24 Facts About Clair Patterson

Clair Cameron Patterson was an American geochemist.

In collaboration with George Tilton, Clair Patterson developed the uranium–lead dating method into lead–lead dating.

Clair Patterson first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

Clair Patterson's father was a mail carrier and his mother was a member of the school board; Patterson had one brother, Paul, and one sister, Patricia.

Clair Patterson graduated from high school in 1939, at the age of 16.

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Clair Patterson attended Grinnell College—close enough that Patterson would hitchhike home to do laundry—and graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1943.

Clair Patterson married Lorna McCleary just before leaving the University of Iowa in 1944.

Clair Patterson made several different experiments which led to shocking results for the time period involving the lead.

Clair Patterson returned to the University of Chicago to work under his research adviser Harrison Brown.

The goal for Clair Patterson was to figure out the composition of the primordial lead in the Earth.

Clair Patterson acid cleaned all apparatuses and even distilled all of his chemicals shipped to him.

Clair Patterson then was able to finish his work with the Canyon Diablo meteorite.

Clair Patterson used the mass spectrometer at the Argonne National Laboratory on isolated iron-meteorite lead to collect data on the abundance of lead isotopes.

The publicity that came after the discovery was made was handled quite well by Clair Patterson, who made the statement, "we did it" in several interviews, sharing the honor of the discovery with his fellow scientific minds behind the action.

Clair Patterson found that deep ocean water contained up to 20 times less lead than surface water, in contrast to similar metals such as barium.

Clair Patterson returned to the problem of his initial experiment and the contamination he had found in the blanks used for sampling.

Clair Patterson determined, through ice-core samples from Camp Century in Greenland taken in 1964 and from Antarctica in 1965, that atmospheric lead levels had begun to increase steadily and dangerously soon after tetraethyl lead began to see widespread use in fuel, when it was discovered to reduce engine knock in internal combustion engines.

Clair Patterson subsequently identified that, along with the various other uses of lead in manufacturing, as the cause of the contamination of his samples.

Clair Patterson argued that "normal" should be replaced by "typical" and that just because a certain level of lead was commonplace, it did not mean it was without harm.

Where Kehoe measured lead in "unexposed" workers in a TEL plant and Mexican farmers, Clair Patterson studied mummies from before the Iron Age and tuna raised from pelagic waters.

Clair Patterson's precise point was that humans only recently had increased their concentration of lead and that the short span of exposure, a few thousand years, was an instant in the Darwinian time scale, nowhere near the time needed to develop adaptive responses.

Clair Patterson focused his attention on lead in food, for which similar experimental deficiencies had marked increases.

Clair Patterson compared the lead, barium, and calcium levels in 1600-year-old Peruvian skeletons and showed a 700- to 1200-fold increase in lead levels in modern human bones, with no comparable changes in the barium and calcium levels.

Clair Patterson's opinions were expressed in a 78-page minority report, which argued that control measures should start immediately, including gasoline, food containers, paint, glazes, and water distribution systems.