“The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration.
Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it - in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down.
Fifty years before the arrival of smart-home devices, Midgley wired up the rotary telephone in his bedroom so that a few spins of the dial would operate the sprinklers. He installed a wind gauge on the roof that would sound an alarm in his bedroom, alerting him whenever the lawn risked being desiccated by a breeze. Midgley cultivated his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career.
Golf-club chairmen from across the Midwest would visit his estate on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, purely to admire the grounds the Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley’s lawn on its letterhead. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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