KEY POINTS:
Tom Bourdillon came so close to being a household name. He was just 91.5m away but to have crossed that distance would probably have meant death for him and his fellow climber Charles Evans. So they turned back.
Three days later, Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzing Norgay succeeded
where they had failed - they reached Earth's highest point, the peak of Mount Everest, and claimed immortality.
Bourdillon did not live long enough to make another attempt. After his early death, his name lived on in the mountaineering community, but for the public he passed into obscurity.
Only now, more than 50 years later, he has the chance of being honoured again - as a scientist.
When he was not tackling the world's peaks, Bourdillon worked for the British Government as one of the pioneers of rocket design. As a sideline he designed equipment to help mountaineers breathe at high altitudes.
He was convinced the apparatus in use was inefficient. It blew oxygen from a cylinder across the mountaineer's face to supplement open air, which meant some oxygen escaped. It would be better, he believed, to clamp a mask over the mountaineer's mouth so no oxygen escaped, and have a second cylinder into which the mountaineer breathed out, filled with soda lime to absorb carbon dioxide.
Late in 1952, Bourdillon received a grant so he and his father Robert, a medical researcher, could design a closed cylinder system, which they hurriedly built in a lab at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Aylesbury, and then whisked off to Snowdonia for tests.
Soon after, a team of British climbers led by John Hunt, and including Bourdillon and Edmund Hillary, set off to conquer Everest. Bourdillon and Evans, a brain surgeon, used the new closed-circuit apparatus.
Hillary and Tensing stuck with the usual open apparatus. Despite their heavy breathing equipment, the rocket scientist and the brain surgeon scaled most of Everest at record speed, covering the stage between 7864m and 8321m in 90 minutes.
The same stretch took Hillary and Tenzing more than two hours.
But at that very high altitude, as the temperature fell, Evans' breathing equipment was giving him problems, and Bourdillon risked frostbite in his hands by adjusting it.
They reached the final camp struck in 1952 by a Swiss expedition, and having rested, set off again. Arriving at a sheltered area at 11am, on May 26, 1953, they decided to change the breathing canisters to ensure they had enough oxygen to reach the top.
Ten minutes later, Charles Evans was in serious difficulties. He needed to take six breaths for every step.
At 1pm, they emerged on to Everest's south summit, at 8760m, just 91.5m from their destination, but it had taken them an hour longer than expected. Bourdillon, approaching exhaustion, took a hard look at Evans, and knew they had to turn back.
"The two men were an awe-inspiring sight," wrote Sir John Hunt, the expedition leader, who watched them struggle back exhausted to camp.
"With their great loads of oxygen on their backs and masks on their faces, they looked like figures from another world. From head to foot they were encased in ice."
Bourdillon's failure had lasting implications, because to this day, the only breathing kits for mountaineers are open-circuit.
All further interest in Bourdillon's idea seemed to have died with him - until five years ago, when Dr Jeremy Windsor, part of a team at University College London studying medical techniques in extreme environments, wrote a paper pointing out that Bourdillon's equipment had allowed him and his partner to ascend more than 7925m quickly.
"Combining recent advances in breathing circuit technology with decades-old wisdom about closed-circuit oxygen systems, it may be possible to transform the way mountaineers travel at high altitude," he said.
The article was spotted by Dr Roger McMorrow, an Irish anaesthetist who, like Dr Windsor, is part of the Cauldwell Xtreme Everest project - a group of medics who went to Everest last year and set up the world's highest laboratory at 7925m.
They worked on developing a new version of Bourdillon's equipment. Dr McMorrow is convinced it is possible to produce a modern version of Bourdillon's equipment that would work at the highest altitudes.
"With an open circuit, an awful lot of oxygen is wasted and it becomes less efficient the faster you breathe. A closed circuit can deliver higher than sea level amounts of oxygen at high altitudes," he said.
He is also working with the private research firm Smiths Medical, the medical arm of the giant Smiths Group, on a miniaturised system for sufferers of the increasingly common disease COPD, which restricts breathing, making it hard for sufferers to go out because they must be near an oxygen source. The equipment could return their mobility.
Tom Bourdillon died on July 29, 1956, aged 31. He was climbing the Alps.
- INDEPENDENT
