History of the Hyperbaric Chamber: From Henshaw's Domicilium to Soft Portable Chambers

[ Pressure gauge ] Reference imagery; final photography in production

This page answers one question: who invented the hyperbaric chamber, and how did chambers change from a 17th century proposal to the hospital and home units sold today. It is a history of the device. It uses medical journal reviews, a city encyclopedia, a diving medicine bulletin, a society web page and FDA records, all linked where used. Where people in the past claimed a chamber treated a disease, we report the claim as theirs and say how it was received. We do not say whether any treatment works.

Who invented the hyperbaric chamber

No single person. The idea is usually credited to Nathaniel Henshaw, an English physician who described a sealed air chamber in 1664. The first working chambers came from French physicians in the 1830s. Caisson work in the 19th century gave chambers a second job: recompressing workers. The 20th century added steel hospital chambers, Navy treatment tables, clear acrylic chambers for one person and, from the late 1980s, fabric bags that fold into a pack.

Our sources do not agree on every date or name. We list the conflicts in a section of their own near the end, rather than pick one silently.

1664: the Henshaw domicilium

A 1997 paper by Michal Kluger in the SPUMS Journal says deliberate exposure to pressure for medical use was first described by Henshaw in 1664, when he built his Domicilium. Kluger calls him an English clergyman and physician and says the vessel could raise or lower the pressure, with air as the breathing gas. Kluger adds that Henshaw believed low pressure cured chronic disease and high pressure suited acute disease, and that scientific evidence was lacking.

A 2024 review by Richard Clarke in Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine, Nathanial Henshaw: Not history's pioneering hyperbaric practitioner, goes back to the source. It says the idea appears in a five chapter treatise, Aero-Chalinos: or A Register for the Air, printed in 1664 by a Dublin bookseller. The fifth chapter proposes a Domicil, or air chamber: a room of about twelve or fourteen feet square, with brick or stone walls, a tight door and small windows. A large pair of organ bellows, piped through the wall, would fill or empty it. Henshaw proposed pressures up to three times atmospheric.

Clarke concludes that the chamber was a proposal and was never built. He argues that a 17th century plank door and leaded glass windows could not hold the pressure, that the bellows were impractical and that carbon dioxide would have built up inside. He writes that it would be another 170 years before a working air chamber existed, and that Henshaw's legacy is the concept, not the first practice. A history page from DDRC Healthcare, a hyperbaric centre in Plymouth, UK, also names Henshaw first and says his domicilium used bellows, so its pressures were probably low.

The 1830s: compressed air baths in France

The first working chambers in our sources are French. Clarke's 2024 review says Emile Tabarie, a physician in Montpellier, described an air chamber he called a pneumatic laboratory to the French Academy of Sciences in 1832, and that V.T. Junod is credited with the first purpose built hyperbaric chamber. The history timeline of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine dates Junod's chamber to 1834 and describes it as a copper sphere that reached 2 to 4 atmospheres.

A 2019 chapter by Chandrasekhar Krishnamurti, Historical Aspects of Hyperbaric Physiology and Medicine (IntechOpen), says Junod's treatment was called le bain d'air comprimé, the compressed air bath. The chapter says Pravaz built the largest chamber of its day in Lyon in 1837, with seats for 12 patients, and that Tabarie designed a spherical pneumatic chamber of cast iron. It dates the first mobile hyperbaric operating theatre, built by the French surgeon Fontaine, to 1877. Kluger says 27 operations were done in Fontaine's unit under moderate pressure, with nitrous oxide as the only anaesthetic.

The idea crossed the Atlantic. The SAEM timeline says the first hyperbaric chamber in North America was used in 1860. The Krishnamurti chapter says the neurologist James Leonard Corning built the first chamber in the USA in New York, and that compressed air therapy was introduced to the USA by Corning in 1871. Kluger writes that hyperbaric air therapy spread through Europe, Canada and the US as a panacea for a wide range of illnesses. That is his description of how it was sold, not a finding that it worked.

Caissons, bridges and the first recompression

Engineers used compressed air too. A caisson is a sealed working chamber sunk below the water table, with its air pressure raised to keep water out. Workers who came back to normal pressure fell ill. The DDRC page says these mystery illnesses led to the early name caisson disease.

A February 2023 bulletin of the DAN Recompression Chamber Network, in an article by JP Imbert, says the first account of recompression treatment was published in 1854 by Pol and Wattelle. They reported 16 cases among caisson workers in coal mines in the north of France, where Pol ran pressurized work at around 3 atmospheres. The bulletin says they used recompression to ease symptoms and that Pol later died of severe decompression sickness. It also says Paul Bert published La Pression Barométrique in 1878.

