The Secret History Of Lead.(use of leaded gasoline)

Nation, The, March, 2000 by Kitman, Jamie Lincoln

The next time you pull the family barge in for a fill-up, check it out: The gas pumps read "Unleaded." You might reasonably suppose this is because naturally occurring lead has been thoughtfully removed from the gasoline. But you would be wrong. There is no lead in gasoline unless somebody puts it there. And, a little more than seventy-five years ago, some of America's leading corporations-General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (known nowadays as Exxon)-were that somebody. They got together and put lead, a known poison, into gasoline, for profit.

Lead was outlawed as an automotive gasoline additive in this country in 1986-more than sixty years after its introduction-to enable the use of emissions-reducing catalytic converters in cars (which are...

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