When was the helmet invented for sports

They could have gone with arch-helm, or razor-helm, or awesome helm if that wasn't already taken, right? It was called a frog-mouth helm because the lower brim juts out like the open mouth of a frog. But, seriously? Anyway, this type of helm was used almost exclusively for jousting. The narrow visor and the jutting lower brim protected the jouster's eyes. These helms included an elaborate web of straps inside that kept the steel from actually touching the knight's head.

This prevented the transfer of energy from lance to skull. Maybe the National Football League should look into this, eh? Burgonet, 16 th century: Burgonets were similar to armets, but they had a characteristic ridge that along the top of the head, starting at the forehead and curling back like a crest.

These helmets did not typically have face protection, but had long cheek pieces and a long, curved brim at the front. Sometimes something called a falling buffe was added to protect the face. A falling buffe was a piece of metal that used to be shiny but, over time, became dull. Yeah, not really. Many ceremonial types of these helmets were made, often in Italy.

Poke around the internet. You won't be disappointed. Morion, 16 th th centuries : The Morion is best known as the conquistador helm.

You know, the one the soldiers wore in Disney's Pocahontas. These types of helmets were similar in a "Yeah, I'm a Kennedy, too" sort of way to Burgonets. They both have the long, curving crest looping back from the forehead, although the morion crest is often slightly larger. And they both have brims along the front and sometimes the back. Morions can have cheek pieces, but typically do not. They rarely had any type of face protection.

The fantasy novel I am currently working on features these helmets. More on that at a later date Here are a few examples of replica helmets sold by Strongblade. Please visit our Armor and Helmets page to see a more complete list. Phone: Follow twitterapi. The helm that launched a thousand movies.

Spangenhelmens ara gooda, ya? The Norman Mailer Helm. The Iron Hat. The Greatest Helm Ever. In it's hideous glory. In the very first season, the average scoring per team jumped by In Gerry E. Morgan and the John T. Riddell Company of Chicago patented a molded plastic helmet with a web suspension that could be adjusted to fit the player. Instead, the company sold the patent rights to the Army. Soldiers at Corregidor, Anzio, and Omaha Beach went into battle wearing football helmets under their steel helmets.

When the Army won the national collegiate championship wearing the helmets in , other colleges took note. In the barehanded days of early baseball, the catcher required the nerves of a test pilot. While a team might carry only one or two pitchers, it took a platoon of catchers to finish a game. Work, a superintendent at the B. Goodrich Company, played one of the most important rounds in the history of golfing equipment.

Haskell accepted the challenge. Armed with a supply of elastic yarn, he worked at winding the stretched rubber into a tight ball. When the ball reached the size of a small marble, it shot from his fingers and bounced around the room. Haskell finally came up with a round ball under tension and wrapped in gutta percha gum. When a local golf pro tested the Haskell prototype, he watched in amazement as it landed yards beyond a bunker that no one had ever reached in one drive.

A patent for the design was granted on April 11, Here's Jean Vuarnet in his S. Speeds rose quickly, and catastrophic injuries, too. Stefan Kaelin, a star of the Swiss team during that era, remembers using a cork helmet with a fabric cover, made by Vuarnet, in The following July, racing in New Zealand, the Swiss had fiberglass helmets. Ski racers complained about the weight, and about interference with goggles. Manufacturers responded by departing from standard motorcycle-helmet design.

In , the Snell Memorial Foundation published a ski helmet standard calling for something like a lighter motorcycle design. Bell then adapted a motocross helmet with a lighter fiberglass shell to produce the SR-1 for ski racing. The original motocross helmet had a jaw protector meant to ward off clods of dirt thrown up by spinning tires, and a larger face cutout to accommodate big goggles.

The SR-1 offered the same features, certified to a lower impact standard. Steve and Phil Mahre ran downhill in their Bell motorcycle helmets. Another solution to the weight problem was acrynitrile butadiene styrene ABS. Butadiene is a synthetic rubber. It made the tough plastic resilient enough for use in auto bumpers. An ABS shell could be designed to split or crush to absorb impact, rather like a glass shell. Most important, it could be injection-molded, making it much cheaper than fiberglass, which had to be laid up by hand on a steel form.

By , European companies like Jofa, Boeri, Uvex and Carrera were marketing inexpensive plastic helmets, especially for kids. Beginning around , regional cycling associations began looking for improved bicycle helmets. A number of good helmets were produced based on climbing-helmet designs, but they provided inadequate cooling, or were deemed too heavy.

Eventually the bicycle business settled on a simple EPS helmet with a light fabric cover, or only a very thin decorative polycarbonate shell. Giro was founded in based on this design, just as the U. Cycling Federation began requiring certified helmets in all competitions. By , when the Union Cycliste Internationale followed suit, dozens of factories filled the need for lightweight bike helmets.

Most of them immediately adapted their cycling helmets for the ski market. Off the race course, helmet sales were spurred by the tree-collision deaths of Michael Kennedy and Sonny Bono, six days apart at the turn of It is not clear why the aerodynamic claim led buyers to reject all of the aero research of manufacturers of the elongated designs.