The SAEM timeline and the Krishnamurti chapter both say the first recorded death from caisson disease came in 1859, during construction of the Royal Albert Bridge. The chapter says that in 1873 Andrew Smith first used the term caisson disease, for 110 cases on the Brooklyn Bridge project. The DDRC page gives the same figure of 110 cases.

A 2020 review by Richard Clarke in Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine picks up the thread. It says therapeutic recompression was proposed in 1854 and first used in a systematic way during excavation of the Hudson River tunnel. By the early 20th century, an on-site chamber was increasingly seen as essential for compressed air work. The review describes those chambers as steel, large enough for several people, and fitted with an entry lock so people could pass in and out while the main compartment stayed under pressure. For how that work differs from a modern clinic chamber, see decompression vs hyperbaric chamber.

Orval Cunningham and the Cleveland steel ball

The largest chamber in this story was built in Ohio. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History entry on the Cunningham Sanitarium says the treatment was developed by Dr. Orval J. Cunningham of the University of Kansas. H. H. Timken, owner of the Timken Roller Bearing Co., financed the steel sphere in 1928 after a friend was treated. It stood five stories high on Lakeshore Blvd and joined a three story hotel through steel tanks. The entry says the treatment was used mainly for diabetes.

The Cleveland Historical page on the sanitarium gives the build: a 900 ton sphere of half inch steel plates, sixty five feet high, with 350 ten inch portholes. It says the first patients arrived on 1 December 1928. The page says Cunningham believed diabetes and cancer were caused by living organisms that fail to grow in the presence of oxygen. Kluger reports the same idea and says Cunningham first used a chamber for victims of the influenza epidemic during World War I. The Krishnamurti chapter says Cunningham built a chamber in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1921.

The claims were not well received. Kluger calls the later treatment of diabetes, hypertension, syphilis and cancers "at best naive and at worst fraudulent". He says a lack of data led an American Medical Association investigation bureau to conclude that the field was "tinctured much more strongly with economics than with scientific medicine", and that a hiatus followed until the middle of the 20th century. The Krishnamurti chapter says the AMA asked Cunningham to validate his claims, that he refused to share details or cooperate, and that he was then labeled a quack and a fraud.

The building outlived the practice. The encyclopedia says Cunningham ran it until 1934, when James H. Rand II bought it. It became the Ohio Institute of Oxygen Therapy, then Boulevard Hospital in 1936, which closed in 1937 for financial reasons. Cleveland Historical says the sphere was dismantled on 31 March 1942 under orders from the U.S. War Production Board, for about $25,000 of scrap metal.

The Navy, oxygen and the treatment tables

Navies turned recompression into written procedure. The DDRC page says the US Navy built diving simulators and a testing tank in 1912. The SAEM timeline says John Scott Haldane developed dive tables for the Royal Navy in 1908. The Krishnamurti chapter says those tables remained the basis of diving operations until 1956.

The Wikipedia article on hyperbaric treatment schedules says the first standard table for recompression with air appeared in the US Navy Diving Manual in 1924, with a reported relapse rate of 50%. It says field results showed a 1944 oxygen table was not yet satisfactory, and that Goodman and Workman developed an oxygen treatment table in 1965. Variations of that table remain in general use. The same article lists US Navy Treatment Table 6 at a maximum of 60 feet of seawater, with a standard run time of 4 hours 45 minutes.

Oxygen itself came late to the chamber. A 2021 review by Smolle and colleagues in Medicina, on PubMed Central, says Behnke and Shaw first used hyperbaric oxygen for decompression sickness in 1937. The DAN bulletin says Behnke structured the first US Navy treatment tables in 1933 and that Workman revised them in 1965. It says the Navy tables, and Table 6 in particular, have since been the most used protocols.

Boerema, Churchill-Davidson and hospital chambers

In the 1950s surgeons and radiotherapists brought chambers into hospitals. The Smolle review says that in 1955 Churchill-Davidson used hyperbaric oxygen alongside radiation therapy in cancer patients, while Boerema developed it as an adjunct to cardiac surgery to lengthen the time the circulation could be stopped. The Krishnamurti chapter places Churchill-Davidson's trials at St Thomas' Hospital in London and calls Boerema the father of modern hyperbaric medicine.

Kluger describes Boerema, a Dutch cardiac surgeon, reporting that pigs whose blood was replaced with saline could live for up to 15 minutes in 100% oxygen at 3 atmospheres, and performing heart operations under circulatory arrest before bypass machines. Kluger says that work led Professor Johnstone to start a hyperbaric facility at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney in 1964. He also says the heart lung machine, developed by Gibbon in 1953 and widely used by the mid 1960s, replaced hyperbaric oxygen for cardiac operations, and that surgery in a hyperbaric operating suite soon became of historical interest only.

