(Thomas Froese)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, July 18, 2026)
Yesterday, July 17, was Nils Bohlin’s birthday. More on Mr. Bohlin shortly. His claim to fame involves seatbelts.
Seatbelts weren’t always in fashion. Consider the ‘70s. There’s my father and his mutton chops with my buddy Paul and myself, all in our blue van during a snowy night on a country road with black ice. Before we hit the ditch Paul screamed an expletive, which is always cool for a young teenager except in those moments when you’re facing death.
I had neither seatbelt nor seat. Instead I sat low, in back, on a heater, a metal box connected to a thick heating hose, everything sitting loose on the van’s floor behind its two seats.
After hitting the ditch the van did its best impression of a Snowbird jet and rolled 360 degrees, fully around and back onto its wheels. From its front doors we then jumped, myself last, having furthest to go to escape the crumpled vehicle, its engine, dangerously, still running.
While the van rolled I’d felt suspended in air, as if unseen angels had things under control. Surprisingly, I felt little. It wasn’t unlike when some neighbourhood punks beat me horribly and I walked away simply with a better understanding of how fear and adrenaline work together.
Bohlin, an aircraft designer, would have thoughts about this rollover phenomena. The thoughts of Paul’s parents were simply that he’d never drive with us again.
This may be because during the mishap Dad Froese was sporting a leg cast. When a policeman came by our house – we’d hitchhiked home – he had questions, all answered by my father while he hid his left leg under a home office desk.
This isn’t to indict my father, although, cast aside, he was charged with leaving an accident scene, which, remember, was a dark, frozen field.
It is to say that despite life’s topsy-turviness, things usually somehow work out. Paul became a policeman. We were groomsmen in each other’s weddings. And I had the good fortune of a good story when the need arose.
Children of the ‘70s bounced around in plenty of cars. My sister and I first did so in my father’s purple Pontiac Parisienne, a boat of a car where children who were very small and tired could nap atop the rear window’s parcel shelf. Later, our red Cutlass convertible had seatbelts at least in front. If the old milk truck we took to our farm had one, I don’t recall it.
But now consider airplanes. How about that unnamed Serbian on a recent Ryanair flight, Greece to Germany? When outside debris shattered his passenger window, only his head and shoulders were partially sucked out of the plane. His seatbelt saved his life.
In this we’re products of our time. Horses got people around for thousands of years with their particular horse hazards. These days in my neighborhood we’re simply navigating a new four-way stop where, after crawling up to it, nobody knows what to do. This, after a car flipped rather remarkably onto its roof there some time ago.
So we can all thank our lucky stars for Bohlin, who’d have turned 106 yesterday. The engineer from the modest Swedish city of Härnösand didn’t just design aircraft, but in 1959 he designed the modern three-point seatbelt. Who knows how many lives it has saved?
Not that everyone buckles up. Driving in developing nations, that is the majority world, can be especially harsh. So there are stories and images, most unpleasant, from there too.
And while only about five per cent of drivers in Canada now don’t strap in – they’re often drunk – a full one-third of all road deaths in this country result from no belt. Oh, to be a human missile.
It’s good news, then, that over time we’ve learned something. Even so, years down the road they’ll still look back in complete shock because of God knows what else that we’re now doing.