Public relations considerations aside, there were drawbacks to stiffs, stiffness being prime among them. In a 1964 research paper on heads crashing through windshields, Patrick wrote that the joints of cadavers had to be "loosened by manipulation to the point where they had about the same resistance ... as a living human with muscles partly tensed." This after screw-mounting accelerometers on the back of the skull and replacing the brain with gelatin of like weight and specific gravity. Dressing the things began to seem like the least of a lab man's worries.

The main problem with corpses was that there weren't enough of them to go around. For this reason, much of the early impact survival work was carried out on animals. A description of the second annual Stapp Car Crash Conference, in 1956, begins like a child's recollections of a trip to the circus. "We saw chimpanzees riding rocket sleds, 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." Steering wheels back then were not collapsible, and had a disagreeable habit of impaling the driver's chest should the car's front end be smashed in. By 1964, steering columns had killed 1.2 million drivers, and researchers like Patrick felt justified in their treatment of the animals. (The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did not, and the event inspired "vehement protest.")

Pigs were popular subjects because of their similarities to humans "in terms of their organ set-up," as one industry insider put it, and because they can be coaxed into a useful approximation of a human sitting in a car. As far as I can tell, they are also similar to a human sitting in a car in terms of their intelligence set-up, and their manners set-up, and pretty much everything else excluding possibly their use of cupholders and ability to work the radio buttons. The Belgian hare was also considered a good sitter. A paper in the "Proceedings of the Seventh Stapp Car Crash Conference" -- another book best used as a pillow -- includes a drawing of an adorable little bunny sitting upright in an adorable little Erector Set-like jeep. Less adorable was the experiment's objective: "To produce injuries sufficiently severe to cause death and possibly decapitation of the test animals."

By now, of course, the tolerance limits of the human body have long ago been worked out, and dummies and computers stand in for corpses and lab animals. I talked to a crash-test dummy engineer, Mike Beebe, who works at Applied Safety Technologies Corporation in North Milan, Ohio. During calibration, Beebe said, modern crash-test dummies endure the same sorts of indignities that humans and pigs once did: The Head Drop ("we drop its head on a steel plate"), the Thorax Impact ("we impact its chest with a probe") and the Torso Flexion Test ("a clamp-his-legs-down, bend him-over kinda thing").

I asked Beebe if a lot of sadists apply for work at his company. "No," he said, "but I'll tell you, it sure is a stress reliever sometimes to go out and smack a dummy around." Beebe expressed guarded admiration for Patrick and other human forebears of the crash-test dummy. "It takes an interesting combination of courage and uh, other things, to make you do that."

Recent Stories