How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet

In 1929 in Chicago, people kept mysteriously dying inside their homes. It took 15 deaths for the authorities to realize that these people were getting killed by their fridges. Because fridges back then were no longer just boxes of ice. Instead, they relied on a chemical looping through the back to stay cold.

And the best chemical for this job was methyl chloride, a toxic and virtually odorless gas. So if it somehow leaked from the fridge, it could kill you without warning. Other fridges used flammable gases instead. So a leak combined with a spark from the stove and your house could suddenly go up in flames.

So one company tried to solve this problem, but in the process they accidentally created a seemingly magical substance. Soon it made its way into a huge range of products which were so popular they ended up in nearly every home in America. But what people didn't know was that these products came at a price. The chemicals used to make them were being released into the environment slowly poisoning everyone on the planet including me.

You have high levels of a chemical you never heard of. It shocks me. Like where could this have come from? almost every living creature from polar bears to birds to fish.

Massive worldwide contamination by completely man-made chemicals that are fingerprints back to just a couple of companies. This is a video about one of the biggest chemical coverups in history. For legal reasons, I want to note that this investigation is based on publicly available documents, recordings, and third party opinions. All sources are linked in the description.

The story all began with an attempt to save lives. In 1936, a chemical company called DuPont set out to find a safer alternative to the gases used in fridges, one that was neither toxic nor flammable. Their lead scientist on the project was a 27-year-old chemist named Roy J. Plunkett.

He was experimenting with a gas called tetrofluoethylene or TF. It's a pair of double-bonded carbons, each bonded to two florine atoms. One morning, as Plunkett was setting up a test, his assistant picked out a cylinder full of TF and twisted the valve, but nothing came out. Plunkett thought the gas must have leaked, but the cylinder still weighed about as much as a full one.

So, he grabbed a saw and cut the ...