Crash test dummieswere invent in 1949 , which earn it all the more surprising that in the fifties the US Air Force was test ejector seats on its aircraft by strapping live bear into the chairman .
In 1950 , the nuclear bomb calorimeter - carry Convair B-58 Hustler was build . It was the first operating poor boy capable of Mach 2 flight ( traveling twice the velocity of sound ) . While cool if you want to go somewhere tight , it was n’t so expectant if you did n’t desire that place to be the ground . While the engineering was an extraordinary improvement , move at such speeds meant that pilots could no longer eject from their aircraft safely , and so a new organization had to be designed .
Theidea it come up withhad two stages . First , pull a pre - ejection handle would tuck in the pilot burner ’s leg , then case them in a ejection seat . A second lever tumbler was then pulled that would fire the pilot film and capsule into the atmosphere , before deploying a chute . The capsule , which contained food and water supply for the pilot burner , would then lento descend to the ground , or onto the water where it would blow , look saving .
As you ’d guess , the abridgment was n’t approved immediately and had to go through examination – on the unemployed and bears ( who you could also debate were unemployed ) .
quiz on the background took place on American citizens recruited from the unemployment lines , Gizmodo reports , before further tests were conducted on American bleak bears , Himalayan brownish bears , and chimpanzees . The approximation was that the beast would simulate the weight and size of it of a human pilot film . Rather than using crash test dummies to do this , they would simply drug up a bear and flog it into an ejector fundament .
The bears made it through to the final examination phase angle , where they were to be discharge while the aircraft was in flight .
The bears and chimpanzees were used to learn of potential faults in the plan of the abridgment . As you may hear in the video recording above , fault in how the seats escape from upon rejection would be discover through finding fractures of the bear ' ivory . The capsule was then tweaked and test again on the brute until finally a capsule was plan that was safe for human archetype .
The bears suffer a variety of injuries during the tryout , which establish at different altitudes and speed . Several stomach broken bones and other wound , though all of them survive long enough to beeuthanized at a later appointment . After which , they were dissected .
The bomber was retired less than a decade later .
