Test Sequence unusual crash
W e need information on what the human body can withstand is the professor at Wayne State University Retirement Biomechanics Lawrence M Patrick will tell you if you ask him why he has agreed to be slammed in the chest by a pendulum metal 22 pounds, to launch a knee repeatedly against a metal bar fitted with a load cell and initiate some 400 laps on a fast sled deceleration that mimics the effects of a car crashing head on Wall 1960 to 1975, Lawrence Patrick was a human crash-test dummy.
Patrick's field of study was a macabre offshoot of the automotive safety industry known as the search for the survival of the human impact You might ask, as I Why didn t they use dummies Crash test This was the other side of the equation a dummy can tell you what impact an accident has been unleashed on different parts of the dummy body, but without knowing how the impact of the real part of the body can take, the information was useless You first need to know, for example, that the maximum amount of a chest can compress without causing injury to the soft wet things inside, it is two inches and three quarters or the speed required for a human skull to penetrate a windshield to 1964 is 12 9 mph things like that.
Although Patrick admit to anything beyond hurt a little, he and his students endured an amazing amount of pain in the name of improving automobile safety Her 1963 study of facial injuries includes a photograph a young man who seems to rest in peace with his eyes closed allusions closer inspection which, in fact, something not peaceful is about to take place to begin with, man uses a book called injuries head as a pillow uncomfortable, but probably more enjoyable than actually read Hovering just above the cheek of the man is a metal rod prohibiting identified in the caption as a gravity impactor text informs those of us inconsiderate enough to actually read the volunteer waited several days for the swelling to subside, then the test was continued until the power limit that he could the second nd part of supporting the study was to examine the fracture mechanism, fracture above comes not by our friend gravity impactor, but High-speed, pneumatically driven rotary hammer blows to the face.
There is only one type of man who will put up with this, and that is a dead God help you if you lived near Wayne State University in the mid 60s and you gave your body to Patrick science and his men take as much as possible, and then, as he said, we continued with corpses into the range of injuries in the name of safer routes and road trips, the dead were strapped in deceleration trolleys and automobiles that break, press the head with steel pendulums, sent through the windshield and broke simulated intersections.
I asked Patrick, who is 79 now, so the public was outraged by this particular scientific use of the dead there was a break between all our communications, as if he spoke of some Third World country ever now is around the installation of telephone lines abroad That was the way he spoke, neutral, somewhat formally, as he read from a script for a propaganda film of the 50 Some were yes, but the tests were conducted under strict regulations the bodies were treated with respect Their faces were covered and they were dressed.
I asked him what kind of dress the corpses wore for the occasion The pause was a little more this time, they were dressed in a leotard I tried to imagine Patrick muscling a body of 170 pounds in a leotard I Danskins wanted to know more I wanted to ask what color leotards were, and if researchers have never laughed at the absurdity of it all, but I could not help it wasn t in the script I said, I see.
PR considerations aside, there were drawbacks to stiffs stiffness being the first of them in a 1964 research paper on the heads that split windshields, Patrick wrote that the dead seals were to be loosened by manipulation to the point where they were about the same strength as a human being living with partly stiffened muscles after this accelerometers mounting screws on the back of the skull and replace the brain with the weight of gelatin and such density dress things started to seem the least of the worries of a laboratory man.
The main problem with the bodies was that there weren t enough to go around for this reason, much of the work of survival of the early impact was performed on animals A description of the second annual Stapp Conference car accident in 1956, began as a child's memories of a trip to the circus We saw chimpanzees riding sleds rocket, a bear on an impact swing We observed a pig, anesthetized and placed in a sitting position on the swing in the harness, crashed into a deep dish steering wheel at about 10 mph at the time Flywheels are not foldable, and had a nasty habit of impaling the driver's chest should end before the car to be smashed in 1964 steering columns had killed the drivers 1 2 million, and researchers like Patrick felt justified in their treatment of animals the Society for the prevention cruelty to animals has not, and event inspired vehement protests.
The pigs were popular subjects because of their similarities to humans based on their body placement, as industry insider put it, and because they can be brought to a useful approximation of a session human in a car as far as I can tell, they are also similar to a human sitting in a car in terms of intelligence set up, and manners set-up, and just about everyone except perhaps the use of cupholders and ability to work the radio buttons the Belgian hare was also considered a good guardian a document in the minutes of the seventh Stapp Car Crash Conference another best used as a pillow includes a drawing of an adorable little rabbit sitting upright in an adorable little jeep Erector Set was less lovely as objective experience to produce injuries serious enough to cause death and perhaps décapitat ion of the test animals.
Now, of course, the limits of tolerance of the human body has long been working there outside, and models and computers replace cadavers and laboratory animals, I was talking to a crash-test dummy engineer Mike Beebe, who works in security technologies applied Corporation north of Milan, Ohio During calibration, Beebe said, modern crash test dummies are enduring the same kinds of indignities that humans and pigs once that the fall head we drop her head on a steel plate, the thorax impact us an impact on his chest with a probe and torso bending test clamp her legs down, bend him over a little thing.
I asked Beebe if many sadistic apply for work at the company No, he said, but I'll tell you, it sure is a stress reliever sometimes go out and slap a model around Beebe expressed guarded admiration for Patrick and other human ancestors of the crash test dummy must be an interesting combination of courage and uh, other things do you do.
Former columnist Mary Roach Show is the latest author of Adventures on the Gulp His previous books include Alimentary Canal Stiff, Spook and packing for Mars.
I was a human crash test dummy, human, dummy, crash Stapp Conference.
Умань, Черкасская область, Украина