Doubt it when you take population increase into account
Even then. We didn't stop using fire as we populated the earth, after all. We still use it.
Consider: fire allowed us to cook stuff, and actually changed things so that we COULD populate things....fire is at the base of pretty much all human civilization. There aren't two many things, technologically, that we can do WITHOUT fire...but it has certainly been misused and has been the cause, directly and indirectly, of a LOT of misery and death.
The questions are...and there are two of 'em...
Is the use of fire more helpful than it is harmful, in the long run?
Are the first users to blame for its misuse, if they didn't know at the time that it WAS going to be misused?
Just as an example; London was horribly smoggy. People died of the smoke there for centuries before the city actually burned down. That's just one city.
Now let's think about asbestos, and a couple of other things.
When inventions do what they are intended to do, and the inventor has no way of knowing what damage that invention can do, is the inventor to be blamed, really? It's not as if he were a comic book evil master-mind. I find, for instance, your glee about the way the inventor of lead additives to gas died to be a little creepy, frankly.
Lead is a problem....we now have unleaded gas.
Fluorocarbons were the problem with the ozone layer. How in the name of all that is holy could he have known THAT? So we no longer use them, and the hole in the ozone layer is closing.
He obtained over a hundred patents, and without him, we wouldn't know as much about the properties of rubber...and its synthetic replacements, which are used by everybody. He died in 1944, a LONG time before the problems of his leaded gasoline and Freon were known, or could be known. He died a particularly nasty death, because of polio.
Tell me. Have you ever had, or known anybody who had, polio? I do. My family was pretty hard hit by it and it was only because the Salk vaccine became available when I was five or six that I didn't get it. My cousin did.
So I find that statements like...what did you say...that [the manner of his death] could not have happened to a more deserving person" to be...considerably more judgemental that I would expect from you. I was rather surprised.
Remember this: Midgely was only 55 when he died because of an invention that was supposed to help him deal with his illness. In 1944. Given how hard he worked to TRY to make leaded gasoline safe to produce and use, and given that we had absolutely NO idea that Freon could do damage to the ozone layer for another three decades or more, it's POSSIBLE that had he continued working, we might have known about the dangers sooner and done something earlier. He was active in researching that stuff until the day he died.
In other words, it's not like he knew the dangers and didn't CARE.