Today, I randomly got Crash Test Dummy's "Mmm mmm mmm mmm" stuck in my head. Back in the day, I even bought their album - a ludicrously mid-90s affair called God Shuffled His Feet - so thought I'd check up on 'em on Wikipedia.

Only problem is, Wikipedia redirected me to a page on actual crash test dummies. Makes sense, I suppose - but, as I discovered, what doesn't make much sense is the history of crash testing.



As the car industry commerically boomed in the 1930s, it became apparent that they needed someway to test the impact a car accident can have on a human body. According to Wikipedia:

"Death rates had surpassed 15.6 fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles and were continuing to climb; vehicle designers saw this as a clear indication it was time to do some research on ways to make their products safer."

Their solution? In a strangely poetic but ultimately fucked up move, they decided the best possible test 'subjects' would be human cadavers.

So: dead bodies.

In order to understand what happens in a car accident, researchers took the recently deceased and:
- dropped steel ball bearings on their skulls
- dumped them down unused elevator shafts onto steel plates
- fitted them with "crude accelerometers", strapped into automobiles and subjected them to head-on collisons

Now, I've watched a helluva lot of Six Feet Under, but I can't imagine anyone who would a) think that doing that to dead bodies is A-OK, or b) agree to let their loved one be severly mangled in their death. It's 'rest in peace', not pieces.

The use of human cadavers was soon abandoned, not only because of the moral and ethical issues, but also because they could only abuse a body once before it was useless (leading to problems with comparitive data), and "child cadavers were not only difficult to obtain, but both legal and public opinion made them effectively unusable".

With the option of dead people removed, some researchers took matters into their own hands, as it were.

"Some researchers took it upon themselves to serve as crash test dummies. Colonel John Paul Stapp USAF propelled himself over 1000 km/h on a rocket sled and stopped in 1.4 seconds. Lawrence Patrick, a now-retired Wayne State University professor, endured some 400 rides on a rocket sled in order to test the effects of rapid deceleration on the human body. He and his students allowed themselves to be smashed in the chest with heavy metal pendulums, impacted in the face by pneumatically-driven rotary hammers, and sprayed with shattered glass to simulate window implosion."

Lawrence Patrick has admitted the tests made them all "a little sore". It's no surprise the search was on for a suitable replacement. After dead humans and living humans, there was only one logical place to go: animals.

A witness to the testing describes what sounds a bit like a messed up circus:

"We saw chimpanzees riding rocket sleds, a bear on an impact swing... We observed a pig, anesthetized and placed in a sitting position on the swing in the harness, crashed into a deep-dish steering wheel at about 10 mph."

Pigs were the 'favourite' choice amongst automobile manufacturers, as they had the ability to sit upright - and as such, allowed researchers to study decapation.

While religous group had "begrudingly" accepted the use of cadavers because hey, they're dead, they can't feel it; animal rights protesters were up in arms about the torment crash testing placed on animals. They can't have been too adamant about the whole shebang though, as testing on animals by General Motors continuted until 1993.

This is despite the first crash test dummy, nicknamed "Sierra Sam", was created in 1949; and the bimoetric science of crash test dummies refined to relevant perfection by 1976.

All of which has nothing to do with the band who made "Mmm mmm mmm mmm", which I'm still in the dark about. But, long story short: wear your fucking seatbelt.