Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (40 page)

What is surprising about the nineteenth century is the number of hazardous trades without hard headgear: miners, building laborers, workers in heavy industry. Only relatively
late in the century did Western people develop the idea of an accident that was not just an individual’s misfortune but a symptom of social injustice. Early philanthropies like the Red Cross were intended for the military wounded, and many of their supporters bitterly opposed initiatives to extend help to civilian casualties. Gradually the law began to accept a principle of employer responsibility—without
culpability—for worker injuries. Eventually governments, insurers, and other third parties would force or persuade employers to provide protective equipment, but before 1914 there is little evidence that even trade unions made this a high priority.
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When World War I began, one military item that no nation had on hand in large numbers, or even in planning, was the helmet.
To withstand direct rifle fire, the armor of the time would have needed to be as ungainly as Ned Kelly’s, no doubt considered a bizarre atavism. But a big surprise in weaponry helped bring back metal headgear. In the 1890s, French officer-inventors showed how a blast’s energy could be used to return an artillery piece to its original position, so it could be aimed more accurately on every shot
with the help of forward observers, and reloaded four times more
often. England alone fired almost a million rounds on a single day in September 1917, and more than five million tons during the entire war. Wounds from artillery fragments accounted for more than half of all casualties, significantly more than rifle or machine-gun bullets. While machine guns and artillery could be equally deadly
to troops going over the top in battles like the Somme, barrages were constantly menacing troops still in the trenches, devastating them psychologically as well as physically. Nervous breakdowns were called shell shock for good reason.
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At the beginning of the war only the heavy cavalry of the major nations still wore a helmet and breastplate, but they could do little at the front. A French
officer who had proposed a helmet was rebuffed by General Joseph Joffre, who did not believe the war would last long enough to put it into production. Like many other innovations we have seen, the first helmet arose by improvisation or lucky accident in the field. A wounded soldier told Intendant (Quartermaster) General August-Louis Adrian that a mess bowl in his hat had saved his life, and the general
had a metal skullcap made like the old
secrète
that fit under the service cap. Its favorable reception encouraged him to develop Europe’s first new standard-issue helmet since the pot helmet of the early seventeenth century. But Adrian did not return to the pot; he and his staff modified the standard French fireman’s helmet of the time, giving it a slightly shallower brim and lower crest but leaving
the bowl’s shape unchanged. This simplified the tooling for the manufacture of hundreds of thousands.
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The bowl was the only thing simplified and rationalized about the Adrian helmet. Its predecessor may well have been based in turn on a helmet from Melos in the Louvre, of a Hellenistic type called the neo-Attic. Despite wartime pressures, it was surprisingly complex to produce, demanding seventy
stages even after preparation of the metal components. The slot and crest that added to the time and expense also weakened the helmet’s structure and added (with other ornamentation) at least a hundred grams to its weight. Yet Bashford Dean saw France’s reasons for keeping it. Its beautiful form reflected the work of the immensely popular military artist Édouard Detaille and helped build the
troops’ spirit and morale. The wearer, Dean wrote, “becomes fond of his helmet and his feeling toward it is a distinct asset.… He is convinced that its shape is excellent, he is accustomed to its lighter weight, and he would gladly wear it under conditions in which he would probably cast aside a heavier and a better helmet.” As we saw earlier, the French army also had a style of marching and fighting
that emphasized mobility and élan rather than
momentum. The Adrian helmet as a technology was well matched to the French technique of war.
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The British helmet showed a radically different approach to design. Its shallow bowl permitted the use of relatively thick steel that could be formed in a single pressing while keeping its thickness. Like its predecessor the kettle hat, it protected the
shoulders as well as the head from objects falling from above, and offered good protection from direct bullet hits. Simplified production also mattered to the U.S. Army, which placed an initial order for two million, at the time no doubt the largest single helmet project in human history. Like the French soldier, the British Tommy seems to have identified with his headgear. Yet Bashford Dean, observing
the effectiveness of the U.S. model based closely on it, was disappointed with its exposure of the back and sides of the head.
