Hardheaded Logic
HELMETS, MORE THAN ANY OTHER TECHNOLOGY , defy conventional chronology. They seem to evolve like metallic and polymeric crustaceans, but not conventionally. A form may disappear for a thousand years and then reappear on a new branch. Another may keep its shape but change materials and habitats. Medievalists have advised the commanders of industrial armies, and armorers from dynasties of European craftsmen have helped tool up for new designs with classic jigs and hammers.
The first metal helmets probably appeared in the third millennium B.C., linked to the development of complex, literate societies in the Middle East with organized warfare. Head protection was part of the earliest version of the arms race, not yet between swords and shields but between maces (weapons with weights at the ends of their handles) and helmets.
In the late medieval era two helmet styles became classics. The kettle hat, or chapel de fer, has a bowl with a wide brim. Taking less time and skill to make than more contoured cavalry models that enclosed the face, it was ideal for equipping foot soldiers in large numbers. The brim must have helped protect them from volleys of arrows and from missiles hurled from walls during sieges. It also was relatively comfortable and did not interfere with vision or hearing. Many knights preferred them, and one in the thirteenth century, Jean de Joinville, wrote in his chronicle of lending his kettle hat to King Louis IX for fresh air after the king had spent hours in a massive helmet. The sallet was an equally versatile design. Its brim was contoured back over the neck for added protection, and it often had a pivoted visor with an eye slit, which could be raised and lowered; it also had a removable chin protector called the bevor. The sallet potentially offered the visibility of the kettle hat with the option of protective attachments. Originating in northern Italy, it became popular in England and Germany and appears in Albrecht D’fcrer’s famous engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil .
By the early sixteenth century armorers’ skills had reached a peak, but firearms were starting to threaten their trade. First-class helmets could defy the most massive crossbow that demanding patrons sometimes brought for proving, but a sixteenth-century musket with new-style corned (uniformly grained) powder could achieve a muzzle energy of 4,400 joules, a more than 20-fold increase over the 200 joules of a crossbow bolt and enough to penetrate mild sheet steel two millimeters thick. Bulletproof armor came in the later sixteenth century but was too heavy to be worn proudly and gracefully. Twentieth-century experiments have proved that late medieval armor allowed flexibility and comfortable movement; heat, not weight, was its real problem. But the new equipment was often carried by servants as part of a baggage train and could not always be unpacked for unexpected combat. By the late sixteenth century educated opinion held that the new armor could disable a man by the age of 35.
Not only firearms but new military ideas worked against body armor. Commanders of the early seventeenth century, led by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, sought maneuverability and speed and willingly reduced their armor. The helmet usually was the last piece of armor to be abandoned. But arms and armor historians like to point out that protection never disappeared. Bashford Dean, an American ichthyologist and paleontologist who helped establish the technological history of armor as a scholarly field, observed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a number of military authorities continued to value armor. Some important eighteenth-century commanders wore it; helmets still protected against swords and lowvelocity bullets. There is a portrait of Lord Jeffery Amherst from 1760 with a gleaming helmet beside him. It was more common, though, for an officer to wear a small metal skullcap called a secrète under his hat.
In Europe, sappers, digging under heavy fire to attack enemy fortifications, had their own head coverings. Then there were the cavalry helmets of the nineteenth century, the most glorious survivors of medieval and Renaissance tradition. However, in 1865 a correspondent of the Times of London called attention to the plight of an orderly in the heavy cavalry who was barely able to control his runaway horse because he had to use one hand to hold down his helmet, with its “monstrous tail.” Calling for the present model to be retired to a museum, the correspondent repeated an “authentic story” of a regiment of heavy cavalry “charging with their swords dangling from their wrists while they held on their helmets.”
Nineteenth-century military helmets may have been better designed than they now appear, but even at their best they did not point the way to the future of head protection. Twentieth-century helmets probably owe more to a popular tradition that had been developing over the centuries. From medieval times, soldiers, firemen, and others without access to prestigious armorers had headgear and other equipment made from leather processed for strength and durability, called cuir-bouilli , literally “boiled leather,” sometimes stitched together in sections to form protective combs or ridges.
What is surprising about the nineteenth century is the number of hazardous trades that never used hard headgear: miners, building laborers, workers in heavy industry. Only relatively late in the century did Western people develop the idea of an accident that was not just an individual’s misfortune but a symptom of social injustice. Eventually governments, insurers, and other third parties would force or persuade employers to provide protective equipment, but before 1914 there is little evidence that even trade unions made this a high priority.
