Hi folks -- there are days in which I come to my reading and leave humbled at what little I really know about the history of the automobile. If you think all the history of the automobile is already written down and done, you are either a fool or simply obtuse. I have given lectures to university engineering freshmen for sometime on the history of auto safety, and yet until now I have totally ignored one of the most important figures in this field, Bela Barenyi. Maybe it is because I read more English language sources than German or French, or maybe I need to learn much more about the history of technology that I purport to know.
This void was corrected by my reading of a fine book published in English in 2006 and authored by M-B's Dr. Harry Neimann. While the book is written by an archivist, head of the corporate history department, and publicist, and thus is a bit too glowing and overstated, nevertheless it does do a good job of detailing the life of one of the most important auto engineers of the 20th century. Barenyi's work was largely responsible for the development of passive safety design in automobiles, beginning during the 1930s and reaching fruition by the early 1960s. It is the crumple zone we are after here, and Barenyi had the vision and the expertise to develop this concept, an innovation that has revolutionized the way cars are designed to absorb kinetic energy. Parts fly, there is plenty of noise, but in the end automobile occupants are much safer than in more rigid vehicles that intuitively one would think would be more protected by mass in a collision.
If you are interested in the history and evolution of auto safety, this is a must read. Who in the U.S. was working on parallel matters during the same time as Barenyi?
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