Question: The life of this village structure spanned the century from the building of the Panama Canal to the invention of “Post-It” notes and the discovery of a moon around Saturn. Times changed and so did this building. Do you recognize it? Can you identify it and its location?
Last week’s answer: Were you able to identify Herb Hildebrandt and his daughter Carol? In 1969, after seven years of perseverance, Herb unveiled his new device for precise control of intravenous feeding.
Continuous, reliable control of intravenous feeding for patients in hospitals and nursing homes was Herb’s goal when he started to tinker with a model feeding system in his home workshop. He began working on the control system after a family crisis. His infant daughter, Carol Anne, had become dehydrated to the dangerous point of chemical imbalance during an attack of intestinal virus. Round-the-clock intravenous feeding aided her recovery, but Mr. Hildebrandt thought the method used was imprecise and unreliable. Intravenous feeding was regulated by a simple thumbscrew clamp squeezing the plastic tube that carried the feeding solution from an inverted bottle to a needle inserted in the patient’s vein. A physician or nurse starting a feeding had to adjust the clamp and count the drops to get the prescribed rate of flow. The rate had to be checked continually, since the nature of plastic materials, as well as temperature, humidity and vibration, all affected the tubing. In addition, medical personal had to be on guard for the time when the bottle emptied.
During a period of several years, Mr. Hildebrandt persevered until he was satisfied that he had developed a dependable, permanent improvement in IV feeding. With support from his employer, General Electric’s heavy military electronic systems, he was able to verify his ideas and create a new design with the aid of the analog computer that he used in his daily work on weapons systems. Further time and effort were then devoted to developing specialized components, building and improving a working model and testing its performance. In the end he unveiled the Intravenous Flow Regulator, which incorporated a small motor, a function selector switch, and a drop sensor, all joined by a miniaturized electronic circuit. The nurse could then just set a dial on the race of the unit to the number of drops desired per minute. If the rate of flow varied for any reason, the regulator tightened or loosened the grip on the tube as required. A red light would alert the nurse when the bottle was empty.
Next time you visit a hospital or are having a procedure that involves an IV, thank the late Herb Hildebrandt for his invention.
A number of readers guessed this one correctly. First among them was Phil Nagy:
“My brother Chris and I were fortunate enough to have worked for Herb’s company in the late 1970s/early 1980s as electronic testers and assemblers,” Nagy wrote in an email to the Messenger. “This photograph hung in his office, next to his patent recognition plaque.”
Contact Editor Sarah Hall at [email protected] or leave a message at 434-8889 ext. 310 with your guess by 5 p.m. Friday (please leave the information in the message; we are not generally able to return calls regarding History Mystery responses). If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo, your name and guess will appear in next week’s Messenger, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Museum at the Shacksboro Schoolhouse and the Baldwinsville Public Library.
