Photos courtesy Indiana University Archives
INVENTED BY an IU professor and an Indiana State Police captain in 1954, the Breathalyzer has saved “hundreds of thousands of lives,” forensic toxicologist Barry Logan says. Here’s how the groundbreaking device came about—and how its technology has changed in the 70 years since.
The development of the Breathalyzer runs parallel to the rise of the U.S. auto industry. By the 1920s, the U.S. dominated the world’s auto production market, with Chevrolet, Ford, and General Motors jockeying for consumer dollars. Then factories pivoted to munitions for the First and Second World Wars, but after the troops returned in the late 1940s, vehicle ownership shot up. So did collisions caused by impaired drivers, records from the National Transportation Safety Board show.
Before the Breathalyzer, fairly enforcing drunk driving laws was an uphill battle. After New Jersey instituted the first laws against drunk driving in 1906, nearly every state in the union rolled out laws against driving while intoxicated. But prosecutions were inconsistent and often unfair, Indiana State Police spokesperson Captain Ronald Galaviz says. Juries were expected to make a character evaluation in the courtroom and to take the word of the arresting officer.
Early drunk driving busts often relied on the contents of a balloon. Before the Breathalyzer, the main scientific test used to determine if a person had consumed alcohol required suspects to blow into a balloon. “Then you would empty the contents of the balloon through some silica gel,” says Dr. Barry Logan, a forensic toxicologist who heads up Indiana University’s Center for Studies of Law in Action. If the chemical-infused gel changed color, alcohol was likely present in the breath. But it “wasn’t reliably quantitative,” Logan says. All it showed was whether someone had recently had a drink, not if they were too drunk to drive.
The earliest version of what would become the Breathalyzer had a fairly comical name. What the world needed was a device that detected blood alcohol content (BAC), as that’s the most reliable indicator of dangerous impairment. In 1931, IU School of Medicine biochemistry and pharmacology department chair Rolla Neil Harger created a device that could do just that. He called it the Drunkometer.
An Indiana State Police crime lab staffer knew he could make the Drunkometer better. Fort Wayne native Robert Frank Borkenstein “didn’t originally have a lot of formal education,” Logan says. A tinkerer who worked at a local photography shop after high school, he got a job with the state police when he was 24. Eventually, he took a position in the department’s crime lab, where he met Harger and learned about the Drunkometer. A bespoke piece of equipment made of “blown glass and rubber tubing” and using caustic chemicals such as sulfuric acid, “it was never a practical device in terms of something that law enforcement could take out into the field to detect drunk drivers,” Logan says. Borkenstein figured out how to refine and scale the Drunkometer to make it both portable and easy to mass produce. That new device was called the Breathalyzer.
Photos courtesy Indiana University Archives
Data collected by Breathalyzers shaped research into impairment. Once a driver’s BAC could be determined with a quick test, states were free to set a “legal limit” for it. Research at the time suggested that drivers with a BAC under 0.15 percent could safely operate a vehicle, but as the use of the Breathalyzer increased, “we understood more about how alcohol affects people’s driving over time,” Logan says. On October 1, 1998, then-President Bill Clinton signed a national law setting the legal BAC limit for drivers at 0.08 percent. In 2013, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a recommendation that the benchmark be lowered to 0.05 percent. So far, only Utah has made that switch.
It’s almost impossible to beat a Breathalyzer violation in court. Blood alcohol content restrictions are known as “per se” laws, a term for laws concerning acts that are automatically considered illegal, without the need for further evidence. In the case of blood alcohol levels, if a Breathalyzer test determines a driver is over the limit, legal proceedings typically center around sentencing, as the suspect’s guilt is considered a given.
In the decades following its invention, Borkenstein’s Breathalyzer fell victim to genericization. In the way people use “Kleenex” to mean tissue, the word “Breathalyzer” is now used to describe any breath analysis device. Borkenstein and Harger were the “first to market with a practical, commercial device that made a sea change in terms of how alcohol and driving laws were enforced. But the Breathalyzer itself isn’t manufactured anymore and hasn’t been in probably 20 years,” Logan says.
Borkenstein and Harger probably wouldn’t recognize the breath analysis devices of today. Harger passed away in Indianapolis in 1983 and is interred at Crown Hill Cemetery. Borkenstein graduated from IU with a degree in forensic science. He retired from the Indiana State Police and became chairman of what is now IU’s Department of Criminal Justice. In 1971, he became director of its Center for Studies of Law in Action, the same role Logan has today. Borkenstein died in Bloomington in 2002. Bulky devices seen in movies have been replaced by small, fuel cell–powered breath testers. If police get an above-the-limit reading, the suspect is taken into custody to take an infrared technology test. “There are safeguards today’s technologies have that Breathalyzers didn’t,” Logan says, “but the Breathalyzer was the foundation for them all.”
