Editor in Chief - John McMahon Ret. Deputy Chief

Innovations We Use Every Day

by Rebecca Richardson, Staff Writer

Have you ever stopped to wonder about the things we use on the job today... where they came from and who developed them? I did some searching and was able to gather some history on the things we take for granted every day.

Following deadly fires with large losses of life; The Coconut Grove Nightclub 1942, The LaSalle Hotel 1946, and the Winecoff Hotel in 1946, fire and building officials searched for a way to provide life safety for building occupants. They found that factories and other buildings equipped with automatic sprinklers had an amazingly good life safety record compared with similar buildings without sprinklers.

The Fire Extinguisher: On February 10, 1863, Alanson Crane patented the fire extinguisher. Inventor Thomas J. Martin, patented a fire extinguisher on March 26, 1872. And during World War II, Dr. Percy Julian, an African-American, invented the aero-foam extinguisher for use against gas and oil fires.

The Fire Engine: The first practical fire engine was tested in Cincinnati, Ohio on Jan. 1, 1853,

The Fire Pole: The nation's first firehouse pole was installed in New York City on April 21, 1878, .

The Fire Hose: On May 30, 1821, Mr. J. Boyd of Boston, MA patented the first rubber-lined cotton web fire hose.

The Fire Escape: On May 7, 1878, the fire escape ladder was patented by Joseph Winters. This was followed by the portable fire escape ladder, which was invented on November 11, 1890, by Daniel McCree of Chicago.

The EKG: The history of EKGs is quite long and involved. Here are some of the highlights. In 1878 John Burden Sanderson and Frederick Page, British physiologists, recorded a frog's heart's electrical current with a capillary electrometer and showed it consists of two phases (later called QRS and T).

1887 British physiologist Augustus D. Waller of St. Mary's Medical School, London publishes the first human electrocardiogram. It is recorded from Thomas Goswell, a technician in the laboratory.

1891 British physiologists William Bayliss and Edward Starling of University College London improve the capillary electrometer. They connect the terminals to the right hand and to the skin over the apex beat and show a "triphasic variation accompanying (or rather preceding) each beat of the heart". These deflections are later called P, QRS and T. They also demonstrate a delay of about 0.13 seconds between atrial stimulation and ventricular depolarization (later called PR interval).

In 1893 Willem Einthoven introduces the term 'electrocardiogram' at a meeting of the Dutch Medical Association. Later he stated that Waller had coined the term. In 1895 Einthoven distinguishes five deflections which he names P, Q, R, S and T. 1920 Harold Pardee of New York publishes the first electrocardiogram of an acute myocardial infarction in a human and describes the T wave as being tall and "starts from a point well up on the descent of the R wave.

Willem Einthoven wins the Nobel prize for inventing the electrocardiograph in the year 1924.

The Stethoscope: The stethoscope was invented by French physician R.T.H. Laennec, who in 1819 described his use of a perforated wooden cylinder to transmit sounds from the patient's chest to the physician's ear. This monaural stethoscope was modified to more convenient forms, but the binaural type has largely replaced it with two flexible tubes attaching the chest piece to spring-connected metal tubes with earpieces.

The Aspirin Tablet: Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid), is a derivative of salicylic acid that is a mild and non-narcotic analgesic. Hippocrates, who is known as the father of modern medicine, lived sometime between 460 B.C and 377 B.C. He left historical records of pain relief treatments, including the use of powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree to help heal headaches, pains and fevers.

In 1829, scientists discovered that it was a compound called salicin in willow plants which gave the pain relief. The drawback was that salicylic acid was tough on stomachs. A means of 'buffering' the compound was searched for. The first person to do so was a French chemist named Charles Frederic Gerhardt. In 1899, a German chemist named Felix Hoffmann, who worked for a German company called Bayer, rediscovered Gerhardt's formula. Hoffmann made some of the formula and gave it to his father who was suffering from arthritis. He had good results with the medicine. They then decided to market the drug.

Aspirin was first sold as a powder. In 1915, the first Aspirin tablets were made

CPR: In the late 1950s, Dr. Peter Safar, who is known as the father of modern day CPR, pioneered the development of the ABCs (airway, breathing, circulation) of resuscitation, including the technique of "mouth-to-mouth" resuscitation, and assembled these techniques, together with others, into what is currently known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

This photograph, taken in the 1950's, depicts Dr. C. Park, Anesthesia Resident, Baltimore City Hospital; Capt. Martin McMahon, Chief, Baltimore Fire Department Ambulance Service and Dr. Peter Safar, Chief, Department of Anesthesia, Baltimore City Hospital, performing one of the earliest resuscitation studies using CPR. This picture was used with permission from

Dr. Patrick Kochanek at

www.safar.pitt.edu.

Much of the information for this article comes almost verbatim from

www.about.com.

Other sources of information were:

www.encarta.msn.com

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