Karen’s Opinion

I must have too much time on my hands because I have been looking up some crazy things. I wondered when and where the first crash test dummy was used. Have you ever entered a search for crash test dummy?

I appreciate the work that crash test dummies do. Crash test dummies are full-scale replicas of human beings, weighted and articulated to simulate the behavior of a human body, and instrumented to record as much data as possible on accident variables such as speed of impact, crushing force, bending, folding, or torque of the body, and deceleration rates during a collision for use in crash tests. They remain indispensable in the development of new makes and models of all types of vehicles, from family sedans to fighter aircraft. It would be impossible to have the safety mechanisms installed in our vehicles if we did not have a way to test such mechanisms. I doubt anyone today would volunteer to go through the tests that crash test dummies do.

Detroit’s Wayne State University was the first to begin serious work on collecting data on the effects of high-speed collisions on the human body. In the late 1930s, there were no reliable data on the response of the human body to extreme physical injury, and no effective tools existed to measure such responses. Biomechanics was a field barely in its infancy. It was therefore necessary to employ two types of test subjects in order to develop initial data sets.

The first test subjects were human cadavers. EEWWW! They were used to obtain fundamental information about the human body’s ability to withstand the crushing and tearing forces typically experienced in a high-speed accident. To such an end, steel ball bearings were dropped on skulls, and bodies were dumped down unused elevator shafts onto steel plates. Cadavers fitted with crude accelerometers were strapped into automobiles and subjected to head-on collisions and vehicle rollovers.

The value in human lives saved as a result of cadaver research was profound. As a result of design changes implemented up to 1987, cadaver research has since saved 8500 lives annually. For every cadaver used, each year 61 people survive due to wearing seat belts, 147 live due to air bags, and 68 survive windshield impact.

However, work with cadavers presented almost as many problems as it resolved. Not only were there the moral and ethical issues related to working with the dead, but there were also research concerns. The majority of cadavers available were older European American adults who had died non-violent deaths; they did not represent a demographic cross-section of accident victims. Deceased accident victims could not be employed because any data that might be collected from such experimental subjects would be compromised by the cadaver’s previous injuries. Since no two cadavers are the same, and since any specific part of a cadaver could only be used once, it was extremely difficult to achieve reliable comparison data. In addition, child cadavers were not only difficult to obtain, but both legal and public opinion made them effectively unusable. Moreover, as crash testing became more routine, suitable cadavers became increasingly scarce. As a result, biometric data were limited in extent and skewed toward the older white males.

Enter the crash test dummy!