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In 1916, 22-year-old Hugh DeHaven Jr., who had dreamed of joining the first generation of American flyboys, was rejected by the aviation section of the U.S. Army Air Corps and therefore volunteered for the Canadian Royal Flying Corps in Toronto. On his final training flight a year later, "a crazy young pilot," as DeHaven would describe him, decided to practice gunnery runs with DeHaven's airplane as target. They collided and the two aircrafts plunged 500 feet to the ground. The gunner died but DeHaven survived.His examination of the wreckage convinced him that his most serious injuries had been caused when the massive, pointed buckle on his "safety" belt penetrated his abdomen, rupturing his liver, gall bladder, and pancreas.1
DeHaven completed his military service as a clerk but, oddly enough, a clerk who collected bodies, an assignment that allowed him to observe the similarities between others' injury patterns and his own. Focused on injury prevention, he theorized that wounds might be prevented by redesigning or reconfiguring elements in the plane's interior. As he explained, "it suddenly dawned on me that you can't say that an accident produces injury because an accident can also produce great safety."2 This insight propelled him into his life's work: the epidemiology of accidents.3 Believing that statistical analysis would enable engineers-aeronautical and automotive engineers in particular-to eliminate hazardous design features, he lobbied aircraftand automobilemanufacturers to improve product safety by applying data compiled from real-world events.4With support from federal agencies and civilian and military aviation concerns, he would spearhead the creation of two influential organizations, the Crash Injury Research project (CIR) in 1942, designed to study injuries in airplane accidents, and the Automotive Crash Injury Research project (ACIR) in 1953 that did the same for automobiles.
DeHaven was, in fact, instrumental in developing crash injury studies into a legitimate science.5 This article focuses on one significant element of that transformation.
"The Father of Crashworthiness Research"
DeHaven was born in 1895, the second child of Louise and Hugh De- Haven, president of DeHaven Manufacturing, a profitable steel and iron concern located in Brooklyn, New York.6 Tragedy struck the family in 1911 when Hugh's sister Mildred perished in a boathouse fire, a horrific event that perhaps initiated DeHaven's later professional focus on accident prevention. 7...