Origins
A 1927 paper produced by Emil Bogen, who collected air in a football bladder and then tested this air for traces of alcohol, discovered that the alcohol content of 2 litres of expired air was a little greater than that of 1 cc of urine. However, research into the possibilities of using breath to test for alcohol in a person's body dates as far back as 1874, when Anstie made the observation that small amounts of alcohol were excreted in breath.
Also, in 1927 a Chicago chemist, W.D. McNalley, invented a breathalizer in which the breath moving through chemicals in water would change color. One use for his invention was for house wives to test whether their husbands had been drinking before letting them in the house.
The first practical roadside breath-testing device intended for use by the police was the drunkometer. The drunkometer was developed by Professor Rolla H. Harger in 1938. The drunkometer collected a motorist's breath sample directly into a balloon inside the machine. The breath sample was then pumped through an acidified potassium permanganate solution. If there was alcohol in the breath sample, the solution changed colour. The greater the colour change, the more alcohol there was present in the breath.
In late 1927, in a case in Marlborough, England, a Dr. Gorsky, Police Surgeon, asked a suspect to inflate a football bladder with his breath. Since the 2 liters of the man's breath contained 1.5 ml of ethanol, Dr. Gorsky testified before the court that the defendant was "50% drunk". Though technologies for detecting alcohol vary, it is widely accepted that Dr. Robert Borkenstein (1912–2002), a captain with the Indiana State Police and later a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, is regarded as the first to create a device that measures a subject's blood alcohol level based on a breath sample. In 1954, Borkenstein invented his Breathalyzer, which used chemical oxidation and photometry to determine alcohol concentration. Subsequent breath analyzers have converted primarily to infrared spectroscopy. The invention of the Breathalyzer provided law enforcement with a non-invasive test providing immediate results to determine an individual's breath alcohol concentration at the time of testing. Also, the breath alcohol concentration test result itself can vary between individuals consuming identical amounts of alcohol due to gender, weight, and genetic pre-disposition.
Read more about this topic: Breathalyzer
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
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