A rocket sled, mounted on steel railroad tracks, blasted across a remote patch of the Mojave desert on Dec. 10, 1954, reaching speeds of 642 mph — literally faster than a speeding bullet. At the end of its brief, violent journey the sled — piloted by daredevil researcher John Paul Stapp — ran through a complicated braking system that stopped it short, subjecting its pilot to forces equivalent to what the driver of a car hitting brick wall at 120 mph would experience. It was Stapp’s final run on the rocket sled, but he continued a long career of daring experiments testing the durability of the human body. He survived, albeit barely, acquiring the nickname “The Fastest Man on Earth.” Stapp’s experiments on his own body revolutionized the way humans understood safety and technology.
By placing himself in some of the most dangerous and daring situations imaginable, he showed the transportation industry how to keep humans safer.
Born in Brazil in 1910, Stapp grew up in a family of American missionaries. Though he never took to religion himself, he eventually became something of a missionary in his own right, expounding the virtues of safety in high-speed travel. He was educated at Baylor University in Texas, and he received his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1940. In the years after World War II, the military sought bright minds to solve its growing set of technological challenges, and the capaciously talented Stapp fit the bill. He entered the military in 1944, acting as a general duty medical officer after he’d finished his M.D. In 1946, he was transferred to the Aero Medical Laboratory in Ohio to conduct tests on pilot safety.
Stapp quickly established his own courage, as well as his capacity for endurance. He spent over 65 hours flying at 45,000 feet, an unheard-of altitude at the time. At those heights, dangerously low air pressure threatened to afflict him with decompression sickness, or the bends — a dangerous, potentially deadly condition caused by bubbles of gas rapidly expanding in the blood stream. He sought to avert this hazard, discovering that if pilots inhaled pure oxygen for a half hour prior to flight, they could avoid the condition — a method still used today by military pilots and paratroopers.
Stapp’s problem-solving success guaranteed him assignment on what was, in 1947, the Air Force’s most important project: the study of gravitational force on the human body. Military pilots who crash-landed were subjected to several times the force of gravity at sea level: 1 G, the standard unit of gravitational force. Because of the prevailing notion that 18 G's would liquefy a human body, WWII pilots flew planes at low altitudes and speeds so that if they crashed, the sudden stop wouldn’t subject them to fatal gravitational forces. Flying lower and slower, however, put pilots at risk from enemy guns. The military wanted to find ways to make pilots safer from the enemy without putting exposing their bodies to forces of the elements. Stapp was suspicious of the 18 G limit. He knew of WWII stories that suggested humans could withstand far more punishment — planes that had crashed at high speeds, their pilots walking away unhurt — so, in his cavalier style, he set out to prove it.
To simulate high-speed crash conditions, Stapp and his team developed a ground-running rocket sled, little more than a platform with a chair and rockets, mounted on railroad tracks in the middle of the Edwards Air Force base in the Mojave Desert. The pilot would ride the sled, reaching speeds of over 200 mph, then stop on a dime, recreating the G’s a fighter-pilot would experience during a crash. They named the sled — with morbid good cheer — the “Gee Whiz.” After 35 test runs with a dummy, Stapp decided it was time to ride the Whiz himself. By August of the next year he’d ridden the rocket 16 times, shattering the 18-G limit — along with several ribs — and experiencing up to 35 G’s.
Despite hemorrhaging retinas, concussions, and other physical trauma, the daredevil Stapp carried on — one apocryphal story has him setting his own broken wrist on his way back to his field office. By 1953 the military had recognized Stapp’s work, and he’d forever changed the way it handled aircraft safety, specifically in the types of harnesses used and the way cockpits were designed.
In what would be his last series of tests, Stapp mounted a shiny new rocket sled that made the Gee Whiz look like a go-kart. He was seated facing backward to minimize the effects of the G-force on his eyes. When questioned by a reporter, Stapp quipped, “I assure you, I am not looking forward to this.” During his final rocket ride in the early winter of 1954, the immense G-forces he encountered burst almost every capillary in his eyes. For a day he was blind. Yet the Fastest Man on Earth survived, fully sighted, going on to other fields of experimentation, including high-altitude sky diving.
Stapp’s most conspicuous contribution to popular culture came during a news conference in 1947, when he referred to Murphy’s Law. When asked what this was, he said, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Many variations of this universal bit of wisdom exist, but Stapp codified it, supposedly naming it after one of his colleagues, Edward Murphy. His application of the aphorism kept him safe during his daring experimentation, and its apparent cynicism belies his notorious optimism.
Stapp’s legacy is far-reaching, though many of his innovations are taken for granted. His work on seatbelt design was instrumental in America’s 1966 seatbelt law. His record-breaking G-force experiments paved the way for what at the time was new military technology: the jet fighter. Stapp claimed that all the immensely dangerous work he did was, ironically, in the name of safety; his career was geared toward finding ways to keep operators of modern technology alive and well.
It’s also perhaps ironic that Stapp died peacefully in his home at 89 — a ripe old age after the massive and continual physical stresses he’d subjected himself to. Before he died, he left his own eponymous law for us to ponder, known as Stapp’s Ironical Paradox: “The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle.” Stapp’s contributions were certainly miraculous — if not particularly inept.
Rob Ogden is a writer in Cleveland.