Overview

In 1927, six sailors lay trapped in a flooded submarine, breathing carefully, waiting for rescue. They had emergency oxygen. They followed procedure perfectly. They all died anyway, although, not from drowning, but from the carbon dioxide their own lungs produced. The technology to save them didn't exist yet. This is the story of how we learned to keep humans alive where nothing should breathe. From the frozen cockpits of WWI biplanes to the recycled air of the International Space Station, Breathing Machines traces a century of life support engineering; the invisible technology that transforms hostile environments into habitable spaces. It's a story of chemistry and catastrophe, of submarines that became tombs and spacecraft that became sanctuaries, of engineers solving problems that couldn't wait and pilots trusting them with every breath. You'll discover why pure oxygen nearly killed the Apollo program, how nuclear submarines stay submerged for months without surfacing, why astronauts drink yesterday's urine and call it coffee, and what it will take to keep humans alive on Mars. The fundamental problem never changes: humans need to breathe. The solutions keep getting more ingenious. Breathing Machines is popular science for readers who want to understand not just what these systems do, but why they exist and what it cost to develop them.

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