The Evolution of the Hard Hat | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of the Hard Hat

nytimes.com

54 pointsjohnny31340 comments

This article starts in 1919 but I would assume that wearing hats to protect one's head mechanically (opposed to thermally) has been a tradition since hats were invented. While the hat mentioned in the article is a definite milestone, I wouldn't say it's the starting point for protective hats.

Checking wikipedia I see bowler hats were first created in 1849, and from the article[0]:

[the manufacturers had] been commissioned by a customer to design a close-fitting, low-crowned hat to protect gamekeepers from low-hanging branches while on horseback at Holkham Hall

A traditional bowler is a very sturdy piece of equipment and I could believe the afforded good protection for their day and is very much in the spirit of a modern hard hat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowler_hat

And firefighters definitely used helmets in 19th century

Probably more for defense against attacks from rival companies than dangerous environments haha

(off topic: http://spacing.ca/toronto/2012/10/02/the-toronto-circus-riot...)

The article isn't really talking about protective headgear in general, it seems to be specific to the origin of the modern day "hard hat", whose make and style can be directly attributed to the helmets worn in WW1.

If you believe the movies Spartans were wearing protective hats almost 3000 years ago.

I am just waiting for the day I can get my name painted on my hardhat at the shipyard. It certainly is a status symbol here. It's a telltale sign that someone isn't experienced when they're walking around with an undamaged hard hat. It's a telltale sign they might be too risky when they walk around looking like they went through a tornado!

Edit: Also every one always complains about the NYT paywall, but it's $5 a month for a digital only subscription. I can't help but think I read more than enough content to get value.

-I was given a visitor's hard hat when visiting $YARD on the Gulf coast - gate security didn't quite know what to make of the "Use your head, not your helmet" sticker affixed to the helmet I had brought - and eventually decided it could be interpreted to suggest that you didn't need PPE if you kept your wits about you.

Sigh.

The lowest price it gives me, on the basic plan, works out to be $96/year on a "special" price ($2/week special billed at $8/month) with a suggestion that it'd be $180 normally outside of the special.

When I was labouring on building sites as a student (1990 or so), the "cool" thing to do was to take the silver tape used for edging computer flooring tiles, and cover your hard hat in it. I should imagine the tape adhesive didn't much enhance the strength of the underlying plastic, but least you had a cool, shiny silver hat.

When I was a conscript in the Swedish army in the early 90:s, this involved some work around masts and telecomms towers (I was in a signals unit) and, under peacetime labour protection rules, that meant wearing an approved hard hat. The army's steel helmet (m/37, i.e, 1937 pattern!) wasn't approved, so we wore standard, bright orange, hard hats, which looked rather funny with our camouflage uniforms. Someone asked whether we could spray paint them dark green, but the answer was a blank no; they must not be modified in any way or the approval would no longer be valid, and our superiors would be in violation of all sorts of laws for allowing us to use them.

Aren't you supposed to replace a hardhat after any damage?

Yes, but doesn't their post make it clear why they don't? The hard hat is a piece of safety equipment and it is also a piece of fashion used to signal status socially. Guess what happens when you walk onto a job site with clean, freshly purchased gloves.

Sure, but no one is replacing their hard hat after having bonked their head lightly on a door frame. Scuffs and light marking shouldn't affect the functioning of the hard hat but still be a rough indicator of job-site experience -- until it gets replaced in a more serious and you start over of course, but thats not really a bad thing either in my opinion.

One more part of this is the original British Police.

They had a requirement that any applicants be at least 5'9", and in order to cut an even more imposing figure, they wore tough Beaver Top Hats, which served a dual purpose: raising the height of any officer to at least 6 feet, and to protect their heads against blows from unhappy citizens. Police in the UK have worn some form of head protection ever since.

The article neglects to mention that protection against head trauma was the whole original purpose of top hats. They were worn by coach drivers, and then fox hunters took them up (along with the split coat tails, thence to become formal wear, ultimately), for the same purpose. Being thrown from a horse or overturned wagon, or struck by a low-hanging branch, was a real hazard in both cases.

As noted elsewhere, London bobbies subsequently adopted them, too, but they had to exist first.

Always fun to watch video footage of factories, construction sites, etc., and pick out who is who by hat color, whether suspension system has been adjusted or not, and what stickers may show up. In the US, yellow is often entry-level, white is usually supervisor or VIP visitor, but look for wear, scuffing, and dirt to be sure.

Where does this idea come from? A lifetime of construction work and I have never seen color coding of hard hats. You wear what was given to you. The company purchasing agent isn’t picking multiple colors to differentiate people, they are buying a single color in bulk, or you wear a hat you buy and the shop you buy from has at most 2 choices.

Funny how simple things become status symbols in some place but not in others. Here in France, a hard hat is just a PPE for use in the construction industry, not any kind of status symbol. Perhaps those categories of workers and their members are perceived differently on the two side of the Atlantic?

When I wore hard hats on job sites stickers from suppliers were a big thing. So not sure status symbol but definitely personalization thing. Not much different from developer laptops today.

Though the idea is older. There was a maybe 99% invisible ep on this in the context of miners as I recall.

