Oxygen Sense: Creating Embodied Knowledge to Promote Health Innovation in the Royal Air Force, 1939-45.

Abstract

Chambers that simulate low-oxygen environments saw use by many of the world's air forces during World War II, yet the hypobaric chamber played an equally important role in rapidly adapting air force personnel's cultural mentality and behavior. Behind its German and American rivals in the field of aviation medicine, Britain's Royal Air Force distinctively mobilized the hypobaric chamber to aid its European bombing campaign, shaping aircrew into crude oxygen detectors long before the wide use of cabin pressurization and electronic sensing technology. Physiology, often overlooked by historians, can be usefully reinserted into the story of the world's air forces, taking inspiration from recent histories of technology on the suitability and malleability of human behavior to fit complex systems. "Oxygen sense" shows how embodied knowledge of hypoxia was promoted because it swayed oxygen skeptics. Embodied knowledge eased the integration of aircraft technology with human respiration to become a routine component of flying practice.