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What would you call a guy who has saved approximately 11,000 lives every year in the US alone and way more than that around the world?\u00a0 You\u2019d probably think that you were reading a cracker of a superhero comic but this guy is for real.\u00a0 Was he a war hero?\u00a0 An emergency response guy like a medic, firefighter or cop?<\/p>\n
Nope \u2013 he was an inventor.\u00a0 What he invented was the three-point seatbelt.\u00a0 His name was Nils Bohlin. In later life, he looked a bit like Father Christmas. Which is kind of appropriate, considering the gift he\u2019s given to the world.<\/p>\n
Bohlin was born in 1920 in Sweden, the country where he worked after graduating with an engineering diploma.\u00a0 His first significant employer was SAAB <\/a>, but he wasn\u2019t working on their cars; his area was on the planes.\u00a0 Specifically, he got to work on ejector seats, which were in hot demand at the time, the time in question being World War 2 when pilots were getting shot down and needing to bail out ASAP.\u00a0 At the time, there was a bit of competition going on, and the German aircraft manufacturer Heinkel got the idea at the same time as SAAB and managed to get an operational ejector seat first.\u00a0 (Did they really independently get the same idea simultaneously?\u00a0 Or was there some skulduggery going on?\u00a0 Plot for a WWII spy thriller here.)<\/p>\n After the war was over (and SAAB had got a good working ejector seat), a new problem was cropping up.\u00a0 The demand for masses of fighter and bomber planes had died down but in the post-war period of prosperity, the demand for and use of the car had soared.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t just a toy for the rich any more.\u00a0 With a lot more cars on the roads going faster thanks to all the technology developed during wartime, there were a lot more accidents.\u00a0 A sort of seat belt had been invented: a two-point lap belt with a buckle that did up in the middle over your stomach.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve been in some classic cars, you may have seen them (I have some very dim memories of using one of these, possibly in the ancient Mini <\/a>\u00a0owned by my grandparents when I was little\u2026 I think).\u00a0 While these two-point jobs were a heck of a lot better than nothing, they were not ideal.\u00a0 For a start off, they didn\u2019t stop your head pitching forwards during a crash thanks to all that momentum with the end result that the driver whacked his\/her head on the steering wheel.\u00a0 You also had the problem of sliding up and out of the seat belt.\u00a0 Then there was the belt itself.\u00a0 At high speeds, that meant all the momentum and force was caught and stopped by a band across your tummy. \u00a0With a heavy metal buckle right in the middle where the force would be greatest. At best, this would make you puke.\u00a0 At worst, it would cause nasty internal injuries.\u00a0 Don\u2019t even think about what would happen if the person wearing the lap belt was a pregnant woman.\u00a0 Something had to be done.<\/p>\n The something was done by Volvo<\/a>, who hired Nils Bohlin to try to improve the design. \u00a0This was 1958 and Volvo had decided that one of their key design principles was going to be safety, safety, safety, rather than merely concentrating on power and speed (one of the CEO\u2019s relatives had been killed in a car crash).\u00a0 Bohlin was the perfect choice. \u00a0After all, he\u2019d had to think about stresses on the human body at speed, restraints and sort of thing when developing ejector seats.\u00a0 Ejector seats had four-pointer restraints but Bohlin knew that this wasn\u2019t going to work in a family car.\u00a0 He wanted a design that could be put on with one hand.\u00a0 As he had four stepchildren and one child, he probably knew all too well that getting multiple straps onto a wriggly child was pretty tricky!\u00a0 On top of that, he had consumer attitudes to contend with.\u00a0 As he said, \u201cThe pilots I worked with in the aerospace industry were willing to put on almost anything to keep them safe in case of a crash, but regular people in cars don\u2019t want to be uncomfortable even for a minute.\u201d The restraints had to be comfortable.<\/p>\n It took him a year of testing, going back to the drawing board, retesting, tinkering and general improving until he came up with the three-point system we are all familiar with today: a belt running from shoulder to hip that attaches to a fixed point at hip level on the opposite side from the shoulder-height anchor points.\u00a0 It was simple.\u00a0 It could be done up with one hand.\u00a0 It was comfortable for men and women (this was the 1950s when the ideal female figure was very, very curvy\u2026).\u00a0 This spread the force of impact across the ribcage and abdomen, which reduced the risk of internal injury dramatically and made slipping out over the top less likely.<\/p>\n
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