In the 1950s – to my surprise – seatbelts were introduced to automobiles by some car company over seas who happened to observed the large amount of bodies being ejected through windshields and such during accidents. THAT was when cars were more or less built like tanks. Here, in the States, after dithering for a time, they were placed in American cars.
The general public refused to use them. Local law enforcement kept scraping up bodies scattered about the road ways and byways of America. The car companies redesigned the seat belts to make them better, safer and easier to use. John Q. Public still mainly declined to use them and continued to bounce off of the steel, unpadded dashboards of the day and get launched through the tough, sharp shard producing safety glass.
Car makers incorporated the padded dash – which at least slowed down the incidents of having ones skull mashed into the back of the head by sudden stops with unbelted drivers. They gave us the collapsible steering column which decreased the incidents of unbelted drivers being impaled on the wheel shaft.
Then they started making cars with ‘crush zones’, a uphorism for cheap, removed the massive steel bumpers, took out most of the a-frame and incorporated shoulder straps in an effort to keep drivers from becoming road jelly when the new cars turned into crushed beer cans.
People still refused to wear them. In the meantime, car racers discovered the advantage to military style seat belts, crash cages, roll bars, crush zones, helmets and fire suits and demonstrated that plowing into a stone wall at about 200 mph still enabled them to walk away.
The general public still refused to wear seatbelts. Detroit threw up its hands and decided to let the idiots slaughter themselves. Insurance companies, weary of huge payouts, got a law passed requiring people to wear the belts. People started wearing the belts and PRESTO many walked away from crashes unhurt!
Many still refused to wear the belts. Detroit came up with self fastening seatbelts – but were forced by consumers to provide a clip that could remove the automatic belt and generally render the device useless. They created a new type of shatter glass in an effort to give those being launched through the windshield a somewhat better chance at survival.
Eventually, the police began to ticket people for not wearing seatbelts and insurance companies began to deny paying claims to people injured in crashes who had not worn seat belts. A small contingent of people STILL declines to wear them and here it is, 40 years later. The amount of people refusing to wear the belts has declined sharply, because most of those who refused are dead or too banged up from accidents to drive.
Kind of like the helmet laws. I think this is considered natures way of culling the herd. The stupid get killed off, hopefully before they can breed and spread their beliefs. Most bikers still haven’t realized that the road, as well as cars, are actually much harder than their thick heads. Even kids now wear helmets for their bicycles, finding that they protect their wild brains from falls and skaters wear helmets, having grown weary of trips to the hospital and professional motorcyclists wear helmets, discovering that when they crash on the course not only does it keep their brains in their skulls but keeps the wheels of other bikes from mashing them out. Race car divers wear helmets, discovering that not only do they keep their brains from splattering across the track but their heads from burning up if they catch on fire. Professional snow skiers wear helmets, having found that granite boulders are harder than the skull. Construction guys, often thought to be a particularly brainless lot to begin with, wear helmets finding that those ‘silly yellow things’ keep little things, like bolts, hammers, wrenches and bricks accidentally falling from high areas from entering the top of their heads and coming out around their toes.
BUT, not the hard core MACHO biker. He hasn’t quite learned yet. I think that speaks vast amounts concerning their general intelligence level.
What? Me worry?’