Whilst an ambulance is packed full of equipment designed to save lives, it is difficult to truly quantify the extent to which the oxygen cylinder has saved people on their way to the hospital.
Described by NICE as the most common drug used in emergencies, oxygen tanks are used to maintain a minimum oxygen saturation to avoid hypoxia, cell death and organ failure.
Oxygen is needed to live, but the understanding of how it worked and how it could be applied took centuries to truly come into effect.
However, as soon as it did, it revolutionised medicine and saved countless lives.
Who Discovered Oxygen?
To understand the need for the oxygen tank, it is important to go back further and explore the history of oxygen therapy.
The element oxygen was first discovered in the 1770s by two chemists who did not really know what it was.
German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was technically the first person to isolate and describe oxygen, although due to issues with getting a preface from his friend, his findings would be published three years after another scientist had independently discovered oxygen.
British scientist and later revolutionary politician Joseph Priestley would be the first to capture oxygen in 1775, described by him as ‘dephlogisticated air’, by heating mercuric oxide and capturing the contents in a jar.
The name came from the now-debunked phlogiston theory of fire, which was the idea that all flammable materials contain a specific substance that causes and catches fire, being released into the atmosphere whenever something flammable was burned.
This was thoroughly debunked when oxygen and the process of oxidation were discovered.
Who Was The First Person Treated With Oxygen?
Theoretically, this jar was the first ever oxygen tank, although it was extremely small and Dr Priestley tested it on plants, mice, candles and even himself, which would make him theoretically the first person treated with oxygen, albeit without a condition to cure.
This would change just eight years later in 1783, as a French doctor treated a young tuberculosis-stricken woman with daily inhalations of oxygen. According to Dr Caillens, the woman “very much benefited” from the oxygen therapy.
The Rise And Fall Of Oxygen Mania
Much like radiotherapy a century later, the production and early storage of oxygen would be somewhat misused, unaware of its true nature and treating the new substance as a cure-all panacea.
This confusion led to a century of unusual claims regarding the utilisation of so-called “compound oxygen”, which in reality was diluted nitrous oxide with some kind of adulterant to add colour.
This was derided as the “quintessence of bosh” by Samuel Wallian, but just four years after this, the development of continuous oxygen administration led to the first early and effective oxygen therapies.
Dr Albert Blodgett found that constant administration would help not only to relieve the pain caused by suffocation and hypoxia but also restore breathing. This is not dissimilar to the primary function of oxygen today.
It would be Dr John Haldane who reached the biggest breakthrough when it came to oxygen therapy thus far in 1917. It would quickly be used in the trenches of the First World War to provide relief for people suffering from poison gas attacks.