100 of the Worst Ideas in History by Michael N. Smith

They eat grain, but the main part of their diet is locusts, which are much more destructive to the farms. It turns out that sparrows form an important link the ecology of China. But despite the revolutionary zeal, Chinese leaders slowly became aware that they had made a terrible mistake. Hundreds of millions of sparrows died, almost making them extinct in China.

Cities went on anti-sparrow hunts, mobilizing their whole population to kill the birds, and they were extremely effective.

Sparrows were shot out the sky, their nests destroyed, and their eggs broken. No matter how much you have messed up this week, it is not as bad as what he did.Ĭhinese persons destroyed any sparrow they found. The hole in the ozone layer was ultimately traced back to Midgley, and it cost world governments billions of dollars trying to fix it. Fifty years after Midgley's idea, scientists realized that these gases were punching a hole in the ozone layer, threatening to drastically change the Earth's environment. At the time, however, nobody realized that Freon and other CFC's were creating a hole in the ozone. He created Freon, a coolant that soon became commonplace in refrigerators, and was the first mass market chlorofluorocarbon. After developing leaded gasoline, Midgley got hired to figure out how to make refrigerators safer and less expensive by using different cooling gases. That's pretty bad, but Midgley was somehow able to trump his first terrible idea. For decades, Midgley's leaded gasoline wrecked the environment and caused health problems, until people finally got wise and stopped using it. Even back in the 1920s, Midgley and others knew that lead was dangerous, but they went forward with it anyways. Early gas wasn't very dependable, and Midgley fixed it by adding lead into the gasoline.

Midgley got his start working on the problem of gasoline in car engines.

100 of the Worst Ideas in History by Michael N. Smith