Richard von Foregger (27 June 1872 – 18 January 1960) was an Austrian-American chemist, manufacturer and Olympic swimmer.

He was born in Austria, educated in Germany and Switzerland, and worked in the United States, where he invented and mass-produced several air regeneration systems.

She taught von Foregger some Russian, in addition to his native German and fluent French and English.

In 1905, while working at the Roessler and Hasslacher Chemical Co., New York, he produced oxygen by reacting water with fused sodium peroxide.

Shortly thereafter he designed a portable oxygen generator that was tested by mountain climbers, long-distance runners and bicycle racers.

[2] Since 1907, von Foregger closely collaborated with the anesthetist James Tayloe Gwathmey (1862–1944),[6] who introduced Autogenor to Henry Edmund Gaskin Boyle in 1913.

[2] In the 1910s, von Foregger worked on improving oxygen generators, and in the late 1920s, he introduced the closed-circuit CO2 absorbers in the US.

In the late 1950s, his mental condition deteriorated and he was diagnosed with paranoid psychosis, though this diagnosis was strongly contested by Holt.