Regardless of advances, some will resist

Letter to the Editor,

You know the adage: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”  Applied to the human condition, what does it mean? Stubborn? Lazy? An expression of free will?

When I earned my mechanical engineering degree at the University of Minnesota in the late ’50s and early ’60s one of my professors was Dr. James J. Ryan, better known as “Crash Ryan.”  

Professor Ryan worked on aircraft crash safety during World War II and developed the Ryan flight recorder that was the predecessor of the modern “black box” found on every military and commercial aircraft today to record vital flight information.  Recovery of the flight recorder after a crash will usually tell what went wrong.  

After the war, Professor Ryan turned his attention to auto safety. In the late ’50s, he took a stock 1958 Plymouth and modified it by mounting the front bumper on extended hydro-pneumatic struts, recessing the dashboard, mounting a padded steering wheel on a telescoping column, and adding simple seat belts. He then, personally, drove that Plymouth at 40 mph into a solid concrete abutment. After impact, he restarted the engine, backed up and drove the car away without serious damage to the vehicle or driver. Having shown that cars can be made safer, he became a strong advocate of auto safety with little cooperation from the big-three automakers who were more interested in selling large displacement V-8s and tail fins at the time, but that’s another story.

Since then, many of Ryan’s innovations, or variations of them, have been incorporated into our automobiles by federal law.  

As a result, fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles travelled have decreased from 5.32 in 1958 to 1.14 in 2012, translating to tens of thousands of lives saved in this country.

Still, several times a year, in accounts of traffic fatalities in this county we read in this paper, “The deceased was not wearing a seatbelt.” What a horrible, sad — and preventable — waste of precious human life.  

J. J. Ryan was a brilliant engineer, but there was one problem he couldn’t solve: He had no solution for stupid.

— Les Nelson

Libby