Early Testing of Helmets and Protective Cups

Every so often, an image circulates the internet showing a man wearing a helmet as he flies headfirst into a wall. The picture, which appears to be from the first decades of the 20th Century, is purportedly a test of a football helmet's efficacy. But as Phaedrus, the 1st century Roman poet, noted, "Things are not always as they seem."

The photo fooled me. What else could the image show other than a man demonstrating the protective value of a helmet he invented? I suppose it could have been a coach or equipment manager proving to school officials the effectiveness of the equipment their team would wear during the upcoming season. Still, I never doubted the man in the picture wore a football helmet.

The image made the rounds again during the last few weeks, so I decided it was time to identify the man seen flying into the wall and confirm why he took his short flight. A simple reverse image search quickly answered my questions. The flying man image is from an article in the April 6, 1912 issue of Flight, a British publication devoted to aeronautics. The man bonking his head against the wall is W. T. Warren, an Englishman, and pilot-in-training when planes closely resembled those flown by the Wright Brothers. Planes did not yet have fuselages or cockpits, and they crashed frequently. Warren, it turns out, was not concerned with protecting the heads of American football players; he was concerned with English pilots' noggins. Warren's Flight article describes his helmet design, his tests, and documents it all with two images. 

The image of Warren's test generally appears without its caption or attribution, both of which tell us the test had nothing to do with gridiron football. (Flight, April 6, 1912, p. 309

Unlike football helmets of the time, Warren’s flight helmet had a metal spring system in the peaked crown to cushion blows to the top of the head. (Flight, April 6, 1912, p. 310)

While the Flight article debunks the claim that the guy-flying-into-the-wall was testing a football helmet, it led me to wonder about another supposed test of a football helmet's effectiveness. The second test appears in a 1932 Pathe newsreel that purports to show an inventor testing a football helmet the old-fashioned way. Go ahead and spend the next 56 seconds watching members of a football team kicking the helmeted inventor in the head, hitting him with a bat, and watching him run headfirst into a stone wall, twice.