Samuel Alderson

Samuel W. Alderson (1914 to 2005) was an American physicist, inventor and engineer who pioneered the automotive crash test dummy, formally known as an anthropomorphic test device. The data from such dummies has let automotive engineers design more effective safety features, including seat belts and air bags, restraints estimated to have saved more than three hundred thousand lives since 1960. The dummy that is the present industry standard for frontal crash testing in the United States descends directly from one that Alderson began making for the aerospace industry in the early 1950s. In 1952 he founded Alderson Research Laboratories, which built dummies for the United States military to test parachutes and ejection seats, for NASA to simulate Apollo nose cone splashdowns, and for measuring radiation levels in nuclear tests. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, grew up in California and attended Reed College, the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley.