Dummies

Female crash test dummies came along about 7 years after the first minivans

Karen Panetta (Speak Out, 6 October) seems to have spent a bit too much time on committees, and not quite enough time doing constructive engineering work.

For her information, female crash test dummies came along about 7 years after the first minivans; and were developed not for any particular class of vehicle, but to cater for the effects of airbags on different sizes of people, both male and female. (One of the first airbag deployments in the field was by a 14-year-old American girl who had stolen the keys to her mother’s station wagon)

The first dummy to simulate a pregnant female was developed by a man.

The first crash test dummies were developed to simulate fighter pilots, and were based on the biggest men they could find, for two reasons:

1. Women then, as now, had better things to do than fly about dropping bombs on people; and
   
2. Early ejector seats had a nasty habit of chopping the pilot’s legs off. If you could get a 99th percentile male out of the plane in one piece, any smaller pilots would be fine.
   

Just in case you think I have a downer on female engineers, I mention in passing that my dear departed mother got a First after two years of study. It was wartime when she graduated, so she worked on some really chunky projects; notably atom bombs and jet engines. She was happier about the latter.

Ken Strachan,  Nuneaton, Warks