Breathalyzer
device to estimate alcohol concentration in exhaled air
A breathalyzer or breathalyser (a portmanteau of breath and analyzer/analyser), also called an alcohol meter, is a device for measuring breath alcohol content (BrAC). It is commonly utilized by law enforcement officers whenever they initiate traffic stops. The name is a genericized trademark of the Breathalyzer brand name of instruments developed by inventor Robert Frank Borkenstein in the 1950s.
Origins
Research into the possibilities of using breath to test for alcohol in a person's body dates as far back as 1874, when Francis E. Anstie made the observation that small amounts of alcohol were excreted in breath.
In 1927, Emil Bogen produced a paper on breath analysis. He collected air in a football bladder and then tested this air for traces of alcohol, discovering that the alcohol content of 2 litres of expired air was a little greater than that of 1 cc of urine. Also in 1927, a Chicago chemist, William Duncan McNally, invented a breathalyzer in which the breath moving through chemicals in water would change color. One suggested use for his invention was for housewives to test whether their husbands had been drinking. In December 1927, in a case in Marlborough, England, Dr. Gorsky, a police surgeon, asked a suspect to inflate a football bladder with his breath.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Breathalyzer” as device to estimate alcohol concentration in exhaled air. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q754230. The Library of Congress control number is sh87000075. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1874 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “Breathalyzer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.