-ditch effort to show that it was safe.

Speaker 1 He went ahead with it, and in front of a room full of angry reporters, he did the only thing he could think of. He took out a small bowl of gasoline and used it to wash his hands.

Speaker 1 And then he inhaled the vapors, saying that he could do this every day to no ill effect. It was completely unscientific, but the press seemed to buy it.

Speaker 1 Soon, leaded gasoline was being used by millions. No one noticed when Thomas took a sabbatical to Florida for some fresh air.

Speaker 1 The truth was, he was now suffering from lead poisoning like all his other workers.

Speaker 1 But he did recover, and over the next several decades, scientists estimate that lead gasoline killed tens of millions of people, primarily children.

Speaker 1 Those it didn't kill had permanent lifelong brain damage that has been linked to the rise in violent crime in the late 20th century. And it wasn't even Thomas's only deadly invention.

Speaker 1 He was also responsible for Freon, the refrigeration chemical that damaged the ozone layer. Both it and lead and gasoline were eventually banned.

Speaker 1 Curiously, Thomas was eventually hoisted, quite literally, by his own hubris. He contacted polio in his 50s, and by the age of 55, he was confined to bed.

Speaker 1 He designed a complicated system of pulleys that were meant to allow him to lift himself out of bed.

Speaker 1 But one day, when he went to use the contraption, the ropes twisted, wrapping themselves around his neck. He accidentally hanged himself, which some saw as cosmic justice.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, this is just one situation where curiosity didn't simply kill the cat, but a whole lot of other people as well.

Speaker 1 I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

Speaker 1 This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

Speaker 1 And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com. And until next time, stay curious.

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