So few days ago I, along with several other interested parties, had the chance to look at and touch a 1950's era Emerson Iron Lung. Suzanne & Mark Gibson acquired one to be placed in a local museum.  It arrived at Sports Decals in Spring Grove, IL and is now being stored by owner Paul A Metivier.  We met with Paul and watched his people carefully unload the precious cargo. It,s really quite something to see and realize how polio patients from the late 1920's to the early 60's were able to survive because of there invention.  

 

No device is more associated with polio than the tank respirator, better known as the iron lung. Physicians who treated people in the acute, early stage of polio saw that many patients were unable to breathe when the virus’s action paralyzed muscle groups in the chest. Death was frequent at this stage, but those who survived usually recovered much or almost all of their former strength.

Nothing worked well in keeping people breathing until 1927, when Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw at Harvard University devised a version of a tank respirator that could maintain respiration artificially until a person could breathe independently, usually after one or two weeks. The machine was powered by an electric motor with two vacuum cleaners. The pump changed the pressure inside a rectangular, airtight metal box, pulling air in and out of the lungs.