Wartime approach to ventilator crisis
The British Government has asked manufacturers to help make 20,000 ventilators in less than two weeks to treat patients suffering from Covid-19.
Jaguar Land Rover, RollsRoyce, Vauxhall and Airbus are all involved and the effort is being co-ordinated by a management consultancy.
The goal is to get British companies working together to start manufacturing ventilators in record time. The effort has been described as a ‘‘wartime drive’’. This is what companies do in times of war.
In 1940, the Germans were preparing to invade Britain.
Winston Churchill was rousing the English people but they were desperately short of rifles and machineguns.
Most of the English weapons were on the beach in Dunkirk.
The existing Lee-Enfield rifles and Bren guns were expensive, and it would take time to install the special tooling required to manufacture these weapons.
England did not have money or time but they needed guns quickly. Amazingly, the war department did not form a committee. They gave the project to Major Reginald Shepherd and a guy called Harold Turpin.
Together they sat down at a table and designed a new machinegun. It was designed to use parts that were already available. The main body was made out of pipe used for car exhausts. Other metal components were made from stamped metal, which plenty of British manufacturers were competent with.
The nuts and bolts used were already available in local stores and they got a local bed factory to make the main firing spring.
It had a total of 47 parts and it used existing 9mm pistol rounds.
They named it the Sten gun. It cost £4, which was the average weekly wage at the time.
The Tri-ang toy company stopped making toys and, overnight, went into making the Sten gun. By the end of the war, 4 million Sten guns had been made. Shepherd and Turpin had found what was available locally and hacked together a working machinegun.
Another example of the wartime drive was the De Havilland Aircraft company. Their Mosquito bomber was made almost entirely out of wood, which was rare for the time. Britain had lots of skilled carpenters and joiners. They began making parts of the Mosquito bomber in their own workshops.
Some would make a tail section or the rudder or ailerons.
They would load the components on to their trucks and drive them to the main De Havilland factory where they were assembled.
But planes and machineguns are one thing – it is a completely different thing to make a piece of medical equipment like a ventilator.
But I am reminded of the story of a guy called Tim Prestero. He founded a company called Design that Matters. It focused on designing health solutions for the third world.
Infant death due to hypothermia kills a lot of babies in poor countries. Modern incubators are provided to hospitals as part of foreign aid programmes. But when they break down, the specialised repair infrastructure is not available and the incubators stay broken.
Tim and his team designed an incubator made from car parts.
Toyota vehicles are in the most remote parts of the world and you can get parts for them anywhere.
It made sense to piggyback off the Toyota supply chain.
The incubator’s heating comes from a car headlight. The heat circulation system uses a dashboard fan; indicator lights and a door chime act as an alarm. The unit uses a cigarette lighter and a motorcycle battery so it can run in a power cut.
It is another example of using what is easily available locally and designing a solution around it.
Currently, there are a number of open-source projects working on building a ventilator that can be built locally and quickly. Some are already in the process of getting the medical approvals required.
3D printers are being used to make parts.
Cheap Arduino microprocessors, which are available at any electronic store, are providing the control systems and one project is using modified snorkelling masks to attach to patients’ faces.
No matter the calamity we find ourselves in, there is usually a solution if we look hard enough.
We are all hoping we can get these ventilators built.