December 1956: improving iron lungs

Reading back through the archives of The Engineer can give some startling insights into how our world has changed: quickly in some ways, slowly in others. For example, it’s quite startling to see in an issue from the late 1950s, well within the lifetime of many of our readers, detailing improvements in the designs of mechanical breathing machines — better known as iron lungs — to help with the epidemics of polio which occurred every summer.

Indeed, 1956 — the year of this article — had been a bad year, with epidemics in Ireland and the Netherlands. The vaccine which has eradicated the disease in the industrialised world and come close to wiping it out worldwide has been developed by Jonas Salk only a few years previously and was still in trials. Polio was feared everywhere and with good reason: it killed and crippled hundreds, mostly children, every year.

The article in The Engineer was taken from a lecture given by Captain George Smith-Clarke, who had been chief engineer at British car manufacturer Alvis from 1922 to 1950, and had designed cars which won races at Brooklands and Le Mans. In 1952, he had taken on the chairmanship of the Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital board of management, and as part of this role he’d been asked to look at the engineering of mechanical ventilators.