• Patents. The research LaViolette had carried out at Harvard on determining the pneumatic characteristics of breathing apparatus components had given him the ability to mentally simulate the pneumatic functioning of an entire breathing apparatus.  It was a small step for him to later have the intuitive flash that led his improved dual bag rebreather system design.  Whereas the earlier Harvard-MIT computer simulation study had not led to any design breakthroughs, LaViolette, working on his own after he had left Harvard, had come up with a major improvement.  He built a working model and found that the wearer's breathing resistance was dramatically reduced, excessive breathing resistance being a major problem in such systems.  Such a system could be used for protecting fire fighters from hazardous fumes, for survival in mine collapse accidents and mine rescue operations, and for underwater diving.  In 1973, he filed a patent on his design: U.S. No. 3,837,337 (1974), Canada No. 976,833 (1975).  His Chicago patent lawyer happened to formerly be a member of the legal team that had patented the atomic bomb during World War II.  In 1977, U. S. Divers Corporation secured a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Bureau of Mines to test LaViolette's breathing bag design for use in an underwater rebreather.
• Solar-Aquatics Corp.  In 1974 LaViolette founded the Solar-Aquatics Corporation to develop, patent, and market his improved breathing apparatus and also to develop alternative energy technology inventions.  One of his solar inventions was a method of inexpensively fabricating a flexible plastic fresnel lens solar concentrator.
• Federal Government Reform.  During this time, LaViolette conducted a study of the government certification process for rebreathers since manufacturers would have an incentive to look at improved rebreather designs only if OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) properly enforced their industry standards.  At this time OSHA was known as NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.  LaViolette issued a Freedom of Information Act request and obtained air pressure test data that OSHA (NIOSH) had on file for certifying various rebreather systems.  In studying this data, he discovered that one device had been improperly certified, that its test data showed that it failed to meet OSHA standards.  He discovered that the inhalation and exhalation pressure readings specifying the breathing resistance of the device had been improperly interchanged in OSHA's records.  The exhalation resistance was always higher than inhalation resistance on such units, so by interchanging the measured values, the certifier was able to make the unit pass, since the exhalation resistance threshold value was always the more stringent of the two.  On March 10, 1977, the Fire Independent, a fire fighter industry newspaper, issued a press release about this and published LaViolette's discovery of this certification error in their March 10, 1977 issue.  To LaViolette, the error seemed highly suspicious, possible evidence of willfull data falsification by government officials engaging in industry collusion.

After making sure that OSHA/NIOSH corrected the error in their records, LaViolette made a trip at his own expense from Oregon to OSHA's West Virginia Testing and Certification Laboratory in order to witness first hand a rerun of the breathing resistance certification test on the device.  What he saw was appauling.  Thinking that LaViolette would not catch on, the certification personnel conducted the test in such a way that allowed the faulty device to pass.  This was the same unit that the Boston Fire Department had earlier pulled from service in their precinct when their own investigations revealed its dangers.   They found that the leakage from that the rebreather was so high that it would supply air to their fire fighters for as little as 10% of its rated time, 5 minutes, as opposed to the rated 45 minutes.  After LaViolette made sure that the OSHA testing personnel had corrected three serious errors in their measurement procedures, he had the officials rerun the test.  This time the device clearly fail the test, its exhalation resistance soaring 40% over the legal level.  LaViolette requested that OSHA require that the manufacturer issue an immediate warning to customers and request a recall of the faulty apparatus.  OSHA refused, wishing instead to give the manufacturer a year or more to come up with a changed design, allowing continued industry use of the rebreather.

LaViolette had published a total of two articles on rebreather apparatus design in the Fire Independent, mentioning the certification error in his second article.^{[57, 58, 59]}  He had written a third article covering the OSHA certification fiasco he had experienced in West Virginia and this was due to be published in the same newspaper.  The article would have blown the lid over suspicious activities by this U.S. government certification lab, exposed once and for all the dangers of this miscertified unit, and called into question the certification validity of other rebreathers being sold.  But before this issue could be published, Harvey Utech, the editor and owner of the Fire Independent, received a threat from the rebreather manufacturer that was so serious that he was compelled to suddenly close his business and move to Canada.  LaViolette himself was also greeted with a threat from an OSHA government lawyer, implying that if he knew what was best for himself he should forget the whole thing, that he would not stand a chance against government litigation.  LaViolette even failed to stir much interest from the labor union, other than to send a mild letter to OSHA. He was not able to devote additional time to the matter since he had begun his doctoral work.  Besides it seemed as if he was confronting a veritable brick wall.  Although years later, he often wondered when reading news stories reporting that fire fighters had died of smoke inhalation or miners had died of asphixiation in mine collapses, whether these lives could have been saved if the breathing apparatuses they had been wearing had been properly certified.
• As one other related public service contribution, on November 29,1977, LaViolette participated in an OSHA public hearing on the Code of Federal Regulations that govern testing procedures for breathing apparatus (30 CFR Part 11).  At the hearing he submitted a write up of his recommendations for revision of OSHA's testing procedures.