Belt, Buckled

Today in Tedium: Traveling, in one way or another, is a series of belts. Perhaps you’re traveling in a car, and you’re putting on a seat belt to ensure your safety. Perhaps you’re one of those infamous customers of size on an airplane and you’re forced to ask the flight attendant for a seat belt extender. Maybe you’re just walking around town with your Chrome Industries bag, which features a prominent seat belt buckle. Either way, the seat belt has become a key part of our lives, a strap of nylon webbing that has saved a whole lot of lives in the roughly 100 or so years since they’ve been embedded into the mainstream. But at a time of year when weekend road trips are likely to be picking up (well, at least with electric vehicles, something about gas prices), now’s a good time as any to talk about ’em. Buckle up, because today’s Tedium is all about seat belts. — Ernie @ Tedium

The highly tested, highly used seat belt. (Jasz Paulino/Flickr)

Let’s talk about the fabric that seat belts are made out of, because it’s pretty awesome

Clearly, you’ve likely held a seat belt in your hands sometime during your stay on Earth, but have you ever examined the belt? It is an amazing piece of fabric—one that’s tough as nails and designed to last for decades. Odds are, if you find yourself in a junkyard checking out a dilapidated vehicle, the best looking part of the entire car will be the seat belt, thanks in no small part to its fabric design.

The fabric, also known as “webbing” in reference to the weaving process used to hold it together, is incredibly strong, in part because it has to be. Often made of synthetic materials like nylon and polyester (just like other fabrics in modern vehicles), the tensile strength of a seat belt has to meet certain standards, because you never know when that strength has to be put into use.

One of the benefits of a highly regulated material that has been used in literally billions of places over a 60-year period is that most of the kinks have been worked out, and lots of research has been done into edge cases. If a new edge case comes up, eventually it will get added into new regulatory standards.

To further underline the point: Click in this document about federal motor vehicle safety standards and do a search for the term “webbing”—you’ll find it comes up 281 times, despite it being a very obscure technical term that really only means something to folks who worry about things like textiles, such as Tedium editors.

Because you can buy literally anything on Amazon, I just wanted to let you know that extends to the fabric used to make seat belts.

On top of that, it gives the material certain unique elements compared to the way that we think of most woven materials: Unlike, say, a T-shirt, it’s not really all that water absorbent, and because it’s so tightly wound already, it tends to avoid issues like shrinkage. (And unlike corduroy, you won’t find any wales in a seat belt.) It’s hard to tear a seat belt as well, and often requires a cutting tool of some kind to tear it apart.

And seat belts have a tendency to be deeply considered from a design perspective, both from the position of strength and comfort—if you’re driving in a car for 10 hours, you don’t want to be wearing a seat belt that drives you nuts. Which means that while it’s strong, “military-grade fabric” lost out to “basic creature comforts.”

And like I mentioned above about those Chrome Industries bags (which use three-panel webbing on their straps, just like many seat belts), the design of seat belts has directly inspired the designs of other products. Of course, the modern seat belt—while invented more than 100 years ago—had inspiration from the defense industry, which spent much time testing different kinds of harnesses and other structures during World War II.

The fabric used in the modern seat belt, whether you think of it this way or not, may be the most thoughtfully considered roll of fabric you’ve ever used.

It pretty much has to be. Your life could depend on it.

Nils Bohlin, wearing his most important invention.

The guy who invented an important seat belt design, but gave away his patent

As a society, we often have strong opinions about the value of ownership, especially if we’ve invented something unique or novel—as highlighted in an epic New York Times story, from 2018, all about the unusual ownership situation around a specific type of bikini.

But what happens when you invent something so novel, so fundamental that you’re better off just giving away the patent for the invention for free, because it would do the public significant harm to keep a tight leash on ownership?

That was the situation Swedish inventor Nils Bohlin, an engineer for Volvo, faced when he came up with the three-point seat belt. If you’ve sat in the front seat of a vehicle sometime in the last 60 years, you’ve most assuredly seen this basic design, which not only secures your waist, but also your chest with a stretching belt mechanism that pulls out just as much slack as the passenger needs.

The two-point seat belt, which went across your lap and is still found in the back seat of many modern vehicles today, was an important innovation, but it was imperfect—especially in seats that are independently adjustable, generally in the front seat of vehicles or the middle seat of minivans—and were known to cause internal injuries during car crashes.

