Philip Drinker | |
---|---|
Born | December 12, 1894 |
Died | October 19, 1972 | (aged 77)
Occupation | Engineer |
Engineering career | |
Projects | Iron lung |
Philip Drinker (December 12, 1894 – October 19, 1972) was an American industrial hygienist. With Louis Agassiz Shaw, he invented the first widely used iron lung in 1928. [1] [2]
Drinker's father was railroad man and Lehigh University president Henry Sturgis Drinker; [1] his siblings included lawyer and musicologist Henry Sandwith Drinker, Jr., pathologist Cecil Kent Drinker, [2] businessman James Drinker, and biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen. [1] After graduating from St. George's and Princeton in 1915, [1] Philip Drinker trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh for two years. [1]
Drinker was hired to teach industrial illumination and ventilation at Harvard Medical School [1] and soon joined his brother Cecil and colleagues Alice Hamilton and David L. Edsall on the faculty of the nascent Harvard School of Public Health [2] in 1921 [2] or 1923. [1] He studied, taught, and wrote textbooks and scholarly works on a variety of topics in industrial hygiene; [2] the iron lung itself was originally designed in response to an industrial hygiene problem—coal gas poisoning [2]—though it would become best known as a life-preserving treatment for polio. Charles Momsen credited Drinker "and his friends" for their assistance with gas-mixture experiments that ultimately made possible the rescue of the survivors of the USS Squalus in 1939. [3] During World War II, Drinker directed the industrial hygiene program for the United States Maritime Commission. [1] After the war, he advised the Atomic Energy Commission. [1]
Drinker served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Industrial Hygiene for over thirty years [1] and, in 1942, as president of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, to which he had belonged since its inception. [2]
He retired from Harvard in 1960 [2] or 1961. [1] Drinker received the Donald E. Cummings Award from the American Industrial Hygiene Association in 1950. [4] He was later inducted into the US National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2007.
He and his wife Susan [5] had a son, bioengineer Philip A. Drinker, [6] and 2 daughters, Susan Drinker Moran (1926-2010), author, and Eliza Scudder, educator.