WHEN WORLD WAR I BEGAN, ONE MILITARY item that no nation had on hand in large numbers, or even in planning, was the helmet. But a big surprise in weaponry helped bring back metal headgear. In the 1890s French officerinventors showed how to use a blast’s energy to return an artillery piece to its original position, so it could be aimed more accurately on every shot with the help of forward observers and reloaded four times more often. Britain alone fired almost a million rounds on a single day in September 1917 and more than five million tons during the entire war. Wounds from artillery fragments accounted for more than half of all casualties, significantly more than rifle or machine-gun bullets. While machine guns and artillery could be equally deadly to troops going over the top in battles like the Somme, barrages constantly menaced troops still in the trenches, devastating them psychologically as well as physically. Nervous breakdowns were called shell shock for good reason.
At the beginning of the war only the heavy cavalry of the major nations still wore a helmet and breastplate, but these could do little at the front. A French officer who had proposed a helmet was rebuffed by Gen. Joseph Joffre, who did not believe the war would last long enough to put it into production. The first helmet then arose by improvisation or lucky accident in the field. A wounded soldier told Gen. August Louis Adrian that a mess bowl in his hat had saved his life, and in response the general had a metal skullcap made, like the old secrète, to fit under the service cap. This encouraged him to develop Europe’s first new standardissue helmet since the pot helmet of the early seventeenth century. But General Adrian did not return to the pot; he and his staff modified the standard French fireman’s helmet of the time, giving it a slightly shallower brim and lower crest but leaving the bowl shape unchanged, simplifying the tooling for producing hundreds of thousands. Since the eighteenth century, French fire services had dressed in a military style, and during the Empire and Restoration the sapeurs-pompiers of Paris had remained members of the French Army. French firefighters had worn a succession of magnificent steel and brass helmets, though even with insulation they must have conducted heat all too well.
The bowl was the only thing simplified and rationalized about the Adrian helmet. Its predecessor may well have been based in turn on a helmet from Melos in the Louvre, of a Hellenistic type called the neo-Attic. Despite wartime pressures, it was surprisingly complex to produce, demanding 70 stages even after preparation of the metal components. A slot and crest added to the time and expense and also weakened the helmet’s structure while increasing its weight. Yet Bashford Dean saw France’s reasons for keeping it. Its beautiful form reflected the work of an immensely popular military artist, Edouard Detaille, and helped build the troops’ spirit and morale. The wearer, Dean wrote, “becomes fond of his helmet and his feeling toward it is a distinct asset. … He is convinced that its shape is excellent, he is accustomed to its lighter weight, and he would gladly wear it under conditions in which he would probably cast aside a heavier and a better helmet.” The French army had a style of marching and fighting that emphasized mobility and élan rather than momentum. The Adrian helmet as a technology was well matched to the French technique of war.
The British helmet showed a radically different approach to technology. Its shallow bowl permitted the use of relatively thick steel that could be formed in a single pressing while keeping its thickness. Like its predecessor the kettle hat, it protected the shoulders as well as the head from objects and fragments falling from above, and it offered good protection from direct bullet hits. Simplified production also mattered to the U.S. Army, which placed an initial order for two million helmets based closely on the British design. This was at the time no doubt the largest single helmet project in human history. Like the French soldier, the British tommy seems to have identified with his headgear, but Bashford Dean, observing the effectiveness of the U.S. model, was disappointed with its exposure of the back and sides of the head.
While the French and British-American helmets were classics in their own way, the helmet that proclaimed the twentieth-century revival of the exocranium was German. The German military, renowned for its meticulous planning, had not realized that a leather shortage would force the fabrication of pressed-paper substitutes for the South American hides in its spiked leather helmets. If the French innovation arose from a soldier’s happy accident and the British from a practical manufacturer’s proposal, the German helmet was a scientific project.
Friedrich Schwerd, an engineering professor, collaborated with August Bier, a surgeon who was using powerful magnets to remove metal fragments from wounded soldiers’ heads. The surgeon had been heartbroken by the terrible brain damage done by pieces no larger than cherry pits. Many initial survivors were dying later in agony. The army command soon brought Schwerd to Berlin on Bier’s recommendation, and Schwerd identified the crucial element for a new metal helmet, a “neck protector which stands away from the neck and extends forward to the temples and over the brow.” He knew his military history, citing the German sallet (Schallernhelm) as his model.
Schwerd was firm about avoiding the temptation to strengthen the helmet’s front against direct rifle fire; he knew that riveting extra pieces would weaken the helmet and additional weight would discourage troops from wearing it. Several firms competed to find the best metallurgical formula, and experts even measured ventilation, which turned out to be superior to that of a leather helmet. For the tradeoff between weight and protection there was an apparently ingenious solution, a detachable plate that could be mounted on the helmet’s front with two lugs that doubled as ventilation holes. No other piece of armor in world history had been evaluated by so many experts. The fabrication was so advanced that a U.S. manufacturer could not even figure out how to press steel of a similar formula into the shallower British bowl shape.
