One of the first most important things that you are taught when you start getting into a car is wearing a seatbelt. This is both for your safety as well as to stay on the right side of the law. Today's cars come standard with seatbelts, and if they do not, one thing is for sure, they would be recalled.
Some cars have been recalled in the past for faulty seat belts. Some of these cars include the Cadillac Escalade ESV, the GMC Yukon, Chevrolet Tahoe, and the Chevrolet Suburban. If you are new to the car scene and you are trying to figure out everything. It is time to think and really understand what seatbelts are and what role they play.
Seat belts, or as they are known across other circles, safety belts are safety devices designed to ensure that drivers and passages are protected from harm in the case of accidents or sudden and unexpected stops.
While seat belts reduce the chances of fatalities they do not guarantee it. Sometimes in the course of preventing fatalities, they can cause minor injuries. To get a better understanding of what seat belts are, we need to go back in time. To do this, we are going to take a trip down memory lane and revisit how Volvo invented the modern seat belt.
Let's look at how modern seat belts came to be.
In The Beginning
While Volvo is accredited with the successful invention of the modern seat belt, there has always been the question of who really came up with the concept that Volvo built on. One name that has kept coming up is George Cayley; George was an English engineer who is said to have been the very first person to come up with the idea of seat belts back in the 19th century.
By 1946, George Cayley’s idea was taken a step further by Dr. C. Hunter Shelden. Dr. Hunter is said to have come up with the concept of retractable seat belts. By the early 1950s, a popular Swedish company, Vattenfall, is said to have encountered a problem, and this was that many of its employees were losing their lives in car crashes.
To solve this problem, they considered a number of options, but none of the options seemed viable. This was until two engineers from the power company Bengt Odelgard and Per-Olof Weman were tasked with ensuring that the company cars were safe. During their research, Odelgard and Weman came to the conclusion that diagonal seat belts were safe and easier to use compared to lap seat belts. These two engineers saw to it that all of Vattenfall’s cars were fitted with diagonal seat belts.
It was during this time that their invention caught the eye of Volvo boss Gunnar Engellau. Gunner sought the advice of then Volvo safety chief engineer Nils Bohlin on how to improve Vattenfall’s innovation, and they ended up with the first three-point seat belt.
What Did It Mean To Volvo?
The first thing Volvo did when they got their hands on Vattenfall’s designs and the concept was to patent them. Patenting is one of the many ways that companies protect themselves from copyright infringement suits as well as copycats. For Volvo, this was nothing more than capitalism with a conscience.
The patent also covered the three-point seat belt made by their safety engineer Bohlin. This meant that Volvo had the upper hand for anyone looking to add these seat belts to their cars. They, however, made the patent available for anyone and everyone. They gave their designs to their competitors, allowing the adoption of the three-point modern seat belt.
Measure of Success
Seeing that Volvo never capitalized on the modern seatbelts through license fees or by retaining exclusivity, how do they really measure their success? Well, for one, they take immense pride in how many lives they have helped save over the past years.
This can be seen through the numbers posted by different countries attributing the survival rate of many accident victims to seat belts. Today all cars must come fitted with seat belts, failure to which they are regarded as not road legal.
The Legacy
While Volvo did not originally come up with seat belts, their innovative contribution cannot be overlooked. Volvo gifted the world with a gift that not only keeps people safe but one that has seen lives saved time and time again.
Today seat belts are an international legal requirement and a cultural norm that cuts across all circles. To give your all and expect nothing in return is nothing short of noble.