Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 - (Page 27)

BACK TO BASICS Although he continued to race, Fitch was haunted by the deaths of his co-driver and spectators in the Le Mans incident. “It was a traumatic event for the whole sport and for racing enthusiasts, including me,” Fitch says. “The desire to ﬁnd a means of stopping an errant vehicle at a rate which the occupants could survive haunted me until I went back to the centuries-old basics.” Using Newton’s Laws of Motion, he devised a way to decelerate a car through a series of frangible tubs, each ﬁlled with increasingly heavier amounts of sand. Before calculators were available, he did all the calculations by hand. “My courses at Lehigh were a major plus,” he says. To test his theory, Fitch bought several junk cars, marked off each foot along the race track, and rented a high-speed camera. He then drove the car at 70 mph into empty liquor crates supporting sand bags ﬁlled with 200, 400, 700, and up to 2,100 pounds of sand. (Fitch may be the only inventor to crash-test his own safety devices.) When hit, the sand-ﬁlled tubs absorbed the vehicle’s energy, slowing its speed and reducing the damage it sustained. Armed with photos and calculations, Fitch visited highway departments across the country, convincing them to buy the barrels from the Fitch Inertia Barrier Company. Widely adopted in the 1960s, these ubiquitous yellow Fitch Barriers line many highway exit ramps today. “Tens of thousands of lives have been saved since the ﬁrst millions of barrels were installed in 1968—40 years ago,” Fitch says. After the success of his eponymous barrier, Fitch designed many other safety inventions, including the displaceable guardrail, driver capsule, and compression barrier. In 1998, the Transportation Research Board, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, recognized Fitch’s contributions to automobile safety with the Kenneth Stonex Award. “His lifetime contributions have covered the full spectrum of highway safety—the roadside, the vehicle, and the driver—and resulted in signiﬁcant reduction in injuries and fatalities on the motorways of the world,” the award says. Those contributions continue today. He postponed his 2007 recordbreaking attempt to present a 145-page paper on racing safety to the Society of Automotive Engineers in California. During the same week, he was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame in Detroit, Mich. “I’m quite an old party,” he says, “but I get around.” Fitch’s story was featured in two PBS documentaries, A Gullwing at Twilight: The Bonneville Ride of John Fitch, which aired in 2005, and the 2001 production, Lime Rock Park: The Secret Valley of Racing. His biography and other information are posted on racesafety.com. His escapades with the Mercedes-Benz team can be found in his autobiography, Racing with Mercedes, which can be bought through the Saratoga Automobile Museum. LU winter 2008 27 http://racesafety.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Ugly is in the Eye of the Beholder Fitch's Law of Motion A Blessing to the Community The Amidonian Acclamation China Trip Bridges Cultures, Generations From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News The Last Word

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.