Being the son of an African-American slave he never had much to say about his life choices. However, that didn’t stop him from changing his destiny. As a teenager, he joined a textile mill as an apprentice. With his meager stipend, he hired private tutors for himself. By the age of thirty, he was running his own textile business. However, his groundbreaking innovation Self Contain Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) made him one of the most notable figures of human history.
Due to a lack of fire safety knowledge, fire-related casualties among textile mills were extremely common in the nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries. Without any safety devices, the fire brigade had a minimum practical contribution to rescue work. Therefore, in most of the fire incidents, the survival chances of the trapped victims were almost negligible. One day, that young gentleman noticed in the newspaper that 146 textile mill workers died in a horrific fire accident. He understood the fire brigade could do nothing to save those victims due to proper gadgets and training.
That incident was so perplexing for him that he started simulating fire accidents in a cramped room under a controlled environment. After numerous such experimental encounters with fire, he concluded that it takes nearly fifteen minutes for deadly smoke to engulf the air close to the floor. Based on this finding he designed the first Self Contain Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) with the help of his brother Frank.
Self-contained breathing Apparatuses (SCBAs) provide breathable air to the wearer via a facemask connected to a compressed air tank, oxygen-generating chemical, or compressed oxygen source. Exhaled air is released into the atmosphere through an exhalation valve. SCBAs are essential in environments with hazardous substances or low oxygen levels. Positive-pressure SCBAs are particularly suited for situations immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH). It ensures constant airflow to prevent contaminants from entering. They are commonly used during fires, gas leaks, and other emergency scenarios.
With the invention of this new safety device, he started giving dangerous demonstrations at various fire departments. He and his brother would get into dangerous yet controlled and cramped fire situations wearing this Smoke Hood. However, despite their best efforts initially firemen were quite skeptical about the effectiveness of that new invention.
Meanwhile, a few days later, a devastating fire broke out beneath fifty feet from ground level inside the Lake Erie Tunnel at Cleveland. The ill-equipped fire department of Cleveland asked for his intervention and he arrived there with his brother and his Smoke Hood. Together both of them saved four precious lives from the tunnel. It was the beginning of a new era that changed the fire rescue operation forever. The name of that legendary inventor was Garrett Augustus Morgan. His ground-breaking discovery saved many soldiers’ lives from deadly gases during World War – I.
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