John Stapp's rocket sled
A doctor hit 1,000 km/h and stopped in about a second
Air Force doctor John Stapp tested on himself how much deceleration a human can take. On 10 December 1954 a rocket sled took him to 1,017 km/h and stopped him in 1.4 seconds; he survived 46 g, and his work fed into car seat belts.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Did you know
In 1954 'the fastest man on Earth' was a doctor. On a rocket sled John Stapp reached 1,017 km/h and stopped in 1.4 seconds. The 46 g left him briefly blind, but he lived and went on to campaign for car seat belts. Share →
Murphy's law was born in John Stapp's tests. At Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 engineer Edward Murphy found every sensor wired backwards, and Stapp later repeated his grumble to the press: if anything can go wrong, it will. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 15 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 9 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 7 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 6 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 5 years earlier
Europe
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 21 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 18 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 13 years earlier
- 1952 Great Smog of London — 2 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 1 year earlier
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 13 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 12 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 9 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 3 years later
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 7 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 22 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years earlier
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 6 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 1 year earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 24 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 2 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 4 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 6 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 9 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 13 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 9 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 1 year earlier
- 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu — same year
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 12 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 21 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 18 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 13 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 12 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — same year
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 5 years later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 80)
- Albert Einstein (aged 75)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 73)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 65)
- Mao Zedong (aged 61)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 36)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 25)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 24)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 20)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 70)