First Technology Safety Systems
Posted on 02/18/2005 3:22:42 AM PST by Pharmboy
First Technology Safety Systems
These long-suffering human surrogates are lineal descendants of crash-test
dummies Samuel W. Alderson began manufacturing in the early 1950's.
Samuel W. Alderson, a physicist and engineer who was a pioneer in developing the long-suffering, curiously beautiful human surrogates known as automotive crash-test dummies, died Feb. 11 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90.
The cause was complications of myelofibrosis and pneumonia, his grandson Matthew Alderson said.
The dummy that is the current industry standard for frontal crash testing in the United States is a lineal descendant of one Mr. Alderson began manufacturing for the aerospace industry in the early 1950's. It is used today by automakers and government agencies to test safety features like seat belts.
Seat belts, air bags and other safety features are estimated to have saved nearly 329,000 lives since 1960, according to a study released last month by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
"You have to consider that a test dummy basically motivates all restraint design, whether belts or air bags," Rolf Eppinger, chief of the National Transportation Biomechanics Research Center at the safety administration, said in a telephone interview.
Formally known as an A.T.D., for anthropomorphic test device, the crash-test dummy, with its graceful form and inscrutable face, has also become an artifact of contemporary culture.
Samuel W. Alderson was born in Cleveland on Oct. 21, 1914, and reared in California. He graduated from high school at 15 and attended several colleges - Reed; California Institute of Technology the University of California, Berkeley; and Columbia - interrupting his education frequently to help his father run the family sheet metal business. Returning to Berkeley, he began working toward a Ph.D. under the physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence, but he left without completing his dissertation.
Samuel W. Alderson produced the
first automotive crash-test dummy,
the V.I.P., in 1968.
During World War II, Mr. Alderson helped develop missile guidance systems that used tiny electric motors. After the war, he worked for I.B.M. in an early effort to develop a prosthetic arm powered by a similar motor. Though the arm was not practical at the time, it was a harbinger of Mr. Alderson's long career in making simulacra.
In 1952, he started his own company, Alderson Research Laboratories, originally based in New York. Soon afterward, he was awarded a contract to develop an anthropomorphic dummy for testing jet ejection seats. Mr. Alderson's early dummies and those of his competitors were fairly primitive, with no pelvic structure and little spinal articulation.
At the time, automakers were seeking a dummy for their own use. In the 1930's, with traffic fatalities becoming a growing public health concern, manufacturers began to explore the design of safer cars. But the new science of crash testing raised a seemingly intractable problem: to study the effect of a crash on the human body, researchers would have to equip the test car with a live human being. Volunteers were few.
As a result, the first crash-test dummies were cadavers. While useful in collecting basic data, they lacked the durability required for repeated trials. And because no two cadavers were exactly the same size and shape, no two tests were strictly comparable.
What automakers needed was an army of identical humanlike figures that could be tested and retested, were easy to repair and yielded a broad spectrum of data. By the 1950's, the industry was looking into adapting aerospace dummies. With the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, the search for an anatomically faithful dummy intensified.
In 1968, Mr. Alderson produced the first dummy, called the V.I.P., built specifically for automotive testing. With the dimensions of an average adult man, the dummy had a steel rib cage, articulated joints and a flexible neck and lumbar spine. Cavities held instruments for collecting data.
"The things that the test dummies had to do, they had to accelerate and had to have weight distribution like a human," Mr. Alderson's son Jeremy said in an interview. "They had to take impact like a human."
In the early 1970's, researchers at General Motors built a new dummy, Hybrid I, combining parts from Mr. Alderson's dummy with those of a rival, Sierra Engineering. An improved model, Hybrid II, developed in collaboration with the traffic safety administration, quickly followed. Hybrid III, released in 1977, remains the industry standard. Today, Mr. Alderson's average-man dummy has a family: dummy women, children and infants.
Mr. Alderson was widowed once and divorced three times. Besides his grandson Matthew, he is survived by a sister, Esther Lustig of San Diego; two sons from his second marriage, William, of St. Augustine, Fla., and Jeremy, of Hector, N.Y.; and three other grandchildren.
His cultural legacy includes Vince and Larry, the ubiquitous dummy stars of highway safety advertisements in the 1980's and 90's; the television cartoon "Incredible Crash Dummies"; and the pop group Crash Test Dummies.
Mr. Alderson's other work included manufacturing humanlike figures called medical phantoms that were used to measure exposure to radiation, and synthetic wounds that oozed mock blood and were worn by soldiers during training exercises.
"Those things were coming home all the time," Jeremy Alderson recalled. "And they'd be out in the foyer until finally my mom said, 'Don't bring those things into the house!' "
Very wooden, no doubt.
In a show of respect, Michael Moore, Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, and John Kerry have agreed to test drive a new car in one of his crash simulators.
Did Vince and Larry send flowers?
Well, you get to a ripe old age, you hit the wall, and then you're gone...
RIP, Sam.
RIP. 'Dummy', indeed.
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