Very funny, well-writtenly wry passages in an obit written yeaterday by Margalit Fox: Samuel Alderson, Crash-Test Dummy Inventor, Dies at 90:
In the 1930’s, with traffic fatalities becoming a growing public health concern, manufacturers began to explore the design of safer cars. But the new science of crash testing raised a seemingly intractable problem: to study the effect of a crash on the human body, researchers would have to equip the test car with a live human being. Volunteers were few.
As a result, the first crash-test dummies were cadavers. While useful in collecting basic data, they lacked the durability required for repeated trials.