Mar 29, 2013

Dummies For Dummies

It all began with Mary Ward. In the mid nineteenth century, before gah created women (in the workplace), Mary Ward was an Irish astronomer.

And Mary Ward’s cousins built one of the early steam cars, seventeen years before the invention of the automobile:

On August 3, 1869, Mary Ward became known as the first motor vehicle accident victim when she was thrown from her cousins’ invention.

Since then, with the advent of the gas powered automobile, twenty million people have died in car accidents across the world.

Car manufacturers became aware of the need to redesign cars based on the prevention of passenger injury, but first there needed to be a way to measure the body’s response to the sudden, violent force of collisions.

The first attempts to collect the data of impact was done in Detroit on human cadavers. Steel ball bearings were dropped on skulls, cadavers were dumped down unused elevator shafts onto steel plates, and were subjected to head-on collisions and vehicle rollovers.

Recognizing that the results provided by cadavers accounted for only a fraction of the necessary answers, a few researchers in the 1940s became living participants in momentum experiments.

In the 1960s, animals were routinely used to test the newly invented collapsible steering columns during cabin collision studies.

Meanwhile, in a parallel laboratory, construction of the first human simulacra began in the late 1940s and continues to this day, providing more realistic data of human responses, and better means of measuring and collecting these results.