Nils Bohlin patents the three-point seatbelt - July 10th, 1962

On this day in 1962, Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin patented the V-shaped three-point safety belt.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that cruises the highways of history every day of
the week. I'm Gay, Blues Yay, and in this episode,
we're looking at the story behind the modern seat belt,

(00:20):
one of the most significant contributions to vehicle safety ever
made and one of the most taken for granted two
the day was July tenth, nineteen sixty two, Swedish engineer
Nils Bolan patented the V shaped three point safety belt.

(00:43):
The US patent was issued to Sweden's Volvo Car Corporation,
with Bolan credited as the inventor. The first cars to
have the new seat belt installed were the Volvo Amazon
and the Volvo PV five forty four. Those were also
the first cars in the world to have seat belts
installed as a standard feature rather than an optional add on.

(01:07):
But even still, Volvo only installed the three point belts
in the front seats of its cars and wouldn't add
them to the back seats until nineteen sixty seven. It's
hard to imagine, but for the first eighty years or
so that cars were on the road, the vast majority
of them didn't have seat belts. This omission was a

(01:28):
little easier to justify when the average car topped out
at about twenty miles per hour, but by the nineteen thirties,
a car's top speed had increased to between fifty and
sixty miles per hour, yet a lack of safety belts
remained the norm. To be clear, the front seats of
some cars were equipped with two point seat belts, the

(01:50):
kind that fasten across a person's lap, but they were
mostly used by race car drivers who routinely drove at
high speeds. It wasn't until the mid nineteen teen forties
that American car makers like Ford and Nash began to
offer an optional two point safety belt, but because there
wasn't much of a call for the belts from the public,

(02:11):
manufacturers stopped short of making them standard. The reluctance to
use a seat belt was largely due to the shortcoming
of the early designs. Lap belts, for instance, were known
to cause serious internal injuries in the event of a
high speed collision, and they did nothing at all to
protect the upper body. In most cases, the belts were

(02:32):
still better than nothing, but there was the chance they
could cause even greater harm when that was enough to
turn off most people to the idea of using one.
As a result, safety features were still an afterthought for
most automakers in the nineteen fifties, but when Volvo's president
at the time, Gunner and Golau, experienced a personal tragedy,

(02:54):
he decided it was time the industry got serious about safety.
One of his relatives had recently died in a car crash,
partly because of the design flaws in the traditional two
point seat belt. This pushed him to find a better solution,
and though he was an engineer himself, he knew he
couldn't do it alone. At the time. In the late

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nineteen fifties, one of Volvo's top competitors was SOB, a
Swedish aerospace and defence company that had branched out into
carmaking about a decade earlier. Nils Bolan was an accomplished
aviation engineer at SOB, where he had worked on ejector
seats and safety belts for pilots. In nineteen fifty eight,

(03:36):
he was poached from SAB by Volvo's president and put
in charge of building a better safer safety belt for automobiles.
At first, glance, it may seem strange that the inventor
of an ejector seat, a device that launches occupants from
moving vehicles, should be tasked with designing a device to
keep them inside, But Bolan's work in the aerospace industry

(03:58):
gave him expert knowledge of the effects of extreme forces
on the human body, as well as the limitations of
various restraint devices. For instance, he had intimate knowledge of
the four point safety belts worn by pilots, consisting of
two shoulder straps and two lap belts that buckled together
at the center of the waist. The belts were highly

(04:19):
effective for stabilizing the torso and preventing the wearer from
being thrown forward in a crash. This gave the four
point system a clear safety advantage over the two point
belts used in cars, but Bolan knew that wouldn't be
enough to convince the average driver to wear one. The
belts needed to be comfortable and easy to use as well,

(04:41):
and the four point system was neither. This led Bolan
to create his three point system, which consisted of two
straps that joined at the driver's waist and fastened into
a single anchor point on the side of the seat.
This arrangement was far less restrictive than a four point belt,
could be pulled across the chest and waist with one

(05:03):
hand in a swift, fluid motion. Bolan perfected the design
in less than a year, and Volvo introduced it as
a standard feature on its cars in nineteen fifty nine.
All that said, it's worth noting that Nil's Bolan wasn't
the first person to come up with a three point
safety belt that supported both the upper and lower body.

(05:26):
In nineteen fifty one, when Bolan was still working at SOB,
two engineers named Roger Griswold and Hugh de Haven filed
a patent application for a quote combination shoulder and lap
safety belt. In their version, the straps formed a y shape,
with two parts of the belt coming over the wearer's
shoulders and meeting over the stomach rather than at the

(05:48):
side of the seat. Bolan used this concept as a
starting point because he recognized that a shoulder belt and
a waist belt would help distribute crash forces over a
wider area. However, he didn't think the y shaped arrangement
was the best way to accomplish this, as it distributed
the force of the impact over the wearer's stomach, one

(06:10):
of the least robust and squishiest parts of the body,
so instead, Bolan charted a different, more stable course for
his belts to follow, a sort of sideways V pattern
that ran across the shoulder, chest, and pelvic bone, the
same setup that car drivers are familiar with today. Volvo

(06:30):
filed for a US patent in August of nineteen fifty nine,
and it was granted three years later on July tenth,
nineteen sixty two. Remarkably, though, the company didn't hang on
to the patent for very long. In a rare display
of corporate selflessness, Volvo released its new seat belt designed
to other car manufacturers. This enabled anyone worldwide to duplicate

(06:54):
the belt without any license fees or claims. And yet,
even with free d the access, it took years for
the rest of the auto industry and the public to
recognize the belts as the invaluable life savers that they are.
For example, seat belts didn't become a required feature in
American cars until the late nineteen sixties, and many other

(07:17):
countries were similarly slow to adopt them. In the decades
since the use of safety belts has been enshrined in
law all over the world, and while new features have
been added along the way, the vast majority of seat
belts are still based on Bolan's original design. As for
the man himself, he went on to lead other safety

(07:37):
projects at Volvo until the mid nineteen eighties, including the
design of the now famous side impact Protection System or SIPs.
Bolan's breakthroughs in engineering also earned him many awards, both
in Europe and in the US. In nineteen ninety five,
he was given a gold medal by the Royal Swedish

(07:58):
Academy of Engineering Science. In nineteen ninety nine he was
inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, and in two
thousand and two, just prior to his death, Nils Bolan
was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame as well.
The use of seat belts has been shown to reduce
the chance of serious injury or death from collisions by

(08:20):
roughly fifty percent, and at the time of Bolan's passing,
his invention was estimated to have saved well over a
million lives and county. I'm gay, Blues gay, and hopefully
you now know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep up with

(08:42):
the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have any
comments or suggestions, feel free to send him my way
by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks
to Kasby Bias for producing the show, and thanks thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again

(09:02):
tomorrow for another day in History class.