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Wherever modern dentistry is practiced, the cryogenic gas known as nitrous oxide, composed of two parts nitrogen and one part oxygen (N₂O), has functioned as a viable pain killer and sedative for more than 170 years. However, when English chemist Joseph Priestley published his discovery in 1775, the scientist referred to the inert gas as “phlogistacated nitrous air,” which he had created by heating iron filings dampened with nitric acid. N₂O’s original use was anything but that of a medical nature.

Historically, nitrous oxide was first used around 1790 as a recreational drug by Englishman Humphrey Davy, who tested the substance on himself and friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These gentlemen of leisure discovered, at informal social situations called “laughing gas parties,” that N₂O not only dulled the sensation of pain, it also had a mirthful, albeit hallucinogenic, effect on those who inhaled it.

In the 1840s, nitrous oxide was introduced in America by medical researcher Gardner Quincy Colton. The substance was first commercially manufactured in this country by Trenton, New Jersey’s George Poe, inventor of the respirator and cousin to famed poet Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was the first to liquefy N₂O by carefully heating ammonium nitrate, which decomposed into N₂O and water vapor. Poe also discovered that the addition of various phosphates created a purer gas (like modern medical-grade nitrous oxide, for example) at lower brewing temperatures.

Dentist Horace Wells first used medical-grade nitrous oxide as a legitimate sedative because dentists, particularly in rural America, did not have access to an anesthesiologist. The gas enabled them to operate, yet maintain some form of communication with conscious patients. Today, medical N₂O is a controlled substance and is monitored by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).