Clarke's 2020 review says the 1960s brought multiplace chambers into hospitals. These are rooms that hold several patients and an attendant. For how they compare with one person chambers today, see monoplace vs multiplace chambers.

The acrylic monoplace chamber

The one person clear tube many people picture today has its roots in radiotherapy. Clarke's 2020 review says interest in oxygen as a radiation sensitiser for solid tumours led to a new acrylic hulled single occupancy chamber, in which patients could receive radiotherapy while pressurized in an oxygen atmosphere. The paper it cites for that design is by Emery, Lucas and Williams in The Lancet in 1960.

Clarke writes that hospitals then adopted the type as a more economical and less complex alternative to the multiplace chamber. Kluger, writing in 1997, says monoplace chambers fill with 100% oxygen, cost less, are easy to use and need no attendant inside, and that the high oxygen atmosphere carries an added fire risk. He notes they were more common in parts of Europe, the United States and Asia, while Australia and New Zealand used mostly multiplace units. For the pressure vessel standard that applies to chamber construction today, see our guide to ASME PVHO-1.

From Undersea Medical Society to UHMS

The main professional body in the field started as a diving society. The UHMS about page says the society was formed in 1967 and today serves some 2,000 physicians, scientists, associates and nurses from more than 30 countries. The Wikipedia entry on the UHMS says it began as the Undersea Medical Society. A meeting in Washington, D.C. on 10 April 1967 introduced 88 charter members and elected officers. It names six founders, including Christian J. Lambertsen and Robert D. Workman, and says the society took its current name in 1986.

The Krishnamurti chapter describes the early society as made up largely of naval and former naval physicians. The SAEM timeline and the DDRC page give 1986 as the year the UHMS was set up, which matches the renaming rather than the founding.

Soft portable chambers and the Gamow bag

The last major change was a chamber you can carry. The Wikipedia article on the portable hyperbaric bag says it is named after its inventor, Igor Gamow, who first built a device called The Bubble to study altitude and athletes, then redesigned it as a bag for high altitude wilderness use. It gives an inflation pressure of 105 to 220 mmHg and says the bag is used mainly for severe altitude sickness.

The FDA database shows when it reached the US market. The 510(k) record K874752 lists the Gamow Hyperbaric Bag from Hyperbaric Aerobics, Ltd. of Boulder, Colorado, received on 18 November 1987 and found substantially equivalent on 2 February 1988, under product code CBF, hyperbaric chamber. A later record, K001409, covers a Gamow Bag, Hyper Oxy, Hyper Oxy P/T and Pressure-Cizer from Hyperbaric Technologies, Inc., decided on 2 August 2000.

Clarke's 2020 review says a fabric hulled compressed air monoplace chamber was introduced in the 1980s for diving use. A 2017 position statement from the Southern African Underwater and Hyperbaric Medical Association says soft chambers sold for sports and alternative medicine run below 1.4 ATA, hold a US FDA clearance for acute mountain sickness only, and are designed to be compressed with air only. For what a clearance does and does not mean, see FDA cleared vs FDA registered. For how soft and hard chambers differ, see hard shell vs soft shell.

Timeline at a glance

The table lists each dated event in one line, with the source that gives it. Where two sources differ, the next section says how.

Sources: Clarke 2024 and 2020, Kluger 1997, Krishnamurti 2019, Smolle 2021, SAEM, DDRC, DAN RCN Bulletin, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Cleveland Historical, UHMS, Wikipedia and the FDA 510(k) database. All linked above, read 27 October 2026.

For the chambers on sale now and what we can verify about each, see the scorecard.

Where the sources disagree

Where a primary record exists we lean on it: the 1664 printing date of Henshaw's treatise, the Cleveland city sources for the sphere and the UHMS for its own founding year. We have not seen the 1924 Navy Diving Manual or Behnke's 1933 work, so we leave that conflict open.

What we have not verified

We did not read Henshaw's treatise, Junod's 1834 paper, Tabarie's report or the Pol and Wattelle account ourselves; we rely on the reviews that cite them. We did not find a fetched source that names Washington Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge chief engineer, as a caisson disease case, so we leave him out. We did not find who made the first acrylic monoplace chamber, or the year the first one was sold to a hospital, beyond the 1960 Lancet paper Clarke cites. We did not read the US Navy Diving Manual or the 1965 Goodman and Workman report. We found the 1988 and 2000 FDA records for Gamow bags but did not trace the first soft chamber cleared under a different brand, or whether any came before 1988. We did not confirm the date Igor Gamow first built The Bubble. If you hold a primary document that settles any of these, send it and we will check it. For the terms used on this page, see the hyperbaric glossary.