IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 35

But Denton's dummies do more than car crashes. They've
been used in roller coaster tests in Iowa and in simulated train
wrecks in India. They've been dropped out of airplanes, strapped
into crashing helicopters, and shot out of cannons. They've
checked out school-bus seats, motorcycle air bags, and ski-slope
protection nets. An Australian clothing company ordered a "perfect size 10" dummy to try on its new styles. And in a TV show,
a Denton Hybrid III was punched in the face by a professional
boxer and held in a neck lock by a Brazilian jujitsu fighter.
"There were some applications where we had no clue what
they were doing," Beebe says. "It was proprietary or government
related. The dummies left brand-new. They came back in parts."
A DUMMY LIke NO. 0200-137 consists of 350 metal and plastic
parts. Denton fabricates most of them itself, and just about
everything is done by hand.
First comes the skin, the salmon-colored flexible plastic that
covers a dummy's body. To make the feet, for example, a worker
pours a milkshake-like substance-liquid vinyl-into an aluminum mold the size of a brick. The mold's interior is shaped like a
foot (that is, a dummy's toeless foot), and the vinyl will solidify,
or cure, when it goes into an oven. The skin for the dummy's
head, upper arms, lower arms, hands, thighs, and shins is made
the same way.
In another part of the factory, a group of workers fabricates
steel and aluminum parts for the dummy's skeleton. One technician loads some specs into a computer numerical control, or CNC,
machine, which automatically cuts, drills, and mills a steel part-
in this case, an intricate disk for the dummy's shoulder. Over in
another corner, a worker bends long strips of steel that will form
No. 0200-137's ribs. Co-workers call this guy "Rib Man."
As the workers weld the smaller parts to the larger ones, pieces
of the skeleton begin to take shape: skull, spine, hips, ankles,
knees, elbows. The dummy's neck is more intricate. A large fraction of car accidents, especially rear collisions, result in severe
neck injuries. To create a structure that can mimic the movement
of a human neck, a worker mixes together natural rubber, polyacrylates, nitriles, neoprene, and butyl to obtain precise damping
characteristics. He injects the mixture into a press that molds a
handful of disk-shaped pieces, which will be alternated with metal
rings to form the Hybrid III's characteristic segmented neck.
From different sectors of the plant, No. 0200-137's vinyl and
metal parts converge in the assembly area, where they wait for

46 IEEE Spectrum | October 2007 | NA

the white-coated technician. The technician starts by measuring and weighing the head, limbs, and torso, and with a special
scale he determines each section's center of gravity, which has
to match that of a real person. To assemble the dummy, all it
takes is a bunch of hex screws and a wrench. But No. 0200-137
is not ready yet. He needs some sensors.
ON MY seCOND DAY at Denton, I head out to its headquarters in
Rochester Hills, Mich. From Beebe's remarks, I already have an
inkling that the company appreciates the humor in the otherwise
serious work it does. My suspicions are soon confirmed: dummy
bobbleheads greet visitors at the reception desk; a poster of a
dummy posing as Rodin's The Thinker hangs in a corridor.
When I walk into the corner office of Denton's president and
CEO, David Stein, I get still more. "I spend my day with dummies!"
is one of his favorite tension breakers. Stein, an electrical engineer
turned dummy-industry executive, shows me his collection of
crash-test miniature toys and dummy dolls bought on eBay.
The goal of my visit is to find out how the company is pushing the envelope of dummy design, and I had anticipated that
Stein wouldn't be forthcoming with details. A dummy's specs,
I reasoned, are probably like the formula for Coca-Cola or the
blueprints for the Boeing 787-secreted away in a locked vault
under heavy guard.
Not so. Dummy specifications in the United States are public, Stein tells me. You can walk into the offices of the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington, D.C.,
and request docket 74-14; in it you'll find schematic drawings,
assembly descriptions, performance requirements, and a 16-page
parts list for the Hybrid III 50th percentile.
The rationale behind keeping dummy specs open is so that
automakers, safety equipment suppliers, dummy makers, and the
NHTSA, which crash-tests most new models of vehicles before
they can go on the U.S. market, are all on the same page. (The
European Union and other countries have similar regulations.)
So in principle, anyone can get the specs and build a Hybrid III
dummy. The challenge, Stein says, is consistency-meeting the
requirements while making your next dummy indistinguishable
from the previous one. Fashioning dummies that are like clones
takes a lot of expertise. In fact, only two companies in the world
have the know-how to build the most advanced dummies: Denton
and First Technology Safety Systems, in Plymouth, Mich.
Making the dummy specs public and official also has a down-

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2007