Drinking and driving: A history

This week (Sept. 10) in 1897 George Smith, a London cab driver, became the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after smashing his cab into a wall. He pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings, but had he hired a good lawyer he probably would have gotten off because at the time there was no way to prove he was drunk.

A decade later in America, the first laws against drunk driving were passed, but, again, there was no scientific method for proving drunk driving. Then in 1936, Dr. Rolla Harger, a toxicology specialist, invented a “Drunkometer,” a balloonlike device requiring drunkdriving suspects to breathe into it. The balloon was then attached to a tube filled with a purple liquid (potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid), and as the balloon’s air – the suspect’s breath – was released into the tube the alcohol in the breath would change the liquid’s color from purple to yellow. How fast the liquid’s color changed determined how drunk a suspect was.

Alas, the Drunkometer was not scientifically fool-proof, as it required human calculation – essentially guesswork – to determine the alcohol level based on the speed of the liquid changing color. So, in 1953 a former Indiana policeman, Bob Borkenstein, developed the Breathalyzer, which was easier to administer and much more accurate. Like the Drunkometer, a person would blow into the Breathalyzer, but the Breathalyzer would scientifically determine the alcohol level. No human calculation required.

The Breathalyzer gave law enforcement a new weapon against drunk driving, but not until the early 1980s did the seriousness of the problem become known. That’s when Candace Lightner launched Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) after her teenage daughter Cari was killed by a drunk driver while walking home from school. The Bruce G. Kauffmann Email author Bruce G. Kauffmann at bruce@history lessons.net. driver had three drunk-driving convictions and was out on bail for a hit-and-run arrest.

MADD became a powerful grassroots organization in the fight against drunk driving, lobbying that every state raise its drinking age to 21. In 1984 President Reagan signed a law withholding federal highway grants from states that failed to do so, and with some limited exceptions in certain states (drinking under parental supervision, for example), every state has done so. MADD also advocated that states lower from .15% to .08% the minimum bloodalcohol level designating drivers as criminally drunk, and fought for longer jail terms for drunk driving. MADD has also launched countless drunk-driving awareness campaigns.

It has been effective. Since MADD’S formation drunk-driving deaths have nearly been cut in half, but according to MADD, on average, 10,100 people die in drunk-driving accidents every year, which is nearly 28 people per day.

And, on average, 290,000 are injured in drunk-driving accidents every year, or nearly 800 a day.