What contribution to road safety was invented by Samuel W. Alderson?

Samuel W. Alderson (1914-2005) was of Romanian immigrant heritage and raised mainly in California. Although a gifted and precocious student, he was often obliged to help in the family's sheet metal business instead of attending college. He was also an able sportsman.

In the 1950s, he founded his own company, and originally worked mainly for the aerospace industry, where he first experimented with prosthetic models to use in safety tests. At that time, such safety tests as there were on cars were done with real corpses or, incredibly, living volunteers.

The appalling accident statistics, as highlighted in Ralph Nader's 1965 book, "Unsafe at any Speed" led to urgent demands for higher safety standards, and Alderson produced an anatomically accurate crash test dummy, which is essentially not dissimilar to the ones still in use today. He was helped in this quest by his work in the military, which included producing realistic "victims" of combat wounds. He also worked on the Apollo programme.

His other inventions include items as diverse as the death metal banjo, and his own patented nail clippers!