Earliest Protective Appliances
The earliest protection against gas was the crudest sort of a mask. The first gas used was chlorine and since thousands of people in civil life were used to handling it, many knew that certain solutions, as hyposulfite of soda, would readily destroy it. They also knew that if the breath could be drawn through material saturated with those solutions, the chlorine would be destroyed. Thus it was that the first masks were simple cotton, or cotton waste pads, which were dipped into hyposulfite of soda solutions and applied to the mouth and nose during a gas attack. These pads were awkward, unsanitary, and, due to the long intervals between gas attacks, were frequently lost, while the solution itself was often spilled or evaporated. The net result of all this was poor protection and disgust with the so-called masks.