Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (41 page)

Industrial helmets flourished in the postwar years and even became emblems of American engineering in the 1956 novel of Helen Marie Newell,
The Hardhats
. The author had grown up in Idaho construction camps and worked as a wartime aircraft mechanic. An
Idaho Voter
review noted that “those metal contraptions that save men’s lives” were “familiar
objects to Westerners,” yet they were also still strange enough to make construction workers look like “creatures from Mars.” In November 1958,
Popular Science
ran a two-page spread featuring fifteen styles of work helmet. And civilian head protection became newsworthy. In 1959, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the New York State Commerce Department worked with an advertising agency to distribute
aluminum safety hats with the state seal to the Empire State’s top officials, extolling its citizens as “hard hat doers” and promising companies growth and prosperity “in this hard hat climate.”
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By the late 1960s, bipartisan opinion in the U.S. Congress favored new legislation to reduce an alarming number of industrial accidents. President Richard M. Nixon called for better personal protection
for the nation’s workers in August 1969, and by the end of 1970 he had signed the law creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a new national authority to make and enforce standards of equipment and practice, of course including work helmets. More than ten years after Rockefeller’s failed public relations campaign, there were already many construction projects in New
York City with workers wearing mandatory helmets, now widely required by contractors if not by state and local laws. In May 1970, several hundred construction workers came to Wall Street as counterdemonstrators when antiwar students were protesting the shooting of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio. Workers were reported to have pursued the longest-haired students and
“swatted” them with their helmets; some “hard hats” countered that they had been provoked by a middle-aged ringleader who spat on an American flag, and others observed that white-collar Wall Streeters were at least as
numerous and forceful as the workers. On May 20, about 100,000 construction and dock workers marched from City Hall to Battery Park with patriotic songs and slogans. It was almost
as though industrial safety, engendered by the army and navy, was coming to its original patrons’ aid.
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Whatever the reality, reports of workers attacking student leftists caught journalists’ and social scientists’ attention. Political stickers and American flag decals turned out to reflect a tradition of customizing and individualizing gear, rather than to be the signature of any new paramilitary
force. For protective equipment makers, many of the head coverings were not properly hard hats at all but hard caps, having only small visors rather than full brims.
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As protestors and counterdemonstrators continued to clash, the police, too, started wearing helmets more often. In fact, New York patrolmen assigned to turn off illegally opened hydrants as early as summer 1961 were issued plastic
helmet liners to shield them from bricks and bottles hurled by defiant youths and parents. And as helmeted riot police began to bear down on protesters in the late 1960s and 1970s, demonstrators in turn improvised their own head protection. Joschka Fischer, the future foreign minister of Germany, wore a black motorcycle helmet in his youthful rumbles with white-helmeted officers, while in 1969,
a year after the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago, the street-fighting Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society faced Chicago police again; now the demonstrators wore motorbike helmets and carried batons of their own. When a new cadre of militant demonstrators emerged in the antiglobalization protests at the Genoa and Seattle World Trade Organization meetings, head protection
had become de rigueur on both sides. In Los Angeles, the police-centurion image has so prevailed that
LA Weekly
joked in 2002 that “riot helmets look as natural on cops as mustaches.”
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Does their new armor help the police? British commentators of different political outlooks, whose government is replacing the traditional high-crowned helmet with a squatter and more impact-resistant mutant, have
second thoughts. Just as we have seen that the zori sandal encouraged a certain gait in Japan, the 1864 helmet promoted, according to Andy Beckett of the
Guardian
, a distinctive walk: “very upright, chest out, arms swinging stiffly, the hat brim down low to stop it wobbling, eyes slightly narrowed in consequence,” setting the wearer apart from lesser security officers who were “jittery solutions
to Britain’s current disorders.” And the new helmet might even subtly provoke rather than deter confrontation. To Tom Utley, a columnist for the
Telegraph
, a new “practical” helmet will say
to many people, “‘Here is a man who is dressed to be thumped.’ They will therefore thump him.” Protection, whether of police or of demonstrators, can edge into provocation.
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Punch
has some fun at the expense of the new, martial London police helmet, once more controversial in the early 2000s
.

Work helmets have long lost the aggressive populism of the 1970s. The grand tradition of improvising, whether in the military or on the job, is discouraged. The armed forces’ Kevlar helmets are unsuitable for cooking and their camouflage designs do not invite Vietnam-era embellishment.
In civilian as in military life, equipment is better designed than ever, with superior materials, and there are even steps to build in ventilation, relieving one of the helmet’s oldest ergonomic problems.

Once helmets were revived for soldiers and extended to many workers, safety head coverings for athletes almost inevitably followed. Part of the reason was cultural: if a helmet
represented the courageous infantryman or miner, it could call attention to the rigor and even danger of sport.

As in mining and police work, reinforced hats were the first safety headgear. The top hat of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the descendant of a simple round felt hat—along with the frock coat, originally the plain garb of the common man, as opposed to the wigs and cocked
tricorn hats of courtly dress. For hunting and riding, a round hat could be and still is made, reinforced with additional material.

