Both low-cost cabinet respirator
Respirador de cámara de bajo coste (Both)
- Date
- 1937 · confidence high
- Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Credited to
- Edward Both
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
An iron lung built of plywood and tar-sealed cardboard that creates negative pressure with a bellows and is much cheaper than the Drinker model. It was made by the thousand in the UK and used in the 1937 polio epidemic in Australia.
Both devised it in Adelaide in 1937 and improved it in the UK with Lord Nuffield's backing; Nuffield donated thousands to hospitals across the Empire.
What it led to
- cheap respirators in polio epidemics
- ventilation in under-resourced hospitals
- development of positive-pressure ventilators