James Bert Garner

James Bert Garner (September 2, 1870 – November 28, 1960) was an American chemical engineer and professor at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research from 1914 until his retirement in 1957.

"For 14 years under Dr. Garner the Wabash chemistry department showed one of its greatest periods of productivity with at least 18 future Ph.D's graduated" (Ibid, p. 8).

Dr. James Bert Garner and his first gas mask was and is a Pittsburgh story, one of the many unpublicized ones which have taken place behind the walls of Oakland's Mellon Institute.

While working on methods of recovering sulphur dioxide from copper smelter gases, something happened to recall his favorite experiment at the University of Chicago.

A Pittsburgh newspaper account (no exact reference) of action near Ypres, Belgium,, in 1915 actually was what led Garner toward his most notable scientific contribution.

[Playing a hunch from his current work at Mellon Institute he] made use of the prepared charcoal technique of his lecture assistant days at the Univ.

He found that it adsorbed [not "absorbed"] sulphur dioxide from the air stream, as well as the ammonia of the experiment [Ibid, p. 8-9].In addition to gas mask development, Garner was also involved in many other discoveries and inventions.