Crash test dummy inventor dies at 90

Samuel W. Alderson, a multifaceted inventor who created crash test dummies like those used in automobile safety tests, has died. He was 90.

Alderson died Friday at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif., of complications associated with myelofibrosis, according to his son, Jeremy.

The mechanically inclined Alderson, who grew up puttering around his father’s custom sheet metal shop, built the first automobile test dummy at his Alderson Research Labs in 1960. But the idea simply never caught on, he said, until Ralph Nader’s consumer protection book “Unsafe at Any Speed” was published five years later.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration took sharp notice of consumer outrage over auto safety engendered by Nader’s book. The agency soon began buying Alderson’s dummies to test seat belts, air bags and other devices designed to minimize death and injury in car crashes. Various dummies, including the Vince and Larry models popular in television advertising, were standardized over the years as Alderson and his colleagues improved the technology.

In 1973, Alderson left his original company and formed a competitor, Humanoid Systems, and the two companies dominated the crash test dummy market until they merged in 1990 to become First Technology Safety Systems.

Alderson was the last surviving founder, his son said, of the Stapp Car Crash Conference, an early organization fostering automobile safety research.

When Alderson first created Alderson Research Labs in 1952, nobody was thinking about testing the survivability of car crashes. His customers were the military and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

He first landed a contract to make anthropomorphic dummies for use in testing jet ejection seats and parachutes and later for the Apollo nose cone’s planned water landing.

“The man-like test dummies duplicate not only the shape, size and weight of future astronauts,” a Times story noted in 1964, “but their motions as well, and their skulls, necks, stomachs and chests contain a variety of instruments to record landing forces.”

During World War II, he helped develop an optical coating to enhance vision of submarine periscopes at dawn and dusk, helped devise equipment to aid planes in dropping depth charges on U-boats, and worked on missile guidance systems.