In 1897, George Smith, a 25-year-old London taxi driver became the first person to be arrested from drunk driving, after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings.
Even though they invented the Breathalyzer, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that public awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving increased and police officers were getting more serious about drinking while driving. Lawmakers were trying to get more people to follow the laws about drinking while driving and creating more detailed laws. In the United states the legal drinking age was 21. Some of the punishments you have to go though are jail time, fines ,loss of their driver's licenses and increased car insurance rates. Some drunk drivers have to have special devices like breathalyzers installed in their vehicles to test their blood alcohol level. These devices make it so you have to breathe into a device on the cars dashboard. The device measures the amount of alcohol vapors in your breath and you can’t drive if your BAC is below a certain level.
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In 1936, Dr.Rolla Harger a professor at the University of Indiana patented the drunkometer. It was a balloon-like device, all you had to do was blow into it and it would determine the amount of alcohol in your body by mixing the alcohol vapors in your breath with a chemical solution. It was “the very first stable breath-testing instrument to measure alcohol levels.” In 1938, research by the American Medical Association and the National Safety Council made the new commonly used BAC limit in your body,1.5. It became the first legal limit for blood alcohol concentration. This made the perfect test for police officers to determine whether someone had too much to