Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  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 seventy stages even after preparation of the metal components. The slot and crest that added to the time and expense also weakened the helmet’s structure and added (with other ornamentation) at least a hundred grams to its weight. Yet Bashford Dean saw France’s reasons for keeping it. Its beautiful form reflected the work of the immensely popular military artist Édouard 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.” As we saw earlier, the French army also 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.30

  The British helmet showed a radically different approach to design. 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 falling from above, and offered good protection from direct bullet hits. Simplified production also mattered to the U.S. Army, which placed an initial order for two million, 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. Yet Bashford Dean, observing the effectiveness of the U.S. model based closely on it, was disappointed with its exposure of the back and sides of the head.31

  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, so 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 leather spiked helmets. The French innovation arose from a soldier’s happy accident and the English from a practical manufacturer’s proposal; the German helmet was a scientific project. Friedrich Schwerd, an engineering professor, collaborated with August Bier, who held a chair of medicine and 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.” And he knew his military history, citing the German sallet (Schallernhelm) as his model.32

  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 that 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 the 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. For the thickness of the steel, the shape was remarkably deep; a U.S. manufacturer was not able to press steel of a similar formula into the shallower British bowl shape.33

  The German steel helmet revealed the paradoxes of protection. A sincerely humanitarian device, it was simultaneously a tool to help German troops kill as many of the enemy as possible. It combined an evocative, almost romantically medieval form, with sophisticated medicine and metallurgy. After the war, veterans adopted it or rather recycled it as a paramilitary icon; the largest and most influential of the postwar militias was called the Stahlhelm, and even before the appearance of the National Socialist Party, the ultra-rightist Ehrhardt Brigade wore swastika-decorated steel helmets.34

  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 their traditional armor or their ally’s Stahlhelm. America used a semispherical bowl like that of the seventeenth-century pot, with only a slight brim and visor. The design was actually the work of Bashford Dean’s years as a major in the U.S. Army, not only evaluating other nations’ armor but preparing new designs. Dean especially favored one, No. 5, for its combination of protection—the smooth, round shape maximized the chance that a bullet would bounce off—and simplicity of production. And medieval skills returned in the months before Pearl Harbor, as Dean’s successor at the Metropolitan Museum, Stephen V. Grancsay, helped the army prepare an aluminum master of a new model in the museum’s fully equipped armorer’s shop, which in turn was used in tooling for production. At the suggestion of General George S. Patton, the hexagonal-webbed football helmet suspension recently invented by John T. Riddell was adapted as a separate plastic liner. 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 twenty-seven operations from steel blank to finished helmet to only twenty-two minutes. Over four decades 25 million were to be produced, making the M-1 the most widely used helmet model in history.35

  The M-1 was the elegant answer of American modernism to the ominous angularity of the German model. 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 steel shell, the army tried to discourage improvisation.) The M-1 prevailed through the Vietnam era and beyond.36

  During World War II, Germany’s specialists were increasingly aware of the Stahlhelm’s shortcomings, especially its weight, its high exposed front, and the weakened 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 new German Democratic Republic, anxious to avoid both Western designs and the helmets of its Soviet masters, that finally adopted Model B/II 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” (sic) that Bashford Dean had developed with the Metropolitan Museum’s armorer and the Ford Motor Company in 1917 and that had impressed President Woodrow Wilson himself.37

  In 1978, Captain Schwerd may have had the last laugh. With the recently invented polymer Kevlar (phenolic polyvinyl butyryl) 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. 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. Indeed, the sallet was, as we have seen, not originally German at all.38

  THE INDUSTRIAL FRONT

  From the trauma of the Great War a new attitude spread to civilian life, that hard protective head coverings
were 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 against rock from tunnel ceilings. Some U.S. miners improvised similar protective head coverings. But according to a U.S. Bureau of Mines official interviewed in the early 1920s, a surge of new helmet designs had been inspired by miners’ wartime appreciation for their helmets. An Oklahoma zinc miner declared, “If the old tin hat would stop shrapnel, I reckon it’ll stop these pieces of jack.” At least one mine operator handed out military trench hats to its workers at its own expense. The helmets had become common in California and West Virginia as well.39

  The U.S. Navy also helped civilian innovation. Edward W. Bullard, whose family made miners’ carbide lamps, was impressed by the English-style helmet he wore as a doughboy. The navy, alarmed by frequent and severe head injuries in shipyards, asked Bullard to develop head protection for civilian workers, just as munitions plants in England during the war had (as we have seen) installed what may have been the first large-scale industrial posture seating. Bullard 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 Hard-Boiled 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 construction site to require hard hats was the Golden Gate Bridge; its head 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. In the same year, 1938, Bullard produced the first aluminum hard hat, tough but light.40

  By America’s entry into World War II, there was an active 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 forty pounds. Wartime authorities 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 Gratacap-style hat, 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 company offered “Head Protector” helmets of molded vulcanized fiber, “cradle cushioned against blows,” noting that “thousands” were in use around the world “in mines, mills, on construction projects, and where men are subjected to falling objects.” The Head Protector had an almost spherical dome and a 360-degree brim set at an angle. There were also “Hedgard Safety Hats” of unspecified material but with a novel suspension cradle, perhaps inspired by the M-1’s new system. The catalogue notes that protective headgear would pay for itself in lower insurance rates, a sign that while relatively new it was privately recognized if not yet legally required in most applications.41

