Auto Safety

Here are a few people that change auto safety forever.

 

Table of Contents

 

 

• Introduction

• Table of Contents

• About Samuel Alderson

• About Ralph Nader

• Henry Ford

• Conclusion

 

 

About Samuel Alderson

Samuel Alderson was born in Cleveland, Ohio on October 21, 1914. He died on February 11, 2005. He was a great inventor for crash test dummy. For example, during the last half of the twentieth century Samuel made something to keep drivers safe. We call them seat belts. Samuel made more things seat belts though and change the way auto safety was forever.

 

Samuel was raised in southern California as a toddler where his father ran a custom sheet-metal and sign shop. He graduated from high school at the age of 15 and went on to intermittently study at Reed College, Caltech, Columbia and UC Berkeley. He completed his formal education at the University of California, Berkeley under the tutelage of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence, but did not complete his doctoral dissertation.

 

In 1952, he began his own company, Alderson Research Laboratories (ARL), and quickly won a contract to create an anthropometric dummy for use in testing aircraft ejection seats. At about the same time, automobile manufacturers were being challenged to produce safer vehicles, and to do so without relying on live volunteers or human cadavers.

 

In 1966, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was passed, which together with Ralph  Nader’s book, “Unsafe at Any Speed” put the search for an anatomically faithful test dummy into high gear. With this as a goal, Samuel Alderson produced the V.I.P., a dummy designed to mimic an average male’s weight and to reproduce the effects of impact like a real person. His work went on to see the creation of the Hybrid family of test dummies, which as of the beginning of the 21st century are the de facto standards for testing.

 

Samuel also worked for the U.S. military. During World War II, he helped develop an optical coating to improve the vision of submarine periscopes, and worked on depth charge and missile guidance technology. He also helped create dummies, that reacted to radiation, and synthetic wounds, used in emergency training simulations, which behaved like real wounds. Based on that experience, he formed another company that he managed until shortly before his death, Radiology Support Devices (RSD), to supply the healthcare industry.

 

Alderson died at his home in Marina Del Rey, California, due to complications from myelofibrosis. Alderson was widowed once and divorced three times.

About Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader was born in February 27, 1934. He is an American political activist, as well as an author, lecturer, and attorney. Areas of particular concern to Nader include consumer protection, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government.

 

Ralph published his book  “Unsafe at Any Speed” in 1965. It’s about a critique of the safety record of American automobile manufacturers in general, and particularly the first-generation Chevrolet Corvair. In 1999, a New York University panel of journalists ranked Unsafe at Any Speed 38th among the top 100 pieces of journalism of the 20th century.

 

Henry Ford

Henry Ford was born into a farm family in 1863 near Dearborn, Michigan, and showed an early interest in mechanics. He fixed neighbors’ watches and built his first steam engine at 15.

 

He tinkered constantly, and as America’s first automobiles emerged, Ford focused on internal combustion engines. John W. Lambert invented the nation’s first gasoline-powered automobile in 1891. Five years later, Ford unveiled his own “horseless carriage,” which he named the “Quadricycle,” because it ran on four bicycle tires. The Quadricycle, which steered with a tiller much like a boat, had just two speeds with no reverse.

Ford at the time was chief engineer at Thomas Edison’s thriving Edison Illuminating Company, but his venturesome spirit led him to strike out on his own to try his hand at automotive engineering. Ford left with the encouragement of Edison, who later became one of his closest friends.

“He was always willing to take risks,” says Bob Casey, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

“In 1901, when his first company went belly up, he built this race car and literally risked his life in a race to raise the public perception of him that (he) knew how to build these newfangled machines,” Casey says. “It was a pretty gutsy thing to do.”

 

Conclusion

3 people that change auto history forever. Go online and find more about Samuel, Ralph, and Henry.