The extreme of the elongated aerodynamic style is the chrono helmet developed in the 's for Olympic time trials. This one has a rounded front and usually has a very long tail that rests on the riders back when in the tuck position used by time trial riders. Vents are minimal or non-existent. Early models had only a shell without impact protection, but in Louis Garneau introduced one that met the requirements of the US CPSC standard, and various manufacturers soon began making them to the European CEN standard.

We have a page up on current chrono helmets. Another major helmet shape that crept into bicycle helmets is the "skate-shaped" helmet. Originally developed for skateboarders by Pro-Tec, the style has lower rear coverage, small round vents in the front and even smaller round vents in a circle on top.

The skate style helmet is almost always a hard shell with ABS plastic. Although originally using a squishy rebounding foam that provided the multi-impact performance needed for aggessive skateboarding, the helmets evolved into bicycle helmets because the squishy foam would not perform in harder impacts called out by bicycle helmet standards.

After when the CPSC standard came into effect, big-box retailers were not willing to put a helmet on the floor that could be bought as a bike helmet but did not meet the CPSC standard.

As a result, most skateboarders now are buying single-crash bike helmets with crushable EPS foam inside. A few manufacturers are making helmets with EPP foam or other foam that can be certified to both the ASTM skateboard helmet standard and the bicycle helmet standard. Liners Until the 21st century, bicycle helmet liners were all crushable foams. In the late 80's or early 90's came the introduction of new foam types to replace the simple EPS picnic cooler foam that dates from the 's.

It is extensively used in the automobile industry. EPP has the desirable characteristic of slow return to its original shape after an impact, and is therefore well suited to multi-impact helmets. It is generally considered to have slightly more rebound on initial impact than EPS, and a little less impact attenuation for a given thickness.

Although Aria Sonics had an EPP helmet for five years or more, the design was never appreciated by consumers, and its marketing was inadequate to establish its advantages.

A Canadian company called Headstart introduced EPP designs in the mid's, but the helmets were not well finished and did not have the quality appearance that was required to sell in the U.

Although GE had not originally designed its combination foam and resin product for bicycle helmets, it was appreciated for its resistance to catastrophic failure, permitting manufacturers to open up larger vents and thin out liners in some places.

This is a slightly heavier foam with exceptionally small and uniform cells. It skins over in the mold, producing a shell-like cover on the lower section below the regular plastic shell.

EPU can be inmolded or the shell can be applied afterwards. It has almost no rebound and performs well in lab tests. Taiwanese manufacturers are the main users of EPU, and helmets made of it are among those on the Snell B certification list, indicating that they perform well indeed. There may be some environmental issues related to the production process for EPU, however.

In a ski helmet company known as Team Wendy or W Helmets showed a new helmet with a foam they call Zorbium. The company claims it has extraordinary energy management capabilities, with a "rate-sensitive" quality that makes it give in a lesser impact but causes it to stiffen to handle a harder hit. Although the concept is apparently sound, we never could get any test data on production models. The foam is heavy and absorbs sweat readily. W Helmets remains the only user of this foam, and their implementation has been directed toward ski models.

By they were no longer making civilian helmets. It may seem surprising that most bicycle helmets are still made of the EPS developed in the 's. Over the years we have heard of various experimental foams that were about to break open the market with astounding performance characteristics, but few have materialized in actual production, and their benefits are not readily apparent.

There are probably limits to such properties as foam thickness. Basic laws of physics make it evident that it would be very difficult to stop a rider's head from 14 MPH to 0 MPH in less than, say, a half inch of crush space, without exceeding the , or g limits in bicycle helmet standards. So better foam may not produce much improvement unless the crush rate of the EPS has some undesirable characteristics or multi impact is important for the sport.

Thicker helmets could do more, but consumers reject them. Some attempts have been made to improve the way EPS works, mostly with dual-density formulations. The cone-head technology developed by Don Morgan and marketed in is designed to make the transition between layers smoother. In the years since several newer foams have appeared, associated with marketing labels like "Brock foam," or "cross-linked foam. Beginning about with Cascade lacrosse helmets, liners appeared that were not foam-based.

Most depend on plastic constructs of some kind that manage energy by collapsing on impact. They showed up first in football and lacrosse helmets, but in there were production bike helmets with Koroyd [tm] liners that look like bundles of soda straws.

They still had EPS molded around them. Non-foam liners have huge potential for future development. They produce custom helmets with a 3D printed liner of hexagonal honeycomb cells that crush on impact. The interior liner is custom made for the wearer's head, using data from a head scan done with an iPad or iPhone that can be done at home. HEXR claims their helmet provides better energy management than a foam helmet, but cites only one European standard lab test at an average of g, a level that is good but can be attained with a good standard thick EPS foam liner.

In theory, a custom helmet can use all of the available space between your individual head and the inside of the shell for energy-management liner, so this technique could be the future of high-end helmets. For uniquely shaped heads or those with cochlear implants that alone could be a big advance. The easily-managed head scan raises the possibility that manufacturers of conventional off-the-shelf helmets could match individual head scans done at home or in a shop with the interior dimensions of their helmets to provide best fit recommendations at a fraction of the price of a custom helmet.