Philip Drinker

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.

Family and early life Drinker's father was railroad man and Lehigh University president Henry Sturgis Drinker;

Career

During World War II, Drinker directed the industrial hygiene program for the United States Maritime Commission.

Thus, for the next twenty years, the Navy failed to effectively protect its shipyard workers from asbestos, leading to tens of thousands of cases of asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. Only in the mid-1960s did the Navy and others start to repudiate this defective conclusion. Subsequently, this report has been used by many attorneys to argue that nobody could have known that asbestos insulation work was dangerous until further studies finally appeared in 1964-5.

After the war, Drinker advised the Atomic Energy Commission. He was later inducted into the US National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2007.

He and his wife Susan had a son, bioengineer Philip A. Drinker, and 2 daughters, Susan Drinker Moran (1926-2010), author, and Eliza Scudder, educator.

Publications