Related video showing why you should always wear a hard hat on a construction site:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufbOJhaZRmI

http://archive.is/h6gha

I am absolutely sure people had hard hats for work prior to 1919. Pith hats, for example.

For fighting, certainly, but for labor? You may well be correct, I just don't know.

Putting out fires for example? They used rigid leather hats in the 1800s that sound like they have exactly the same construction.

Miners did [0] - as a mount for lamps as well as for protection against bumps. Tangentially, some tank crews wear helmets inside their tanks for protection to avoid head injuries while bouncing around on terrain.

[0] https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/min...

I've always wondered: is a motorcycle helmet always more protective than a hard hat, or are there cases where a hard hat protects better?

Yes, a motorcycle helmet (even an open face one) is far more protective than a worksite hard hat. That’s part of why they cost hundreds of dollars compared to $10 or whatever.

I can't think of an example but there might be situations where a motorcycle helmet would increase your injury because it is harder to remove.

Reminds me of the footwear worn at a glass factory I once visited. The glassblowers there wore open shoes without ties, eg: slippers and not normal shoes. The reason was that if you got a drop of molten glas in your shoe you could easily pull your foot out and prevent the worst part of the burn. With closed shoes before you got them off you would have severe burns.

> there might be situations where a motorcycle helmet would increase your injury because it is harder to remove.

Same can be said for seat belts, but it's the wrong metric to measure efficacy. Overall, they prevent injury/loss of life magnitudes more than they contribute to it.

Same can be said for wrapping yourself in bubblewrap every morning. It all depends on the situation and the risk you expect to encounter.

To be clear, I'm not in doubt of the safety superiority of motorcycle helmets when riding a bike. But wearing one at a jobsite seems to introduce more risk then it prevents (as @dsfyu404ed mentions).

A good motorcycle helmet has an emergency release system, but it's still a 3-man job for professional EMTs. It's recommended to always leave the helmet on after a crash and stabilize the injured rider.

I haven't been riding for years now so I missed out on this development, good to know it exists.

I was told to always take my motorcycle helmet off if I got into a roadside fight, since an attacker can grab the jaw bar and basically have control of your head. I haven't had to test the idea though.

I'm not too familiar with fistfights or helmets but I would've thought being able to strike them in the face without much risk to your own face would be an advantage in such a case. It would be like grabbing a collar or someone's ears, which can work, but you've tied up at least one of your hands doing that.

Once someone can grab your head you're losing the fight.

Best option is to hop on your bike and run- you're faster and can take shortcuts that cars can't.

If you have no choice, taking your helmet off as using it as a blunt weapon is your best option.

The classic example where I live is where a farmer went over the handlebars of his farm bike, head first into a shallow hole the ground, and his helmet caught in the hole causing it to snap his neck. The argument then was that if he hadn't been wearing a helmet his head wouldn't have been stuck and he'd have survived. Of course, your chances of simply being killed by a blow to the head when crashing a bike are far far higher than your chances of getting your helmet wedged in precisely the wrong sized hole, so helmets are still a huge win.

Likewise with seatbelts people always worry about what would happen if they're T-boned off a pier into deep water, or something similarly unlikely, when chances are they're just going to drive into the back of someone and the seat belt would save them.

The glass factory example seems odd, though - in that environment wouldn't you be wearing high cut leather workboots, such that any glass falling on them would just flow/bounce off?

Motorcycle helmet is fixed to your head whereas a hard hat is not. In many situations an impact sends the hard hat flying with minimal kinetic energy imparted on the former occupant. In those cases a motorcycle helmet would be worse because the wearer's head would move around more making neck injury more likely.

For top of the head impacts they're likely close to equal since the strap system in a hard hat is pretty damn optimized for that use case.

For repeated impact (fairly rare on the job site vs the default in motorcycle crashes) the motorcycle helmet is obviously superior and it has superior coverage.

This is kind of an apples to oranges comparison. Wearing a motorcycle helmet (or any helmet that covers the ears) massively reduces situational awareness and wearing one 8+hr/day for the length of one's career would likely not be good for ones neck. It is not the right tool for the hard hat's job (and vise versa).

Disclaimer: Not a helmet engineer.

The best data we have on mtotocycle injuries shows that about one third of motorcycle head hits are in the chin area. It's a totally different hazard model.

See the Hurt Report for details.

Most hard hats I've ever had to wear are really only good for protecting against certain small classes of injuries anyway. If somebody drops a wrench or a hammer from an overhead catwalk, or if you're felling a tree and knock loose a widowmaker, it means it'll knock you down, rather than split your head. A thin plastic shell and the laughable harness in most of them doesn't do much aside from help capture condensation and steam up your safety glasses.

When I was working in a powerplant, if you were working on the upper floors above the boiler, it was usually hot enough to start softening up the plastic on the cheaper ones.

Those small classes are pretty common though. See also things like small chunks of rock when climbing. There are a lot of opportunities for small, fast moving, hard objects to hit your head in a lot of situations. On a job site it’s also easy to hit your head hard on low objects and stun or cut yourself.

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