Some say Gottlieb Daimler invented the first motorbike helmet in the
1880s. It was essentially a leather cap witha fur lining as used by motorists,
and only provided protection against fast flying mosquitoes or possibly a sparrow that had eaten a
small rock. A hat was probably just as effective, or even just having some hair on your head.
The first genuine motorbike helmet appeared in 1914. Dr Eric Gardner asked a fellow englishman,
Mr Moss, to design a helmet with a hard outer shell. It had no internal padding
at all but could probably protect against a sparrow that had eaten a large rock.
At first, the Autocycle Union said to take their helmet and put it where the Sun doesn't shine,
but finally they saw sense and made them compulsory for the Isle of Man TT
race in 1914. But everyday riders still wore thin leather helmets, if anything,
and the leather helmet ads focused not on safety but more on just preventing bad hair days. Helmet
design got its next big boost from the death of Lawrence of Arabia in 1935. He'd survived numerous
camel accidents but went over the handlebars of his motorbike and died six days later. One
of his neurosurgeons, an Australian called Hugh Cairns, got sufficiently pissed off at riders
dying that he said "Strewth mate this ain't good, gonna have to do something about it!"
His research saw helmets designed specifically for motorbike riders and made them compulsory for
army dispatch riders. These features included chin straps and also web slings on the inside
to help absorb impacts in Australia. Hugh is officially known as a good sport and not a bad
bloke for saving countless lives of riders, and people in many other sports as well.
So what happened after World War two? Not a lot. Apart from some stunt riding with some Brylcreem
in the hair for protection, there was a bit of helmet research in the USA with the Navy
funding investigations into head injuries. Some very cool chicks got into stuntriding,
but head protection was limited to big hairstyles, a bow, or a hat for ultra tricky stunts. In 1952,
a huge step forward... the world's first-ever performance-based motorbike helmet standard
in the UK: the British standard 1869:1952. Helmet manufacturers were free to design the
way they wanted to, as long as it passed a suite of tests, a brand new concept and
it rapidly led to other standards. In 1953 a professor Lombard of the University of Southern
California developed the first-ever helmet with a polystyrene in a liner... just like
today's helmets but sadly it was ineffective. It was going to take years of research to get
this one right. Helmet standards took a bit longer in the USA, in 1957 William Snell died
in a racing car accident despite wearing a helmet. A medical officer, George Snivelly,
examined many racing helmets and found all of them lacking. It was a serious wake-up call for
all the manufacturers. The Snell foundation was born the same year and created the first American
performance-based standard in 1959 for racing car drivers. In the late 1960s this was endorsed for
use by motorbike riders as well. Helmet design through the 1960s was usually a fiberglass outer
shell and polyurethane foam or cork liner. The world's first ever full face helmet appeared
in 1963 made by Bell. The 1960s saw governments increasingly look at laws insisting on helmets
when riding on public roads, a move many of the governments around the world made in the
1970s. Through the 1970s, the old pudding bowl style helmet was gradually replaced by the 3/4
helmet which most riders preferred as early full-face helmets tended to be quite heavy.
However improvements in helmet design gradually saw the full face become light enough to become
accepted by everyone... except ugly people willing to take a punt that a high-speed faceplant on the
road might improve their looks. Helmet design and materials kept improving, with the last big
shake-up coming up with the COST 327 study in 1996, the world's biggest ever research study
into helmets, accidents, and brain injuries. It resulted in the European standard, used in more
than 50 countries worldwide, and regarded by many as the best of an increasingly out-of-date bunch
of standards. Helmets are still improving thanks to a small number of motivated manufacturers who
are innovating and finding ways to improve the helmets, within the confines of current standards.
But essentially the guys who set our standards have failed to incorporate a pile of new testing
procedures, design standards, and innovations that could make helmets even safer. Making
changes to a standard is serious business as lives depend on these being based on sound principles.
Standards are a tool for two purposes: first for evaluating available helmets, second as guides for
designing new helmets. So the standards need to be performance-based and not prescriptive, and sadly
there are examples of prescriptive standards happening in Australia and other countries.
So in the meantime, if you're in the market for a new helmet get informed
before you decide. You've only got the one head, so use it well and look after it.