  Industrial helmets flourished in the postwar years and even became emblems of American engineering in the 1956 novel of Helen Marie Newell, The Hardhats. The author had grown up in Idaho construction camps and worked as a wartime aircraft mechanic. An Idaho Voter review noted that “those metal contraptions that save men’s lives” were “familiar objects to Westerners,” yet they were also still strange enough to make construction workers look like “creatures from Mars.” In November 1958, Popular Science ran a two-page spread featuring fifteen styles of work helmet. And civilian head protection became newsworthy. In 1959, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, 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.”42

  By the late 1960s, bipartisan opinion in the U.S. Congress favored new legislation to reduce an alarming number of industrial accidents. President Richard M. Nixon called for better personal protection for the nation’s workers in August 1969, and by the end of 1970 he had signed the law creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a new national authority to make and enforce standards of equipment and practice, of course including work helmets. More than ten years after Rockefeller’s failed public relations campaign, there were already many construction projects in New York City with workers wearing mandatory helmets, now widely required by contractors if not by state and local laws. In May 1970, several hundred construction workers came to Wall Street as counterdemonstrators when antiwar students were protesting the shooting of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio. Workers were reported to have pursued the longest-haired students and “swatted” them with their helmets; some “hard hats” countered that they had been provoked by a middle-aged ringleader who spat on an American flag, and others observed that white-collar Wall Streeters were at least as numerous and forceful as the workers. On May 20, about 100,000 construction and dock workers marched from City Hall to Battery Park with patriotic songs and slogans. It was almost as though industrial safety, engendered by the army and navy, was coming to its original patrons’ aid.43

  Whatever the reality, reports of workers attacking student leftists caught journalists’ and social scientists’ attention. Political stickers and American flag decals turned out to reflect a tradition of customizing and individualizing gear, rather than to be the signature of any new paramilitary force. For protective equipment makers, many of the head coverings were not properly hard hats at all but hard caps, having only small visors rather than full brims.44

  As protestors and counterdemonstrators continued to clash, the police, too, started wearing helmets more often. In fact, New York patrolmen assigned to turn off illegally opened hydrants as early as summer 1961 were issued plastic helmet liners to shield them from bricks and bottles hurled by defiant youths and parents. And 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 Democratic convention in Chicago, the street-fighting Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society faced Chicago police again; now the demonstrators wore motorbike helmets and carried batons of their own. When a new cadre of militant demonstrators emerged in the antiglobalization protests at the Genoa and Seattle World Trade Organization meetings, head protection had become de rigueur on both sides. 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.”45

  Does their new armor help the police? British commentators of different political outlooks, whose government is replacing the traditional high-crowned helmet with a squatter and more impact-resistant mutant, have second thoughts. Just as we have seen that the zori sandal encouraged a certain gait in Japan, the 1864 helmet promoted, according to Andy Beckett of the Guardian, a distinctive walk: “very upright, chest out, arms swinging stiffly, the hat brim down low to stop it wobbling, eyes slightly narrowed in consequence,” setting the wearer apart from lesser security officers who were “jittery solutions to Britain’s current disorders.” And the new helmet might even subtly provoke rather than deter confrontation. To Tom Utley, a columnist for the Telegraph, a new “practical” helmet will say to many people, “‘Here is a man who is dressed to be thumped.’ They will therefore thump him.” Protection, whether of police or of demonstrators, can edge into provocation.46

&
nbsp; Punch has some fun at the expense of the new, martial London police helmet, once more controversial in the early 2000s.

  Work helmets have long lost the aggressive populism of the 1970s. The grand tradition of improvising, whether in the military or on the job, is discouraged. The armed forces’ Kevlar helmets are unsuitable for cooking and their camouflage designs do not invite Vietnam-era embellishment. In civilian as in military life, equipment is better designed than ever, with superior materials, and there are even steps to build in ventilation, relieving one of the helmet’s oldest ergonomic problems.

  SKID LID KIDS

  Once helmets were 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 attention to the rigor and even danger of sport.

  As in mining and police work, reinforced hats were the first safety headgear. The top hat of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the descendant of a simple round felt hat—along with the frock coat, originally the plain garb of the common man, as opposed to the wigs and cocked tricorn hats of courtly dress. For hunting and riding, a round hat could be and still is made, reinforced with additional material.

  The first documented hard civilian sports helmets appear to have been British flying (“crash”) helmets sold in 1923 as Royal Air Force surplus. By the early 1940s specially produced head coverings with vulcanized rubber or pulp shells and web sling suspensions, originally designed for racers, were widely used by soldiers and civilians. Possibly the first scientific study of noncombat helmet effectiveness was published in 1941 by the military neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns. He showed the importance of head injuries in motorcycle casualties and began the scientific evaluation of materials, finding pulp four times more effective than rubber.47