The Chess Master, the Dairy Cows, and the Breast Pump That Changed Hospital Care
Of all the figures in the history of the breast pump, Edward Lasker is the most unlikely.
He was a German-American engineer, an international chess master, a five-time US Open Chess Champion, and the author of several books on chess, Go and checkers. He was not, by any obvious measure, the person you would expect to fundamentally change how hospitals cared for premature infants.
And yet.
The dairy farm years
The most successful electric breast pump emerged in the 1920s out of the collaborative efforts of the chess-playing engineer Edward Lasker and the famous American pediatrician Isaac A. Abt. Working for a cow milking-machine manufacturer, Lasker had what Abt believed to be the perfect background for designing a pump that could be used on human mothers.
Before any of that, Lasker had spent years doing unglamorous work. After emigrating from Germany to the United States in 1914 and struggling to find engineering work in New York, he had eventually been hired by Ernest Gundlach, owner of a cow milking machine business. The job required him to work on dairy farms across Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa. He got up at four thirty every morning to prepare his experimental milking machines for the morning milking, helped farmers bring in hay between milkings, and spent years studying the mechanics of how milk was extracted from cows efficiently and without causing distress.
That specific knowledge turned out to be exactly what Isaac Abt needed.
The problem Abt was trying to solve
Abt invited Lasker to build something he could use in his hospital in Chicago for premature infants who were too weak to nurse. Premature infants often lack the muscle strength and coordination to generate effective suction at the breast. Without adequate milk intake in those critical early weeks, their survival and development were at serious risk.
The pumps available at the time, hand-operated devices descended from Needham's 1854 bellows design, applied steady, constant suction and did not remove milk efficiently or comfortably. Abt believed the problem required a mechanical solution built by someone who understood suction dynamics at a practical, engineering level.
Lasker was that person.
The innovation: intermittent suction
Lasker accepted the challenge and in 1923 filed for a patent for an electric breast pump based on his knowledge of cow milking.
The central innovation in Lasker's design was intermittent suction, suction that cycled on and off in a controlled rhythm rather than applying constant vacuum pressure. This was a direct observation from his dairy farm work. Cow milking machines that cycled their suction were more effective and caused less tissue damage than those applying steady pressure. Applied to a breast pump, the same principle produced something that far more closely mimicked the natural sucking rhythm of a nursing infant than any previous device.
His second patent, filed in 1925 and granted in 1932, refined this further, providing independent control over the production of vacuum and the application of that vacuum, allowing rest periods between successive periods of suction.
In other words, a pump that could breathe the way a baby breathes.
Pumping in your own rhythm
Lasker figured out the pump's rhythm. You still have to figure out your own. Our free Pumping Schedule Guide lays out realistic patterns for exclusive pumpers, working moms, and supply-builders so you can pick what fits.
The reception
Within a few short years the pump was being featured in articles in nursing journals and discussed in medical textbooks. Lasker recalled in his memoirs that the famous pediatrician Joseph B. DeLee wrote to tell him that he considered the machine indispensable in any hospital in which maternity work was done.
"Indispensable in any hospital in which maternity work was done."
Pediatrician Joseph B. DeLee, in a letter to Edward Lasker.
That is a remarkable endorsement. Within less than a decade of filing his patent, Lasker's pump had gone from a solution to one doctor's specific problem to a standard of care in maternity hospitals across the country.
His friends, meanwhile, took the whole thing in stride. As one biographer noted: he invented a mechanical breast pump which saved many premature infants' lives and made Lasker much money, although it caused his friends to refer to him facetiously as "the chest player."
He lived to ninety-five years old. He had time to see what he had started.
Lasker brought the pump to the hospital. We're taking it everywhere else.
Pump-a-Collect is a set of wearable in-bra collection cups with built-in silicone flanges. They replace the flanges and bottles your pump came with and attach right to your existing motor. Same pump, suddenly discreet enough for the school run, the office, or the kitchen.
Shop Pump-a-CollectWhat came next
Lasker's pump was designed for hospital use. The question of whether mothers should be able to use one at home was, for the medical establishment of the 1920s and 1930s, a genuinely controversial one.
Sources: MomMed, Breast Pump History, PubMed, Edward Lasker biographical record.
Behind hospital walls
Next week: the doctors who tried to keep the breast pump behind hospital walls, and why they lost that argument eventually, if not quickly.
