"Any of us who [have walked] away from an automobile accident is likely to have a dummy to thank."
JackJensen, General Motors
In the fate 1940s, the U.S. Air Force wanted data on how deployment of their newly designed ejection seats would affect the pilots who were strapped into them. For the first time, a crash test dummy was created to obtain the information. This very smart dummy was named "Sierra Sam" and was built in 1949 by American Samuel'- Alderson (1914-2005) in partnership with the Sierra-engineering Co.
Prior to the arrival of the crash test dummy, human cadavers were used to guide safety design. Working with corpses was of course highly unpleasant, but also the human bodies were very limited in terms of the information they could convey to researchers. It was also impossible to use them repeatedly to any useful purpose, and although they gave limited information on what injuries might be sustained, they gave no clue how the living would react in the scenario under investigation. But Alderson's carefully designed fake humans could. While crash test dummies were made famous by their well-publicized work in car safety, their use in the auto industry began more than twenty years after dummies were first created.
Alderson remained involved in crash test dummy research after his first invention, and in 1968, responding to the dangers of driving, he designed a car-specific dummy that he dubbed "V.I.P." This very important dummy and its modern descendents have been used to test seat belts, airbags, reinforced doors, antilock brakes, as well as influence total car designs. Without complaining they have endured endless simulated collisions to measure velocity of impact, crushing force, deceleration rates, bending, folding, and torque of the body. We owe modern automobile safety features to "anthropomorphic test devices." For dummies, they turned out to be very smart.
