WORKS OFF GARDEN TAP

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 18, 18 April 1947, Page 6

WORKS OFF GARDEN TAP

REPLACING THE “IRON LUNG” A Melbourne hospital engineer has invented an emergency respirator which will work off a garden tap. He is Mr E. Cartwright, chief engineer at Austin Hospital. He told an interviewer that he set to work in earnest on designing a respirator after a Sydney patient died in an iron lung during a Bunneron power failure. He calls it the “Cartwright Pulsator.” Austin Hospital already has eight made from odd scraps of metal. Mr Cartwright said he could standardise design and produce the pulsators for £45 each. The machine is similar to a hand-pumped emergency respirator, but hydraulic action replaces ihe bellows. Water from a tap runs through a tube to a hydraulic ram, a regulator valve operating the flow. The required speed can be adjusted at the tap. Mr Cartwright, a former ship’s engineer, has refused to patent his invention. “I have children of my own,” he said. “I would not like to see one of them suffering. My pulsator is for the benefit of "everyone who needs it. The hospital pays me for doing a good job, and I am trying to do it.”