On this date in 1967, a breathalyser was used on a motorist for the first time in the UK, in Somerset, England. 10 things you might not know about breathalysers:
The word breathalyser is a portmanteau of breath and analyser.
They measure the amount of alcohol in a person’s blood. When a person has been drinking, the body absorbs alcohol through the stomach into the bloodstream. As Blood passes through the lungs, some of the alcohol evaporates and remains in the lungs. The amount of alcohol exhaled reflects the blood alcohol level.
Scientists as far back as 1874 had an inkling that it might be possible to use the breath to test how drunk someone was. Francis E. Anstie made the observation that small amounts of alcohol were excreted in breath.
Chicago chemist William Duncan McNally, invented a breathalyser in 1927 using water with chemicals in it which would change colour when exposed to alcohol. A suggested use for this invention was for women to test their husbands to see if they’d been drinking.
In December 1927, in Marlborough, England, a police surgeon named Dr. Gorsky asked a suspect to blow up a football bladder. 2 litres of the man's breath contained 1.5 mg of ethanol. Gorsky testified before the court that the defendant was "50% drunk".
In America in the 1930s there was a forerunner of the breathalyser called a drunkometer. This device was developed by Rolla Neil Harger of the Indiana University School of Medicine. The drunkometer collected a motorist's breath sample in a balloon inside the machine. The sample was then pumped through an acidified potassium permanganate solution. If there was alcohol in the breath sample, the solution changed colour. The more alcohol there was in the breath, the more pronounced was the colour change.
The breathalyser as we know it today was developed by Bill Ducie and Tom Parry Jones in 1967. It was in this same year that The Road Safety Act came into force with the first legally enforceable maximum blood alcohol level for drivers in the UK.
So how does it work? When a person blows into a breathalyser, any ethanol in their breath is oxidized to acetic acid at the anode, causing an electric current which is measured and displayed by the device.
The accuracy of the test can be affected by many things: other compounds in the breath, the temperature, a person’s health, the amount of air they exhale, human error and whether the suspect is male or female. Having used mouthwash recently can skew the results, as can a passionate Kiss with a person who is drunk.
Is it possible to fool the test? In 2003 episode of MythBusters tested a number of methods that supposedly allow a person to fool a breath analyser test. The methods tested included breath mints, Onions, denture cream, mouthwash, pennies and batteries; all of them proved ineffective.
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