Home Improvement

A Brief History of Air Purifier – Today, air purifiers are all the craze. Each patient allergy, asthma and health nut in the world has one, but believe it or not, there are times when we do not have cleaner air. We just breathe the air in our house and somehow managed to survive. So when did this craze really begin? How to start? This type of air purification has actually been around for more than 200 years in some form or other, although most people do not realize it. Actually, since the early 1800s, scientists have been trying to find ways to make our air clean, well before the industrial revolution never hit and California began to look like an outdoor barbecue on high heat.

To kick off this technology, in the early 1800s John and Charles Dean developed a mask for firefighters. This mask allows them to cost into the burning building without having to worry about will be overcome by smoke fumes from the fire. Around the same time, the mask was also made for divers and coal miners are constantly exposed to dangerous air, but not until 1850 that the first gas mask was developed by John Stenhouse. This mask works in charcoal-based filter design, very similar to some air cleaners today. This masks the original work on the principal filter what they call “enemy” by using a system called High Efficiency Particulate Air or HEPA. Yes, the same HEPA filter system we could buy today. Once they added charcoal to this system it made a dramatic improvement because the charcoal was able to filter out multiple toxins.

But it was not until World War II when we got some of the biggest advances in air filter system. It comes with the Manhattan Project. This is a project that gets together scientists from all over to work on breathing device that would protect soldiers from the atomic bomb. While that is really laughable in itself, it ends in the progress that helps combat the chlorine gas, mustard gas and flamethrowers. A few years later a plague in Africa, scientists are made aware of the need for protection against chemicals, perfumes, building materials, pesticides, dust mites, pollen and food allergens. This began a series of air purification devices are being developed.

In spite of all this, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the clean air craze really took off. The concept of dust-free environment is all the rage, practical or not. According to the study, HEPA filter, which is the biggest rage era, filtered out 99.7% of all allergens in the air, and offenders all sizes of 0.3 microns and larger. But progress did not stop there. Newer devices, such as Nebulizers, offenders are able to filter size 0.1 and larger and still maintain the filter level 99.7%. Over the years, the number of devices used to filter the air has grown astronomically. Just do an Internet search on various types and brands of air cleaners. There are hundreds of them.

All this from a simple mask designed for fire fighters. Who would have guessed?