Lost and found: The Nooth apparatus

Abstract

John Mervin Nooth, military surgeon, correspondent of Joseph Priestly and Benjamin Franklin, and noted inventor and scientist has been lost and found several times, through his eponymous invention: the Nooth apparatus. A large glass apparatus superficially resembling a Kipp’s gas generator was used originally for carbonating water during the “fizzy water” craze in the eighteenth century, only to be outdone by one Mr. Schweppes. The apparatus would later form part of the first anaesthetic equipment used in surgery, some twenty years after Nooth apparatus ceased to be made. The now part-Nooth apparatus / anaesthetiser would then, too, be forgotten again with the advent of the use of nitrous oxide. The Nooth apparatus in the Dublin City University Science Archive was found in a glassware dump in 2000 by the author, and subsequently cleaned, and restored in 2017. It is currently on display, but it is also used, with slight modification, as a gas generator for the undergraduate teaching of trainee teachers with the lesson: “never throw anything away.”