Education
He studied, taught, and wrote textbooks and scholarly works on a variety of topics in industrial hygiene. The iron lung itself was originally designed in response to an industrial hygiene problem—coal gas poisoning—though it would become best known as a life-preserving treatment for polio.
Career
With Louis Agassiz Shaw, he invented the first widely used iron lung in 1928. After graduating from Saint George"s and Princeton in 1915, Philip Drinker trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh for two years. During World World War II, Drinker directed the industrial hygiene program for the United States Maritime Commission.
After the war, he advised the Atomic Energy Commission.
Drinker served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Industrial Hygiene for over thirty years and, in 1942, as president of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, to which he had belonged since its inception. He retired from Harvard in 1960 or 1961.
Drinker was inducted into the United States National Inventor"s Hall of Fame in 2007.