The History of Sterilization and the Autoclave

 

There are a number of industries that require high heat sterilization for safety, and this has led to a market for new and refurbished autoclave sterilizer solutions. A product like a refurbished autoclave sterilizer is capable of using high pressures and temperatures to kill pathogens. This is important to industries like medical offices and even tattoo parlors, since bloodborne pathogens are capable of surviving for up to a week on equipment and tool surfaces. We haven’t always known how to sterilize things, though.

Sterilization and Early History

For almost as long as we have had history we have been doing something like sterilization, trying to improve our health and the safety of surgery and of our animals and foods from things we hardly understood. Aristotle the philosopher is said to have recommended to Alexander the Great that the general’s troops should boil water before drinking it, and ancient peoples were aware that passing a surgical instrument through a flame before using it led to fewer infections. The ancient Persians knew that containers made of silver would keep water fresh. People of this era also realized that salt would preserve foods.

Losing the Way

Humans had long understood that heat and salt made things safer, but no one knew exactly why this was the case. Without knowing the “why”, it was perhaps inevitable that people in the Middle Ages period should fail in their attempts to improve on ancient ways. Heat sterilization disappeared and in its place came attempts to burn sulfur and certain woods in order to fight off the plague.

Understanding the Problem

When Anthony van Leeuwenhoek of Holland invented the microscope, everything began to change. He first saw micro-organisms, and the world’s eyes were opened to the existence of innumerable creatures that could not be seen with the naked eye. With new information about who the enemy was, humankind was poised for a revolution in the war against dangerous pathogens.

Early Modern Heat Sterilization

As soon as people began to understand that microbes could be the problem, they started focusing on heat as a way of making things safe. In 1803 the French government offered a prize to anyone who could find a way to make food safe to eat. Nicholas Appert won the award for inventing and popularizing the canning of fruits and vegetables. Soon other scientists would discover chemicals and preparations that could kill organisms, such as hypochlorite, hydrogen peroxide, and iodine. Heat, however, would always be the primary method of sterilizing things, and it would really come into its own with Louis Pasteur, who invented germ theory and proved definitively that heat kills microbes.

Improving on Sterilization

Sterilization had been a science for nearly 130 years when Charles Chamberland built the first autoclave in 1884. For years to come, scientists would try many different forms of sterilization. Sulfur dioxide and chlorine, for example, were found to be effective; however, they also damaged many of the items they sterilized. Eventually, medical practices returned to the functions of autoclave sterilization as superior in many applications, and autoclave development became a focus of inventive attention.

Today’s Statim Autoclave

Today, autoclaves that provide steam sterilization are the most commonly used type of sterilizer, so that it’s now possible to buy both a new or a refurbished autoclave sterilizer in many places, and autoclave repair services are easy to locate. Sterilization machines like a refurbished autoclave sterilizer are used by tattoo parlors, by piercing shops, and by a wide variety of medical offices. They are very reliable, and when they do fail nearly all failures are due to either human error in using the machine, or mechanical failure due to improper maintenance.

We’ve come a long way since ancient times, but in some ways, we’ve really not improved on the idea of Aristotle to boil water before drinking it. What we have improved is our methods of using heat and pressure to kill pathogens and keep ourselves safe.