Samuel W. Alderson, a multifaceted inventor who created crash test dummies like those used in automobile safety tests, has died. He was 90.
Mr. Alderson died Friday at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif., of complications associated with myelofibrosis, according to his son Jeremy.
The mechanically inclined Mr. Alderson, who grew up puttering around his father’s 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 soon began buying Mr. Alderson’s dummies to test devices designed to minimize death and injury in car crashes. Various dummies, including the Vince and Larry models popular in TV advertising, were standardized over the years as Mr. Alderson and his colleagues improved the technology.
In 1973, Mr. 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.
When Mr. 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.
In the 1950s, Mr. Alderson also was under contract to develop “phantoms” or dummies that could measure radiation doses, originally during nuclear testing. Based on that know-how, he formed another company which he managed until shortly before his death, Radiology Support Devices, to supply the health care industry.