AFTER WORLD WAR I THE HELMET REMAINED A foundation of twentieth-century warfare with remarkably few changes in principle. In World War II the Germans and the British held to improved versions of their designs from the Great War, and Japan chose a British-influenced shape rather than any reflection of its traditional armor or its ally’s Stahlhelm. America used a semispherical bowl like that of the seventeenth-century pot with only a slight brim and visor. It was actually the result of Bashford Dean’s work as a major in the U.S. Army during and after World War I, not only evaluating other nations’ armor but preparing new designs. Dean had especially favored one of those new designs, No. 5A, for its combination of protection—the smooth, round shape maximized the chance that a bullet would bounce off—and simplicity of production. Moreover, medieval skills returned in the months before Pearl Harbor, as Dean’s successor as curator of arms and armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Stephen V. Grancsay, helped the Army prepare an aluminum master of a new model in the museum’s fully equipped armorer’s shop. The model was used in tooling for production.
At the suggestion of Gen. George S. Patton, a hexagonally webbed football-helmet suspension recently invented by John T. Riddell was adapted as a separate plastic liner, and the resulting M-1 steel helmet was formally adopted on June 9,1941. The McCord Radiator and Manufacturing Company, in Detroit, learned how to form the seven-inch-deep bowl in a single pressing, an engineering milestone, and reduced the full production time for all 27 operations from steel blank to finished helmet to only 22 minutes. Some 25 million were produced over four decades, making it the most widely used helmet model in history.
The M-1 was the elegant answer of American modernism to the ominous angularity of the German variety. And like other classic technologies, it opened unplanned opportunities for user improvisation. At the end of its production a U.S. master sergeant wrote nostalgically of its uses, as a seat, pillow, washbasin, cooking pot, nutcracker, tent-peg pounder, wheel chock, and even (with the explosive from an unserviceable claymore mine) popcorn popper. (Since heat degraded the steel shell, the Army tried to discourage some improvisations.) The M-1 helmet prevailed through the Vietnam era and beyond.
During World War II Germany’s specialists were increasingly aware of the Stahlhelm’s shortcomings, especially its weight, its high exposed front, and its weakened transition angles between the crown and the visor and neck protector. A new, sloping design was proposed but rejected by Hitler, who shared his generation’s attachment to the Stahlhelm. It was the army of the postwar German Democratic Republic, anxious to avoid both Western designs and the helmets of its Soviet masters, that finally adopted an improved helmet and used it until reunification. Whether or not any of the parties to the Cold War realized it, this design strongly resembled another U.S. experiment, a “deep salade” that Bashford Dean had developed with the Metropolitan Museum’s armorer and the Ford Motor Company in 1917 and that had impressed President Wilson himself.
In 1978 Captain Schwerd may have had the last laugh. With the recently invented polymer Kevlar as reinforcement, patented and trademarked by DuPont, the U.S. armed forces were able to create a laminated helmet no heavier than the M-1 with superior ballistic protection. The Army’s designers insisted that the new helmet, based on exhaustive scientific measurements of actual heads, was engineered from scratch and that similarities to the Stahlhelm were superficial, but they were unmistakable. In any case, the new model proved itself from the Grenada campaign to the Gulf War, and sarcastic nicknames like “Nazi helmet” and “Kevlar Fritz” faded away as the shape became more familiar.
From the trauma of the Great War a new attitude had spread to civilian life: Hard protective head coverings were now emblems of rational courage and even extensions of the self. Some European miners had long reinforced their headgear; Cornish miners wore heavy felt hats treated with resin to protect against rock from tunnel ceilings, and some U.S. miners had improvised similar protective head coverings. According to a U.S. Bureau of Mines official interviewed in the early 1920s, there was a surge of new helmet designs inspired by miners appreciation for their wartime helmets. An Oklahoma zinc miner declared, “If the old tin hat would stop shrapnel, I reckon it’ll stop these pieces of jack,” and at least one mining company handed out military trench hats to workers at its own expense.
