It seems so simple to us now. A thin, yet tough strip of webbed nylon fabric attached to three hardened points of the automotive interior frame. It’s easy to use, retractable, and requires no service or maintenance.
This one brilliant modification to an already thought-out invention would have a tremendous impact on automotive survivability and be used nearly unchanged for half a century.
It also took over a half-century for people to actually use this life saving device.
Nils Bohlin, a Swedish mechanical engineer, got his start at Saab aircraft company in 1942. He along with others developed an ejection seat for safe exit of aircraft if the worst-case scenario happened.
According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Bohlin took this experience and started applying it to automotive safety devices, hoping to reduce fatalities and severe injuries. After a year of testing and experimentation, he developed the three-point safety belt.
At the time, the seat belt was not new. The first seat belt patent was issued in 1885 and had been used in everything from horse drawn carriages to roofing ladders.
Automobiles had seat belts too, but they were two point systems that when worn properly, still left occupants open to head and chest injuries. In a time when everything inside a vehicle was made of steel, the two-point seat belt wasn’t enough.
In 1959, Nils Bohlin presented his invention to Volvo. Being a car company obsessed with safety, Volvo put the three-point harness in their PV544 model and sold their first one on August 13, 1959, according to “Car and Driver “magazine.
Volvo saw the massive importance of this invention, so much so that it left the patent open for other car companies to use free of charge. After the addition of the new design, Volvo then tracked every accident their cars were involved in for the next year, over 28,000 incidents, and found that the belts reduced death and injury up to 60% more than before.
The data was clear that Bohlin’s invention was a literal life saver. As a hat tip to this invention, every new Volvo sold today has “since 1959” etched in the seat belt buckle.
It took quite a long time for the seat belt to catch on. At the time of Bohlin’s patent, only 14% of people in the United States wore a seatbelt, AAA Auto Club reported from a member survey. It took until 1967 for the Federal Government to require seat belts to be standard on automobiles sold in the United States.
Auto makers tried every trick in the book to get customers to warm to wearing their seat belts, including the much-maligned automatic seatbelt.
In 1981, the first state law requiring drivers to actually wear their seat belt was rolled out in New York, with other states trickling into their own regulations. Presently, only New Hampshire is the only state in the nation that doesn’t require a seat belt on while driving. Nationally, 91.6% of drivers surveyed wear their seatbelts, and they are said to eliminate almost 15,000 deaths a year, says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
In 2002, Nils Bohlin died of a heart attack, and was laid to rest in his home country of Sweden. The same year was a milestone for the three-point seat belt, crossing the one million lives saved mark, said Volvo in a press release upon his death.
With modern safety features like airbags, crumple zones and driver assistance, some drivers might be complacent enough to leave their seatbelts dangling off the B-pillar. It is important to remember that these systems work with the seatbelts, not as a substitute for one. Wearing your seatbelt is still the best defense for surviving an automobile crash.
As for me, I’ll see you on the road… buckled!
Taylor Bryant is an automotives instructor for Augusta Technical College.
