Car Safety
During his work at Holloman Air Force Base, Stapp became interested in the implications of his work for car safety. At the time, cars were generally not fitted with seatbelts, but Stapp had shown that a properly restrained human could survive far greater impacts than an unrestrained one. Many traffic-accident deaths were therefore avoidable but for the lack of seatbelts. Stapp became a strong advocate and publicist for this cause, frequently steering interviews onto the subject, organizing conferences, and staging demonstrations (including the first known use of automobile crash test dummies). At one point, the military objected to funding work they believed was outside their purview, but they were persuaded when Stapp gave them statistics showing that more Air Force pilots were killed in traffic accidents than in plane crashes. The culmination of his efforts came in 1966 when Stapp witnessed Lyndon B. Johnson sign the law making manufacture of cars with seatbelts (lapbelts at that time) compulsory.
Read more about this topic: John Stapp
Famous quotes containing the words car and/or safety:
“Fifty years from now, it will not matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you lived in, how much you had in your bank account, or what your clothes looked like, But the world may be a little better because you were important in the life of a child.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in The Winning Family, by Louise Hart, ch. 1 (1987)
“[As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace between our parents’ safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)