Today, air purifiers are all of the craze. Each allergy sufferer, asthmatic and health nut on the planet has one, but believe it or not, there had been a time when we did not have air purifiers. We simply breathed the air that was in our houses and somehow managed to survive. So at what point did this craze basically begin? How did it start? Sorts of air purification have really been about for over two hundred years in some form or another, though the majority do not understand it. The reality is, as far back as the early 1800s, scientists have been trying to find out how to make our air cleaner, long before the commercial revolution ever hit and California started to look like an outside barbecue on a high flame.

To kick this technology off, in the early 1800s John and Charles Dean developed a mask for fire wrestlers. This mask let them to charge into burning buildings while not having to fret about being overwhelmed by smoke smoke from the fire. Around that same time, masks were also made for divers and coal miners who were consistently exposed to deadly air, but it wasn't until the 1850s the first gas mask was developed by John Stenhouse. The mask worked on a charcoal based filter design, really similar to a few of the air purifiers today.

These original masks worked on the principal of filtering out what they called "enemies" by trying a system called High Potency Particulate Air or HEPA. Yes, the same HEPA filter systems we will buy today. When they added charcoal to this system it seemed to make a dramatic improvement as the charcoal was able to clear out multiple poisons. But it wasn't till World War II when we got some of the best advances in air filter systems. This came with the Manhattan Project. This was a project that got scientists together from all around to work on a respiring device that would protect soldiers from the atomic bomb. Whilst that was essentially silly in itself, it probably did finish up in advancements that helped combat chlorine gas, mustard gas and flame throwers.