The U.S. Navy also helped civilian innovation. Edward W. Bullard, whose family firm made miners’ carbide lamps, was impressed by the British-style helmet he had worn as a doughboy. The Navy, alarmed by frequent and severe head injuries in shipyards, asked him to develop head protection for civilian workers, and he designed and produced a hat from alternating sheets of canvas and glue, painted black, with overlapping front and rear brims. Set with steam, it was called the HardBoiled Hat and introduced in 1919—in its layered construction, a predecessor of the Kevlar helmet of the 1980s. It was the first headgear made to protect miners from falling objects. Head protection was extended only gradually to other industries, probably through purchases by individual workers. The first work site to require hard hats was the Golden Gate Bridge, which opened in 1937; its chief engineer, Joseph B. Strauss, was alarmed by injuries from falling rivets and worked with Bullard, still a San Francisco company, to adapt the Hard-Boiled Hat for heavy construction. The E. D. Bullard Company also produced the first aluminum hard hat, tough but light, in 1938.
By the time of America’s entry into World War II, there was an active but now hardto-document market for industrial safety headgear. On the very day of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, The New York Times noted that a Department of Agriculture laboratory had developed “a plastic helmet out of heavy cotton cloth and soybeans” that could shield civilian workers’ heads from forces of up to 40 pounds. Wartime activities accelerated industrial protection. A catalogue of fire and police equipment published by a Detroit company during the 1940s features a GI in a pot helmet furiously firing a machine gun juxtaposed with a civilian fireman in a traditional fire helmet more calmly discharging the company’s latest carbon dioxide extinguisher. A lighter version of the doughboy hat is listed with a reminder that “U.S. Service Inspectors require uniformed guards, safety patrolmen and maintenance men to wear steel protective helmets.” The catalogue notes that protective headgear will pay for itself in lower insurance rates, a sign that helmets were privately recognized, if not yet legally required, in most applications.
By November 1958 Popular Science could run a full two-page spread featuring 15 styles of work helmet. Civilian head protection was also becoming glamorous. In 1959 the New York State Commerce Department worked with an advertising agency to distribute aluminum safety hats with the state seal to the Empire State’s top officials, extolling its citizens as “hard hat doers” and promising companies growth and prosperity “in this hard hat climate.”
BY THE LATE 1960S BIPARTISAN opinion in Congress favored new legislation to reduce the alarming number of industrial accidents. President Richard M. Nixon called for better personal protection for the nation’s workers in August 1969, and in December 1970 he signed into law the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), creating a new national authority to make and enforce standards of equipment and practice, of course including work helmets. Among police, New York patrolmen assigned to turn off illegally opened hydrants as early as summer 1961 were issued plastic helmet liners to go under their caps to shield them from the bricks and bottles hurled by defiant youths and parents.
As helmeted riot police began to bear down on protesters in the late 1960s and 1970s, demonstrators in turn improvised their own head protection. Joschka Fischer, the future foreign minister of Germany, wore a black motorcycle helmet in his youthful rumbles with white-helmeted officers, while in 1969, a year after the disastrous Chicago Democratic National Convention, the street-fighting Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society faced Chicago police again in motorbike helmets and batons of their own. By the time a new cadre of militant demonstrators emerged in the antiglobalization protests at the Genoa and Seattle World Trade Organization meetings, head protection on both sides had become de rigueur. In Los Angeles the police-centurion image has so prevailed that LA Weekly joked in 2002 that “riot helmets look as natural on cops as mustaches.”
Once helmets had been revived for soldiers and extended to many workers, safety head coverings for athletes almost inevitably followed. Part of the reason was cultural. If a helmet represented the courageous infantryman or miner, it could call desirable attention to the rigor and even danger of sport.
The first documented hard civilian sports helmets appear to have been British flying (“crash”) helmets sold in 1923 as Royal Air Force surplus. Jockeys were the next civilian athletes to use hard head protection. By 1924 lightweight but strong fiber helmets fitting under caps like the old steel skullcaps were introduced in Australia, and the next year they were mandatory in U.S. steeplechase events. They soon spread to Thoroughbred racing.
The most influential and controversial of the rigid sports helmets was that developed by the late 1930s for American football. Originally bareheaded, players of the 1890s had begun to use homemade mohaircushioned leather helmets as play got rougher until manufacturers started to offer what were probably the first ready-made athletic head protectors around 1900. In 1917, for better impact absorption, the head was isolated from the shell by a web of fabric straps, a system marginally improved by innovations of the 1920s and 1930s. The breakthrough was a plastic shell with a new web suspension, adjustable for head size. Unlike leather, the lighter plastic allowed the riveting of the suspension and didn’t mildew. Even before U.S. entry into World War II and the Army’s adoption of the suspension as the foundation of the M-1 helmet system, it was kept off the market by materials shortages.
