Evil from the House of Butterlies, or brain damage by auto fuel

This story about insidious car fuel continues our theme of airborne brain damage.  Starting in the 1920s, one American fuel product wafted lead traces into the atmosphere via exhaust plumes.  The history at times resembles a nightmarish pulp fiction, as a money-making poison spreads around the world, ultimately contributing to sickness and crime.

Ethyl was the brand name of a gasoline mixed with tetra-ethyl lead.  It was designed to reduce engine knock and improve performance, but also contained enough lead to eventually damage human nervous tissue.

Just making the stuff killed some workers, sickened more, and gave others hallucinations: "the larger facility in Deepwater came to be known as the 'House of Butterflies' owing to the insect hallucinations."  At one Ohio plant, starting

[o]n October 26, 1924, the first of five workers who would die in quick succession at Standard Oil's Bayway TEL works perished, after wrenching fits of violent insanity; thirty-five other workers would experience tremors, hallucinations, severe palsies and other serious neurological symptoms of organic lead poisoning. In total, more than 80 percent of the Bayway staff would die or suffer severe poisoning.

The effects on the rest of the human race were initially set aside, as the fuel became something of a global standard.  One generation later (!) a scientist proved that lead had permeated the total world environment so thoroughly as to contaminate Greenland.  Patterson's work lead to the 1970 United States Clean Air Act.

After that, phase II of the Ethyl Gothic appeared, as research suggests phasing out Ethyl and allied fuels has reduced the amount of lead in human exposure.  At least one study correlates the drop to the reduction in American and British crime rates during the 1990s.