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The History of Respiratory Protection Devices

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Posted by admin | Posted in toys, Uncategorized | Posted on 09-07-2011

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Gas Mask Bag

Respiratory Protection equipment has a surprisingly long and established history, tracing back as early as the 16th century.

According to literature from America's George Mason University, the earliest example of a respiratory protection device can be found in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, who suggested that sailors could be protected from toxic fumes using a finely woven cloth dipped in water. This innovation is only slightly diminished by the fact that it was another of Da Vinci's inventions that would have subjected the sailors to toxic fumes in the first place.

However it was arguably another century until the first true respirators appeared. The first device resembling a modern respirator has been attributed to Alexander Von Humboldt, who introduced a very primitive version in 1799 during his time as Berlin's official assessor of mines.

Variations on this device became more prevalent throughout Europe and the Americas, practically all of which consisted of a bag completely encompassing the head and sealed around the throat - with two glass windows for the wearer to see through. The methods of respiration could range massively and the majority were cumbersome.

The first standardized respiration device arrived in 1848, when Lewis P. Haslett was awarded the US patent for his "Haslett's Lung Protector." Filtering dust from the air using one-way clapper valves and a filter of moistened wool, it marked the start of a long string of patents for air purification devices. The cup-shaped mask patented by Hutson Hurd in 1879 quickly became the most widespread for industrial use, paralleling the common modern use of half mask respirators.

One of the biggest developments in this early stage of the field took place on the other side of the Atlantic however. Scottish chemist John Stenhouse discovered during his investigation into uses for charcoal that the substance could capture significant volumes of gas; he built one of the first respirators able to remove toxic gases from the air and laid the foundation for activated charcoal to become the most widely used filter for respirators, a legacy which lasts to this day.

Over the last few decades of the 19th century, respirators would come to be used in both industry and in fire departments across the US and Europe. However they would not be mass produced on any real scale until 1915 - following the atrocities of the First World War and the deadly gas attacks on the Western Front. According to the British Royal Society of Chemistry - and a handwritten thank-you note from Winston Churchill - it was Edward Harrison's bulky box respirator that broke that particular landmark, though the invention owed heavily to the work of American chemist James Bert Gartner.

The war's driving impact on technological innovation would rapidly transform the gas mask, both between WWI and WWII and onwards to the modern age. Leaps in the chemical, physical and biological sciences have rapidly transformed respirators into a variety of smaller forms, each of which offers better protection than almost all of those used in the past.

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