After some failures following the war, the National Football League admitted the helmet in 1949. By the early 1950s it had virtually replaced the leather helmet. However, it had a paradoxically catastrophic effect on injuries. It reduced some head damage but was held responsible for a tripling of neck injuries and a doubling of deaths from cervical spine injuries. Such casualties have resulted in lawsuits that continue to plague the U.S. sporting goods industry, but the real problem has been not in the technology but in the technique. Coaches once instructed players to tackle ball carriers by wrapping their arms around them. Their new technique instead used the helmet as a battering ram, not only to stop the carrier but to dislodge the ball, ultimately by aiming below the victim’s chin, hoping to knock him out. While helmet technology has continued to evolve since the early 1990s and safer designs have been promised, the underlving problem remains from football’s early years as a spectator sport: Fans enjoy and encourage violent plays. For the determined developer of new aggressive techniques, the challenge is to find the loopholes in the new rules.
After the war, pulp and rubber were succeeded by generations of new plastics. Aerodynamic contours replaced the old pudding-bowl design. Top automotive racing models incorporated ventilators and anti-lift design, dramatizing rather than concealing risks. In fact, racing helmets can be so heavy and forces so great that drivers may need a supplementary restraint, such as Jim Downing and Robert Hubbard’s HANS (Head and Neck System), to keep the helmet from whipping the neck fatally in a crash. The death of a prominent amateur motor racer, William (“Pete”) Snell, in 1956 converted most of his fellow racers to the idea of protection and led to establishment of a leading safety equipment research foundation in his memory, but most organized U.S. motorcycle enthusiasts question mandatory-helmet legislation, observing that it has reduced fatalities mainly by discouraging motorcycle riding. Moreover, in accidents at road speeds above 15 miles per hour, some U.S. opponents of helmets say, the additional mass of the helmet only helps substitute neck casualties for head ones. Still, emergency room surgeons treating motorcycle accident victims remain among the strongest helmet advocates, and many cyclists never ride without head protection.
Because of a constantly expanding armory of energyabsorbent materials, construction features, and simulation equipment, the helmet in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries represents both the triumphs and the paradoxes of the technological reduction of risk. There is no universal sports helmet, and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) advises purchasing a separate, purpose-designed model for each sport. By now the list includes lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, in-line skating, BMX cycling, equestrian sports, extreme sports, and boxing.
FOR ALL THESE VARIETIES, THE most ubiquitous symbol of the rebirth of head protection is the bicycle helmet, the commonest, lightest, most colorful, and most controversial of all. Yet it is also relatively recent. It began with the surge of mountain bicycles in the 1970s and was led by Bell Sports, the largest maker of autoracing helmets. In the 1980s and 1990s the size of the potential market encouraged Bell and others to increase the appeal of protection by using new and lighter materials and ventilated aerodynamic shapes to reduce weight without degrading performance, although tooling for some of the most striking models requires (like so many other high technologies) time-consuming and high-priced handcraftsmanship.
Thanks to the feedback of stylish design and growing markets, a once-stodgy idea became sexy and youthful. By 2001, the CPSC reported, 69 percent of child cyclists and 43 percent of adults in the United States wore helmets. Yet this apparent success has turned up a paradox. In the decade from 1991 to 2001 the surge in helmets was accompanied by a decline in ridership and an increase in cyclist accidents, resulting in 51 percent more head injuries per bicyclist. To some opponents of mandatory helmet laws, these statistics are the result of what is called risk compensation, bolder behavior arising from a feeling of enhanced security. There are indeed people who will test the limits of any safety device, but most bicyclesafety advocates reject this explanation. They believe the CPSC statistics of helmet use may be exaggerated, and they point to adverse traffic conditions, more aggressive behavior by motorists, and faster bicycles.
Today’s sports helmet does the same job as the first military ones introduced in the ancient Near East. It spares the wearer a skull fracture or concussion by spreading the energy of an impact, not with a mace tip but with an asphalt surface. Like the ancient helmet, it can build group spirit, though to some critics it merely attempts to eradicate individuality and risk in the name of safety.
The most curious manifestation of the avoidance of risk appeared only in the late 1980s, as the result of a successful medical campaign to reduce sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by urging parents to keep babies from suffocating. An unintended consequence of the campaign was that some babies spent so much time on their backs that their heads became flattened, a condition called plagiocephaly. Mild cases can be self-correcting if parents vary their babies’ positions while the babies are supervised or awake, but thousands of infants have been wearing custom-made orthopedic helmets. There are already 17 companies that make these helmets in the United States alone. This therapy seems a small price to pay to reverse the occasional mishap from a lifesaving technique, but it also shows that nowadays one is never too young to become a hard-head. The helmet was born in ancient warfare, and we have become men, women, and children from Mars.
