> You seem to be arguing your point backwards to me. Lead was only outlawed when refining advanced to a level to permit economically viable high octane fuel wit

> You seem to be arguing your point backwards to me. Lead was only outlawed when refining advanced to a level to permit economically viable high octane fuel without it. Ethyl alcohol was an option, but: > Kettering himself had designed the self-starter a decade before, wrote James Lincoln Kitman for The Nation in 2000, and the knocking was a problem he couldn’t wait to solve. It made cars less efficient and more intimidating to consumers because of the loud noise. But there were other effective anti-knock agents. Kitman writes that Midgley himself said he tried any substance he could find in the search for an antiknock, “from melted butter and camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride.” The most compelling option was actually ethanol. > But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production. And oil companies like Du Pont "hated it," he wrote, perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine. > TEL filled the same technical function as ethanol, he wrote: it reduced knock by raising the fuel's combustability, what would come to be known as "octane." Unlike ethanol, though, it couldn't be potentially used as a replacement for gasoline, as it had been in some early cars. The drawback: it was a known poison, described in 1922 by a Du Pont executive as "a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately." That statement is important, Kitman wrote: later, major players would deny they knew TEL to be so poisonous. * https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-invented-180961368/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...