Seat belts are an essential safety device for today's vehicles. The safety of passengers in the car depends on seat belts and other safety devices. As an essential safety device on cars, many people will think that seat belts were invented after the birth of cars, but in fact, seat belts were invented before the birth of cars.
The earliest seat belts were invented by British engineer George Cayley in the early nineteenth century. Edward J. Claghorn's New Yorker took the lead in patent registration on February 10, 1885. Finally, seat belts appeared and were used on carriages to prevent passengers from falling off the carriages.
In 1911, U.S. Marine General Benjamin Foulois installed seat belts on a Wright Flyer Signal Corps 1 aircraft, but the purpose was not for safety, but because in some wars at the time, the take-off and landing sites were uneven, and the pilots could not control the aircraft's taxiing well. The role of the seat belt is to better fix the body on the seat. But it was not until World War II that seat belts were installed on airplanes.
In the 1950s, Dr. C. Hunter Shelden opened his own neurology department at Huntington Memorial Hospital. Many of the patients who came to see him had brain injuries caused by car accidents, so he began to develop retractable seat belts for some common cases. His invention was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on November 5, 1955. It was not until 1959 that the US Congress finally passed a resolution to establish standardized automobile safety standards.
In fact, Nash and Ford began to make seat belts optional in 1949 and 1955 respectively, but people at that time did not pay attention to it. It was not until Saab released the Saab GT 750 at the New York Auto Show in 1958 that seat belts became standard on Saab models.
The basic three-point seat belts commonly used in cars today were invented and patented by Americans Roger W. Griswold and Hugh DeHaven in 1955. Later, Swiss inventor Nils Bohlin improved it and made it standard for the 1959 Volvo model.
Until 1968, the United States stipulated that all front-facing seats in cars must be equipped with seat belts, and developed countries such as Europe and Japan also successively formulated regulations that car occupants must wear seat belts. my country issued a notice on November 15, 1992, stipulating that from July 1, 1993, all car drivers and front-seat passengers must use seat belts.