U.S. Patent issued for three-point seatbelt
The United States Patent Office issues the Swedish engineer Nils
Bohlin a patent for his three-point automobile safety belt “for use in
vehicles, especially road vehicles” on this day in 1962.
Four years earlier, Sweden’s Volvo Car Corporation had hired
Bohlin, who had previously worked in the Swedish aviation industry, as the
company’s first chief safety engineer. At the time, safety-belt use in
automobiles was limited mostly to race car drivers; the traditional two-point
belt, which fastened in a buckle over the abdomen, had been known to cause
severe internal injuries in the event of a high-speed crash. Bohlin designed
his three-point system in less than a year, and Volvo introduced it on its cars
in 1959. Consisting of two straps that joined at the hip level and fastened
into a single anchor point, the three-point belt significantly reduced injuries
by effectively holding both the upper and lower body and reducing the impact of
the swift deceleration that occurred in a crash.
On August 17, 1959, Bohlin filed for a patent in the United
States for his safety belt design. The U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No.
3,043,625 to “Nils Ivar Bohlin, Goteborg, Sweden, assignor to Aktiebolaget
Volvo” on July 10, 1962. In the patent, Bohlin explained his invention: “The
object… 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
rigid requirements.”
Volvo released the new seat belt design to other car
manufacturers, and it quickly became standard worldwide. The National Traffic
and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 made seat belts a required feature on all
new American vehicles from the 1968 model year onward. Though engineers have
improved on seat belt design over the years, the basic structure is still
Bohlin’s.
The use of seat belts has been estimated to reduce the risk of
fatalities and serious injuries from collisions by about 50 percent. In 2008,
an all-time high 83 percent of front-seat occupants in the United States
buckled their seat belts.