This guy is strapped in and ready to go. (Google Patents)

Bohlin’s patent filing for the three-point seat belt, originally field in the U.S. in 1958 and granted in 1962, warns that even cars that have separate belts for hips and chests are susceptible to forces so dramatic during crashes that “the load-resisting and retaining properties of the belt are impaired to such an extent that the strapped person is not safely prevented from being thrown against the wind-shield or steering column.” Bohlin’s three-point seat belt, an attempt to simplify a more complicated four-point approach used in military settings, provided an important alternative, one that treated the belt as a single mechanism. As the filing explained:

The object of the present invention is to provide a safety belt which independently of the strength of the seat and its connection with the vehicle in an effective and physiologically favorable manner retains the upper as well as the lower part of the body of the strapped person against the action of substantially forwardly directed forces and which is easy to fasten and unfasten and even in other respects satisfies rigorous requirements.

This seat belt design could have provided an important competitive advantage for Volvo, which was one of the few car companies at the time to have a chief safety engineer on staff—a situation that, according to History.com, came about as a result of a relative of Volvo’s then-CEO, Gunnar Engelau, dying in a car crash. Bohlin, who previously worked on safety mechanisms for fighter jets at the Swedish aerospace giant Saab, brought much of that thinking to Volvo’s cars.

“It was just a matter of finding a solution that was simple, effective and could be put on conveniently with one hand,” Bohlin said of his design, according to a 2002 Times obituary.

But it soon became clear that the patent would be more useful as an official standard that was mandated at a regulatory level by state and federal governments. For years, the automobile industry’s own handling of seat belts left a lot to be desired. Seat belts, 1949-1956, a 1979 report created at the behest of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, highlighted the fact that making car safety a matter of consumer choice led to wildly different results among manufacturers.

In 1955, Ford tried to emphasize safety options in its vehicles, including the offering of seat belts, which was a novel option for vehicles at the time. The marketing campaign was spearheaded by Robert McNamara, a Ford executive who just a few years later saw his profile increase significantly as the U.S. Defense Secretary. But while Ford’s efforts at safety were legitimate and drove interest in the vehicles, the company was competing against General Motors, which made no effort to emphasize safety in its own vehicles at the time—instead focusing on more traditional concerns among car manufacturers, such as speed. In a marketing war, speed won out.

Losing a sales battle, Ford soon backed off of the safety language in its marketing—though the report suggests this turned out to be a huge mistake:

Declining sales were the reason given by Ford executives for scrapping the safety campaign. The implicit rationale was that campaign was that safety hurt sales. But it is not at all clear that the safety responsible for Ford’s sagging sales. Instead of hurting sales, the safety campaign, according to some Ford Division officials, had helped in a bad sales year to sell about two hundred thousand more cars than expected. It had been an important fact, some Ford executives felt, in preventing a disastrous sales year.

Ford’s decision, the report argued, proved hugely damaging for the automobile safety movement, leading to years of lost momentum—momentum that was only picked up after federal regulations were put into place.

Volvo’s work, however, did not go unnoticed. A turning point for the three-point seat belt came in 1967, thanks to Bohlin, who published a report based on years of crash statistics involving Volvo’s three-point seat belt, and found that the belt prevented fatal injuries among passengers in vehicles involved in crashes below 60 miles per hour. The impact of the report encouraged the National Highway Safety Bureau, a just-formed predecessor agency to the modern National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to push for the belt to not only be an important add-on for vehicles, but for the device to come standard in all vehicles—a key victory for the automobile safety movement, and one that put safety beyond the whims of marketing.

Thanks to the astute timing of Bohlin and Volvo, the three-point seat belt became a part of the regulations enacted with the American National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966—soon replicated throughout the world—and became the way the public buckled itself in.

Volvo realized that what it had was more important than royalties, and gave away its patented design to other manufacturers, free of charge, to build and improve upon. This move, over the past 60 years, has likely saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Reflecting on the decision in a 2009 retrospective article, an Australian Volvo executive put the move as such: “The decision to release the three-point seat belt patent was visionary and in line with Volvo’s guiding principle of safety. It’s why we like to say there’s a little bit of Volvo in every car.”

In a world where patents are often used as expensive weapons, Volvo’s decision is refreshing.

But, more importantly than that, it’s life-saving.