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While the French and British/American helmets were classics in their own way, the helmet that proclaimed the twentieth-century revival of the exocranium was German. The German military, so renowned for its meticulous planning, had not realized that a leather shortage
would force the fabrication of pressed-paper substitutes for the South American hides in its leather spiked helmets. The French innovation arose from a soldier’s happy accident and the English from a practical manufacturer’s proposal; the German helmet was a scientific project. Friedrich Schwerd, an engineering professor, collaborated with August Bier, who held a chair of medicine and was using
powerful magnets to remove metal fragments from wounded soldiers’ heads. The surgeon had been heartbroken by the terrible brain damage done by pieces no larger than cherry pits. Many initial survivors were dying later in agony. The army command soon brought Schwerd to Berlin on Bier’s recommendation, and Schwerd identified the crucial element for a new metal helmet: “a neck protector which stands
away from the neck and extends forward to the temples and over the brow.” And he knew his military history, citing the German sallet (
Schallernhelm
) as his model.
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Schwerd was firm about avoiding the temptation to strengthen the helmet’s front against direct rifle fire; he knew that riveting extra pieces would weaken the helmet and that additional weight would discourage troops from wearing
it. Several firms competed to find the best metallurgical formula, and experts even measured ventilation, which turned out to be superior to the leather helmet. For the tradeoff between weight and protection there was an apparently ingenious solution, a detachable plate that could be mounted on the helmet’s front with two lugs that doubled as ventilation
holes. No other piece of armor in world
history had been evaluated by so many experts. For the thickness of the steel, the shape was remarkably deep; a U.S. manufacturer was not able to press steel of a similar formula into the shallower British bowl shape.
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The German steel helmet revealed the paradoxes of protection. A sincerely humanitarian device, it was simultaneously a tool to help German troops kill as many of the enemy as
possible. It combined an evocative, almost romantically medieval form, with sophisticated medicine and metallurgy. After the war, veterans adopted it or rather recycled it as a paramilitary icon; the largest and most influential of the postwar militias was called the
Stahlhelm
, and even before the appearance of the National Socialist Party, the ultra-rightist Ehrhardt Brigade wore swastika-decorated
steel helmets.
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The helmet remained a foundation of twentieth-century warfare with remarkably few changes in principle. In World War II the Germans and the British held to improved versions of their designs from the Great War, and Japan chose a British-influenced shape rather than any reflection of their traditional armor or their ally’s
Stahlhelm
. America used a semispherical bowl like that
of the seventeenth-century pot, with only a slight brim and visor. The design was actually the work of Bashford Dean’s years as a major in the U.S. Army, not only evaluating other nations’ armor but preparing new designs. Dean especially favored one, No. 5, for its combination of protection—the smooth, round shape maximized the chance that a bullet would bounce off—and simplicity of production. And
medieval skills returned in the months before Pearl Harbor, as Dean’s successor at the Metropolitan Museum, Stephen V. Grancsay, helped the army prepare an aluminum master of a new model in the museum’s fully equipped armorer’s shop, which in turn was used in tooling for production. At the suggestion of General George S. Patton, the hexagonal-webbed football helmet suspension recently invented
by John T. Riddell was adapted as a separate plastic liner. The resulting M-1 steel helmet was formally adopted on June 9, 1941. The McCord Radiator and Manufacturing Company in Detroit learned how to form the seven-inch-deep bowl in a single pressing—an engineering milestone—and reduced the full production time for all twenty-seven operations from steel blank to finished helmet to only twenty-two
minutes. Over four decades 25 million were to be produced, making the M-1 the most widely used helmet model in history.
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The M-1 was the elegant answer of American modernism to the ominous angularity of the German model. And like other classic technologies
it opened unplanned opportunities for user improvisation. At the end of its production a U.S. master sergeant wrote nostalgically of its
uses: as a seat, pillow, washbasin, cooking pot, nutcracker, tent-peg pounder, wheel chock, and even—with the explosive from an unserviceable Claymore mine—popcorn popper. (Since heat degraded steel shell, the army tried to discourage improvisation.) The M-1 prevailed through the Vietnam era and beyond.
