Early cars had no seatbelts at all. Some later models had simple lap belts, but they could actually cause injuries in big crashes. In 1959, a Swedish engineer named Nils Bohlin, working at Volvo, designed a belt that went over the shoulder and across the lap and clicked together at the hip - the three-point seatbelt we still use today.
Volvo could have kept the patent and made a fortune selling the design to other carmakers. Instead, the company gave it away for free, deciding that saving lives was more important than profits. Other manufacturers quickly added three-point belts to their cars, and laws around the world eventually made them mandatory.
Research suggests three-point seatbelts have saved well over a million lives in the decades since. They cut the chance of dying in a serious crash by about half. Bohlin’s quiet invention rarely makes lists of greatest inventions, but in raw numbers of lives saved, few engineering ideas have ever come close.
