Stunning vintage photos of car wrecks from the days before seat belts and airbags, 1930s

[buster]

Stunning vintage photos of car wrecks from the days before seat belts and airbags, 1930s - Rare Historical Photos

These stunning photographs of car wrecks in the 1930s were captured by Leslie Jones, a photographer who worked for the Boston Herald-Traveler.

rarehistoricalphotos.com

 

[KrisZ]

Here are some of the photos directly from the linked article.

 

[PimTac]

I remember as a kid hearing the collision of cars from blocks away. The sound of two heavy vehicles would carry far. All of us would run to try and find the accident and watch the emergency vehicles show up.

 

[mk378]

I thought cars only crash because the driver is distracted by their smartphone, or the GPS tells them to turn right onto a boat ramp.

 

[Reggaemon]

Looks to me the problem was there were too many trees in those days.

 

[gogydm]

Crumple zones seem to have helped a lot.

 

[billt460]

Crumple zones seem to have helped a lot.

The trees helped find them.

 

[joekingcorvette]

Those old cars didn't do too well in crashes.

 

[97prizm]

Crumple zones made a huge difference. Years ago I talked to a firefighter who responded to a head on accident between an early 90s Mercedes Benz and a late 70s Lincoln. One of his co-workers noted how terribly the benz fell apart versus the Lincoln. One of the paramedics noted that the people in the Lincoln died while the people in the benz walked away.

 

[Passport1]

Here's one that had multiple high speed impacts.

 

[Brian123]

Crumple zones made a huge difference. Years ago I talked to a firefighter who responded to a head on accident between an early 90s Mercedes Benz and a late 70s Lincoln. One of his co-workers noted how terribly the benz fell apart versus the Lincoln. One of the paramedics noted that the people in the Lincoln died while the people in the benz walked away.

I guess this was back in my area in 1990 or so, there was a woman whose 2nd husband died and the kids got very little money, well she was driving a Mercedes and a bomb that was placed under the car went off while she was driving it.

She survived with only minor injuries, what was interesting about the article back at that time was they said if she were driving any other car she would not have probably survived.

 

[Kira]

"At first, the automobile was perceived as a neutral device that merely responded to a driver’s commands and could not cause an accident."

Sounds like a "dodge".

 

[ecotourist]

A lot of those photos involved water. At least there was very little electrical circuitry to be ruined. But the wooden frames might have been a little hard to repair.

I would be interesting to know how the occupants did in those crashes.

 

[vavavroom]

A lot of those photos involved water. At least there was very little electrical circuitry to be ruined. But the wooden frames might have been a little hard to repair.

I would be interesting to know how the occupants did in those crashes.

How they did or how they died? The drivers had to be scraped off their cars' dashboards if they weren't skewered by those non-collapsing steering columns and the passengers were hopefully ejected through open windows.

 

[Chris142]

The truck sticking out the side of the building is an early mack I believe

 

[PimTac]

A lot of those photos involved water. At least there was very little electrical circuitry to be ruined. But the wooden frames might have been a little hard to repair.

I would be interesting to know how the occupants did in those crashes.

How they did or how they died? The drivers had to be scraped off their cars' dashboards if they weren't skewered by those non-collapsing steering columns and the passengers were hopefully ejected through open windows.

A lot of accident victims suffered frontal skull fractures from hitting their forehead on the steering wheel. While the automobiles were built like tanks they were unforgiving to the occupants inside.

I was in an accident as a youngster before seatbelts became the norm. I was sitting in a station wagon at the rear and ended up hitting the back side of the front seat. We were going about 35mph when someone pulled out right in front of us.

 

[Skippy722]

Meanwhile the luddites still using horses were rambling on about how dangerous and impractical the gas powered automobile was

 

[vavavroom]

Tempered glass was patented in the 1870s. When it shatters it crumbles into harmless bits. Safety glass was invented by a French fellow in 1903 and the use of laminated safety glass for windshields became mandatory in the late '30s in the US. Modern, laminated safety glass is made of two layers of tempered glass with a layer of polyvinyl butyral film in between.

 

[LowMilesLesabre]

A lot of those photos involved water. At least there was very little electrical circuitry to be ruined. But the wooden frames might have been a little hard to repair.

I would be interesting to know how the occupants did in those crashes.

The only thing that might have allowed some of them to survive although maybe not all in one piece is that average speeds for automobiles back then were a lot slower than they are today. And that was probably a good thing given that many of those vehicles did not have hydraulic brakes that would get introduced a little later. They literally came equipped with manual brakes so you had better have a really strong braking foot

 

[hank2]

Unfortunately, people have been dying in autos since they first appeared. In the early 1980's, I had a customer that occasionally came into the liquor store that I worked in. He was 92 then and still driving. One of those one in a million guys. As I got to know him, he related some of his history. He was orphaned at a young age in something like 1903-04, when both of his parents were killed in an auto mishap. The first such fatalities in this county. They were driving at night and struck a chain or rope across a road and were decapitated. He was essentially sold to an old order sect farmer by the county courts. After being worked like a farm animal for some years, he left with the circus. Later wound up in Army and in France in WWI. Tough people.