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During World War II, Germany’s specialists were increasingly aware of the
Stahlhelm’s
shortcomings,
especially its weight, its high exposed front, and the weakened angles between the crown and the visor and neck protector. A new, sloping design was proposed but rejected by Hitler, who shared his generation’s attachment to the
Stahlhelm
. It was the army of the new German Democratic Republic, anxious to avoid both Western designs and the helmets of its Soviet masters, that finally adopted Model
B/II and used it until reunification. Whether or not any of the parties to the Cold War realized it, this design strongly resembled another U.S. experiment, a “deep salade” (
sic
) that Bashford Dean had developed with the Metropolitan Museum’s armorer and the Ford Motor Company in 1917 and that had impressed President Woodrow Wilson himself.
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In 1978, Captain Schwerd may have had the last laugh.
With the recently invented polymer Kevlar (phenolic polyvinyl butyryl) as reinforcement, patented and trademarked by DuPont, the U.S. armed forces were able to create a laminated helmet no heavier than the M-1 with superior ballistic protection. The army’s designers insisted that the new helmet, based on exhaustive scientific measurements of actual heads, was engineered from scratch and that similarities
to the
Stahlhelm
were superficial. In any case, the new model proved itself from the Grenada campaign to the Gulf War, and sarcastic nicknames like “Nazi helmet” and “Kevlar Fritz” faded away as the shape became more familiar. Indeed, the sallet was, as we have seen, not originally German at all.
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From the trauma of the Great War a new attitude spread to civilian life, that
hard protective head coverings were emblems of rational courage and even extensions of the self.

Some European miners had long reinforced their headgear—Cornish miners wore heavy felt hats treated with resin against rock from tunnel ceilings. Some U.S. miners improvised similar protective head coverings.
But according to a U.S. Bureau of Mines official interviewed in the early 1920s, a surge
of new helmet designs had been inspired by miners’ wartime appreciation for their helmets. An Oklahoma zinc miner declared, “If the old tin hat would stop shrapnel, I reckon it’ll stop these pieces of jack.” At least one mine operator handed out military trench hats to its workers at its own expense. The helmets had become common in California and West Virginia as well.
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The U.S. Navy also helped
civilian innovation. Edward W. Bullard, whose family made miners’ carbide lamps, was impressed by the English-style helmet he wore as a doughboy. The navy, alarmed by frequent and severe head injuries in shipyards, asked Bullard to develop head protection for civilian workers, just as munitions plants in England during the war had (as we have seen) installed what may have been the first large-scale
industrial posture seating. Bullard designed and produced a hat from alternating sheets of canvas and glue, painted black, with overlapping front and rear brims. Set with steam, it was called the Hard-Boiled Hat and introduced in 1919—in its layered construction, a predecessor of the Kevlar helmet of the 1980s. It was the first headgear made to protect miners from falling objects. Head protection
was extended only gradually to other industries, probably through purchases by individual workers. The first construction site to require hard hats was the Golden Gate Bridge; its head engineer, Joseph B. Strauss, was alarmed by injuries from falling rivets, and worked with Bullard, still a San Francisco company, to adapt the Hard-Boiled Hat for heavy construction. In the same year, 1938,
Bullard produced the first aluminum hard hat, tough but light.
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By America’s entry into World War II, there was an active market for industrial safety headgear. On the very day of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the
New York Times
noted that a Department of Agriculture laboratory had developed “a plastic helmet out of heavy cotton cloth and soybeans” that could shield civilian workers’ heads
from forces of up to forty pounds. Wartime authorities accelerated industrial protection. A catalogue of fire and police equipment published by a Detroit company during the 1940s features a GI in a pot helmet, furiously firing a machine gun, juxtaposed with a civilian fireman in a Gratacap-style hat, more calmly discharging the company’s latest carbon dioxide extinguisher. A lighter version of the
doughboy hat is listed with a reminder that “U.S. Service Inspectors require uniformed guards, safety patrolmen and maintenance men to wear steel protective helmets.” The company offered “Head Protector” helmets of molded vulcanized fiber, “cradle cushioned against blows,” noting that
“thousands” were in use around the world “in mines, mills, on construction projects, and where men are subjected
to falling objects.” The Head Protector had an almost spherical dome and a 360-degree brim set at an angle. There were also “Hedgard Safety Hats” of unspecified material but with a novel suspension cradle, perhaps inspired by the M-1’s new system. The catalogue notes that protective headgear would pay for itself in lower insurance rates, a sign that while relatively new it was privately recognized
if not yet legally required in most applications.
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