Held Breath

At Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., one E. L. Gaylor, student in physiology, breathed pure oxygen as hard as he could for six minutes, saturating his lungs with the gas. One last big lungful he then held, for 14 min., 2 sec.--long enough for a police-man to walk one mile. The previous breath-holding record is reported to have been approximately ten minutes, at the University of California, in 1916. Were Breather Gaylor to attempt living in an atmosphere surcharged with pure oxygen he would soon become drowsy, lose appetite, weight, and finding real difficulty in breathing, he would turn bluish and eventually die. This has been known since Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, whom French Revolutionists guillotined* in 1794, named the gas. But the reason has been learned only recently--by C. A. Binger, J. M. Faulkner and R. L. Moore. In the Journal of Experimental Medicine they tell how the thin membrane of the lungs, through which oxygen reaches the blood, becomes swollen. Oxygen cannot pass through; the person practically suffocates.

* Because, when he had become a rich man from his chemical discoveries, he had served the royalist government of guillotined Louis XVI, by improving methods of farming, by working on the metric system of measurements, and by simplifying the collection of royal taxes.