The first documented hard civilian sports helmets appear to have been British flying (“crash”) helmets sold in 1923 as Royal Air Force surplus. By the early 1940s specially produced head coverings with vulcanized rubber or pulp shells and web sling suspensions, originally
designed for racers, were widely used by soldiers and civilians. Possibly the first scientific study of noncombat helmet effectiveness was published in 1941 by the military neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns. He showed the importance of head injuries in motorcycle casualties and began the scientific evaluation of materials, finding pulp four times more effective than rubber.
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Jockeys were the next civilian
athletes to use hard head protection after the war. By 1924 lightweight but strong fiber helmets fitting under caps like the old steel skullcaps were introduced in Australia, and the next year they were made mandatory in U.S. steeplechase events. They spread to Thoroughbred racing. In 1927 a similar helmet saved the life of a jockey rolled over and kicked in the head by his runaway colt. Head
protection is now required in public riding schools and events in many U.S. states.
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The most influential and controversial of the rigid sports helmets was developed by the late 1930s for American football. Originally bareheaded, players of the 1890s had began to use homemade mohair-cushioned leather helmets as play got rougher until manufacturers started to offer what was probably the first
ready-made athletic head protection, around 1900. For better impact absorption, the head was isolated from the shell by a web of fabric straps in 1917, a system marginally improved by innovations of the 1920s and 1930s. The breakthrough was a plastic shell with a new web suspension, adjustable for head size. Unlike leather, the lighter plastic allowed the riveting of the suspension, and did not mildew.
But even before U.S. entry into the war and the suspension’s adoption by the army as the foundation of the M-1 helmet system, it was kept off the market by materials shortages.
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After some initial failures following the war, the National Football League admitted the helmet in 1949. By the early 1950s it had virtually replaced the leather helmet. In
Why Things Bite Back
I told the story of its
paradoxically catastrophic effect on injuries. It reduced some head damage but was held responsible for tripled neck injuries and a doubling of deaths from cervical spine injuries. Such casualties have resulted in lawsuits that have continued to plague the U.S. sporting goods industry. In 1954,
Sports Illustrated
called them “Martian-looking headpieces” and “the most lethal weapon” for wearer
and opposition alike. But the real problem was not in the technology but in the technique. There is no evidence that the Riddell company, any more than so many other innovators, foresaw the change in user behavior that its products helped bring about. Coaches had once instructed players to tackle ball carriers by wrapping their arms around them. Their new technique instead used the helmet as a battering
ram not only to stop the carrier but to dislodge the ball—ultimately by aiming below the victim’s chin, hoping to knock him out. While helmet technology has continued to evolve since the early 1990s, and safer designs have been promised, the underlying problem remains from football’s early years as a spectator sport: fans enjoy and encourage violent plays. For the determined developer of new
aggressive techniques, the challenge is finding the loopholes in the new rules.
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After the war, pulp and rubber were succeeded by generations of new plastics. Aerodynamic contours replaced the old pudding-bowl design. Top automotive racing models incorporated ventilators and antilift design, dramatizing rather than concealing risks. In fact, racing helmets can be so heavy and forces so great
that drivers may need a supplementary restraint
such as Peter Hubbard’s HANS (Head and Neck System) to keep the helmet from whipping the neck fatally in a crash. While the death of a prominent amateur auto racer, William “Pete” Snell, in 1958 converted most of his fellow competitors to the idea of protection and led to the establishment of a leading safety equipment research foundation in his
memory, most organized U.S. motorcycle enthusiasts question mandatory helmet legislation, observing that it has reduced fatalities mainly by discouraging motorcycle riding. In accidents at road speeds above fifteen miles per hour, some U.S. opponents of helmets add, the additional mass of the helmet only helps substitute neck for head injuries. Yet emergency-room surgeons treating motorcycle accident
victims remain among the strongest helmet advocates, and many cyclists never ride without head protection.
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In hockey and most other sports, the helmet is a tool, not a totem. In baseball and cricket, it is worn only by batters, when at bat. In the early twenty-first century all hockey players wear helmets; the handful of holdouts, grandfathered when protection became mandatory in 1994, are
now retired. Even the mocking adoption of flimsy helmets designed for less hazardous ice sports appears to have vanished. The hockey player’s helmet is but another element of specialty clothing, a routine necessity like automotive seat belts. Controversy in most sports is not about whether helmets should be worn but about the best balance between comfort and protection. The American Society for Testing
and Materials (ASTM), the Snell Memorial Foundation, and other national and private laboratories constantly develop new tests for impact attenuation, just as medieval helmets and armor were proved.
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Thanks to a constantly expanding armory of energy-absorbent materials, construction features, and simulation equipment, the helmet now represents both the triumphs and the paradoxes of the technological
reduction of risk. There is no universal sports helmet, and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) advises purchasing a separate, purpose-designed model for each sport. By now the list includes not only football and hockey but lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, in-line skating, BMX cycling, equestrian sports, extreme sports, and boxing. After a number of celebrity fatalities,
skiing helmets have gained support. Many medical researchers now favor helmets even for youth soccer, where concussions and brain damage have turned out to be more common than most parents and coaches had realized. And the middle-aged are even more likely to suffer soccer and bicycling injuries than their children, partly because they are less flexible about adopting protection. (Paradoxically,
the rate of injury from in-line skating is lower than that from bicycling and less than half the injury rate from softball, because in-line skating looks so dangerous that protective equipment has been the norm.)
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