Samuel W. Alderson

Who was Samuel W. Alderson?

Samuel W. Alderson was an inventor best known for his development of the crash test dummy, a device that, during the last half of the twentieth century, was widely used by automobile manufacturers to test the reliability of automobile seat belts and other safety protocols.

Alderson was born in Cleveland, Ohio but was raised in southern California as a toddler where his Romanian-immigrant father ran a custom sheet-metal and sign shop. He graduated from high school at the age of 15 and went on to intermittently study at Reed College, Caltech, Columbia and UC Berkeley. He frequently interrupted his education to help out with the family sheet-metal business. He completed his formal education at the University of California, Berkeley under the tutelage of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence, but did not complete his doctoral dissertation.

In 1952, he began his own company, Alderson Research Laboratories,and quickly won a contract to create an anthropometric dummy for use in testing aircraft ejection seats. At about the same time, automobile manufacturers were being challenged to produce safer vehicles, and to do so without relying on live volunteers or human cadavers.