Innovations in Safety

Innovations in Safety — page 1 — Keeping Safe All around us are inventions and innovations that keep us safe What happens if you fall off your bike You can hurt your head Luckily inventors created a bike helmet long before you started riding bikes Other inventors have made driving on our roads safer Garret Morgan invented traffic lights to help drivers know when to stop and go Inventors and innovators solve a problem or meet a need Look around you Do you see anything that seems unsafe Maybe you will create the next great safety invention or innovation 4 Thanks to inventors and innovators our world today is a much safer place

Innovations in Safety — page 2 — Inventors and Innovators An inventor creates a product or process that did not exist before The first seatbelt was an invention An innovator changes or improves on an invention that already exists Nils Bohlin was an innovator that improved the seat belt design to create the three-point seat belt which we use today An engineer’s job is to use science and math to solve problems or meet needs Sometimes engineers can also be inventors and innovators when they make new solutions or improve on existing ones Inventors innovators and engineers all share the same traits such as curiosity and creativity Today’s three-point seat belt is an example of an innovation The lap and shoulder belts are connected so you can buckle both with one motion 5

Innovations in Safety — page 3 — Safe Inside Before the smoke alarm thousands of people died every year from fires in their homes It was especially hard for people to survive fires when they started at night when people were sleeping The best idea to solve this problem happened by accident In the 1930s Walter Jaeger was building a device to detect poisonous gas Unfortunately his experiments weren’t working Frustrated he stopped to light a cigarette and something happened his device detected the smoke This led to the first smoke alarm Later innovators Duane Pearsall and Stanley B Peterson created the battery-operated smoke-detecting alarm that we use today Today most homes have smoke alarms This important invention has saved many lives 6

Innovations in Safety — page 4 — Safety without Noise People who are hearing impaired often can’t hear ordinary smoke alarms To solve this problem hearing-impaired Barbara and Sidney Anders created alert systems that will wake a sleeping person These devices can help save the lives of hearing-impaired people during a fire Hearing-impaired people can install devices such as a bedside fire alarm It flashes the word FIRE and triggers a bed shaker located under the mattress The bed then vibrates and shakes waking the person in case of a fire 7

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