One night that same week, he had arrived home feeling ill. Many of his coworkers were acting erratically too. He was hurried to a hospital.ĭymock wasn’t alone. Hours later, a passerby discovered him lying in the dirt, still breathing. Like a man possessed, Dymock rose, fumbled through the dark, opened his window, and leapt into his garden. But on a mild October night in 1923, shortly after Dymock groggily tucked himself into bed, something within him snapped. Walter Dymock didn’t mean to jump out his second-story bedroom window. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson-a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth-and how he took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself. For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks.
