Stuart K. Hayashi
The following is a section of the longer essay, “How Billionaires and Capitalism Save Billions of Lives — Including Yours.” That essay includes an index listing various case studies of a for-profit initiative saving lives. The blog post below is of at least one such case study. You can return to that index here.
Percy Julian’s activism is an inspiration, but the shiny light reflectors on the road are seldom cited as an inspiration for anything. Yet these reflectors make a big difference in their own right. They keep motorists’ eyes on the road and prevent fatality. They were invented and marketed by yet another Percy — Percy Shaw of the United Kingdom. When he died in 1976, he left behind an estate of £193,500. In 2022 money, that is 2 million U.S. dollars. With his fortune, he purchased
a mansion in which, like Leo Baekeland, he showed off his quirks. He bought for television sets and placed them all in the same room. He had all TVs playing at once, each on a different channel, with the volume muted.
He said that this was because when guests came over, they all wanted to watch TV but couldn’t agree on the station.
Percy Shaw’s four TVs did not make a lot of noise, but that was the very purpose of the devices of our next inventor. For decades, inventors and engineers had been trying to figure out how to create an alarm that would warn a home’s residences of a fire before it grew too large for them to escape. These inventors and engineers concentrated on trying to make a machine that would detect heat. By the early 1960s, these heat detectors were already being installed in residences. They would continue to be selling well into the late 1970s.
Yet their weakness was in their unreliability. The detection of a high temperature was not always the same as identifying the outbreak of flames.
In 1963, even as heat detectors were on the market, home conflagrations continued to kill thousands of Americans. That same year, engineer Duane Pearsall had set his sights on something else. The presence of static electricity
disrupted operations in factories and photographic laboratories.
To address that interference, he started the company Statitrol — short for “Static control” — and, with assistants, constructed a device to measure ions in the air. He dubbed it his “static neutralizer.” One day as he was tinkering with it, a colleague lit a cigarette. The rising smoke triggered in the neutralizer and it blared uncontrollably. Many other people would have dismissed this reaction as just another complication or inconvenience, and forgotten about it. And Pearsall might have been one of them, had he not mentioned the incident to an engineer friend from Honeywell Corporation. This colleague inferred that this could be ideal for warning homeowners of the presence of a fire.
It turned out that heat detectors were not the best in warning about any emerging blaze. A
stronger indicator was smoke. This inspiration led Pearsall to take the knowledge he had already gained from his progress with the static neutralizer and to apply it to this new inquiry.
The models put out by Statitrol were impressive. Yet Pearsall still had to work out the kinks, and he still had to demonstrate that his smoke detectors provided an advantage that the already-established heat detectors did not. Independent investigators, though, noticed the difference. Writing in 1974 in an academic paper for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), National Bureau of Standards research engineer Richard G. Wright
assessed, “...smoke detector technology has advanced to the point where the judicious installation of one or two smoke detectors could be more effective than a house full of heat detectors in alerting dwelling occupants to a fire” (page 71).
History has borne out Wright’s evaluation. Yet there was already evidence for it by 1962. In that year, J. H. McGuire and B. E. Ruscoe found that the lifesaving potential of the presence of heat detectors in a home was 8 percent, whereas it was 41 percent for smoke detectors (“The Value of a Fire Detector in the Home,”
Fire Study no. 9 [November 1962].”
In 1972, the rate of mortality from house fires in the United States was 57 in a million people. As smoke detectors and other safety measures became more commonplace in the home, that rate reduced. By the year 2009, it was fewer than 12 in a million.
And in contrast to the heat detector installations being
between $700 and $1,200,
Pearsall’s smoke detector debuted in the Sears Roebuck catalog two years earlier
priced at $37.88.
Yet Pearsall could have lost his chance at saving lives had a reputed champion of safety and lifesaving succeeded in thwarting him. That was corporation-bashing crusader Ralph Nader. In 1976, the Health Research Group division of his group Public Citizen sent a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The message was dire in tone. Sidney Wolfe, the medical doctor and activist leading the Health Research Group, noted that smoke detectors emit radioactivity. For that reason, Nader and Dr. Wolfe demanded that the NRC place a moratorium on its sale and use. Public Citizen
denounced these gizmos as “mindless and dangerous,” followed by a demand that four million of these units be recalled.
Prior to Nader and Dr. Wolfe ever making a fuss, Pearsall already implemented precautions concerning the radiation. When Pearsall started out, his SmokeGard transmitted half a microcurie of Radium 226. Pearsall had already shrunken that to a single microcurie of Americium 241.
Fortunately for Americans who since have been warned of fires by their smoke detectors — and otherwise would have died — the wish of Public Citizen went unfulfilled. To its credit, the NRC rejected the demands of Nader and Wolfe. The NRC replied that the dosage level is what determines whether exposure to radiation and most chemicals is safe or dangerous, and that the dose of radiation from smoke detectors was too small to harm a household. The regulatory agency then
noted that a person would already be exposed to over a hundred times more background radiation during a flight across the United States.
To that, Sidney Wolfe
replied, rather unscientifically, “The issue is not how much radiation is released but why this extra amount of radiation exposure is necessary at all.” He was referring to how smoke detectors released slightly more radiation than did the heat detectors. He then insinuated that the heat detectors were already adequate in alerting people about fires. The figures on the reduction in deaths from house fires in the following years suggest something quite disparate from what Sidney Wolfe and Ralph Nader assumed.
Statitrol grew so much that, at one point under Pearsall’s leadership, the company boasted over one thousand employees. Yet Pearsall never forgot his hardships when he directed a team of just a few members. Following his success, he remained
an advocate for small business. In 2004, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute gave him
an award for “saving upwards of 50,000 lives from deadly residential fires over the past 30 years.”
Return to index of case studies of lifesaving for-profit ventures.
