Life savers

Just think about that for a moment. Let’s call it 1.5 million lives saved. It’s the entire population of a large city like Munich, or Milan. It’s 15 times as many people as died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It’s 500 times the terrible death toll of 9/11.

Saving this many lives is an enormous contribution to humanity. And it’s a contribution that’s easily taken for granted – because it is one of deaths avoided. Because these deaths did not happen, they seem to weigh less somehow than the loss of life in the horrible events listed above. It’s easy to forget the hundreds of thousands of mothers that have had their son or daughter come home safely, the brothers who still have sisters, the sons who still have fathers – the lives lived happily and not violently cut short, thanks to Mr Bohlin’s simple invention.

I am talking about the three-point seatbelt. Bohlin was an engineer with the SAAB aircraft division, working on restraint systems for aircraft ejection seats. He was therefore very familiar with the four- or five-point harnesses that had been used in aircraft since the Thirties. In 1958 he was recruited by Volvo as the company’s first Chief Safety Engineer. The story goes that a close relative of Volvo’s then CEO, Gunnar Engelau, had died in a car crash, and that as a result he pushed his company hard to improve product safety.

Simple lap belts had been fitted to cars for a long time – they were invented as early as 1885, in fact. But they were next to useless in even moderate impacts – the buckle would often inflict terrible abdominal injuries, and of course, there was nothing to stop the unfortunate occupant’s torso jack-knifing forward in a crash and meeting the solid steel harpoon that doubled as a steering column back in those days, before other fine engineers came up with devices like collapsible columns or (much later) airbags.

Bohlin applied his brilliant mind to the problem. The ideal would, of course, be to fit the very secure multi-point harnesses that pilots wore, and that race and rally drivers wear to this day. But these are a pain to put on, and even with inertia reels (which weren’t invented until 1969, again by Volvo) for the shoulder straps, they make accessing controls difficult. Bohlin knew that drivers and passengers would simply not wear them. He wanted to design something so simple that it could be put on and removed with one hand.

His solution was like many strokes of true genius – so simple that it seems obvious, like it did not need inventing at all: the good old three-point seatbelt that most of us have worn every time we’ve driven a car, and hopefully wear every time we get into a car these days. [Quick public safety notice: I’ve seen photos and video of what happens when you don’t wear a seatbelt in the rear seats. Those images stopped me sleeping for months. Please always wear your belt, no matter where you are sitting. Always.]

Just to be a completist, I should mention that, like almost every automotive invention, the first inventor is disputed. Roger W. Griswold and Hugh DeHaven (author of the catchily titled 1942 research paper ‘Mechanical analysis of survival in falls from heights of fifty to one hundred and fifty feet’) filed a very similar US patent in 1955. But they did not manage to get it into production, so I think Bohlin really does deserve the honour of being the inventor.

Bohlin went on to have a long career with Volvo, but it’s this great achievement he’s remembered for. He lived a quiet life, and while he won many awards over his career (including being inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1999) his is not a household name in the way of many of our sporting ‘heroes’. Nor was he a rich man, as many sports stars are – and that introduces us to our second hero…

This one is not a person, but a company – Volvo. Because Volvo did a very rare thing in 1959. Bohlin was a company employee. As such, Volvo owned the rights to the intellectual property that was contained in Bohlin’s patent. Most companies, in most industries, would do precisely what patents are designed to allow them to do – exploit it to give themselves a competitive advantage, and to make money for their shareholders and employees. That would have been perfectly legitimate – to fit the newly invented three-point seatbelts exclusively to Volvo cars for the 20-year duration of the patent, and maybe licence them for a reasonable fee to other rival car makers if they wanted to use the technology. That’s how business works, normally.

But Volvo did not do that. Instead, the company ‘opened up’ the patent rights, to be used by any competitor who wanted to fit three-point belts to their cars. And they did. While the 1959 Volvo Amazon 120 and PV 544 were the first cars to feature three-point belts, German and US car makers rapidly adopted the new design from the early Sixties onwards – and did not have to pay a penny in royalties to Volvo, and certainly not to its humble safety engineer, quietly beavering away in the engineering offices and test labs to improve on his invention.

It should be noted that it took another two decades for rear-seat belts to become standard fitment: I remember cramming as a youth into the back seat of my Dad’s cars with my four brothers and sisters, nary a restraint in sight as we bounced around terrifying Irish back roads… I have no idea how we all survived the Seventies and early Eighties.

It’s worth noting in passing, too, that Volvo has, very laudably, maintained the tradition of sharing intellectual property on vehicle safety. In 2019 it announced that it would share all of its crash safety research data, based on over 43,000 accidents over 50 years, making it an open-source reference for all safety researchers – including those of its competitors.

So, real heroes do exist. They might be modest, hard-working safety engineers, with the clarity of sight to identify a simple solution, and the persistence to see it through to production. Or they might be the executives of a big, otherwise rather staid company, taking a decision to forego profits and try instead to do some good in this world – for no better reason than that it’s the right thing to do. Mr Bohlin, and Volvo – Ti salutes you.