Hello and thank you for downloading this episode of the witness history podcast from the BBC

World Service with me Rachel Nailer. I'm going to take you back to when a Swedish engineer,

the late Nils Balin, invented the three-point seatbelt for vehicles. It's estimated to

have saved more than a million lives around the world. I've been speaking to Nilser's

stepson, Gunna Ormock. It's June 1958 and Nils Balin has just been appointed as Volvo's

first ever safety engineer at their head office in Gothenburg in Sweden. One of his colleagues,

a sales representative, has been seriously injured in a car crash. I'm going to let Nils pick

up the story here. He's talking in this cheesy Volvo promotional video from the 1980s.

In the accident, he'd slid out of the belt and was thrown out of his car. When Gunnar Engelau,

Volvo's managing director at that time got wind of the accident, he reacted immediately.

Bloody hell, this can't be right. He actually wore the belt, didn't he? This shouldn't be allowed

to happen. This was my cue for letting him know that I'd found certain flaws in our seat belts.

Engelau's conclusion was characteristically plain. Then I think you should do something about it.

And he did. Two weeks later, he invented the three-point seatbelt. In Nilser's previous role,

as an aerospace engineer at Sarb, it was his job to throw people out of speeding vehicles.

He designed ejector seats. But at Volvo, his job was to keep them in place. The pilots he used

to work with were willing to wear almost anything to keep them safe, but he soon discovered drivers

and passengers and cars didn't feel the same. Let's go back to Nils in our video. They've even added

some jazzy piano music. Ordinary people just aren't used to taking orders, particularly not if it

involves some sort of discomfort. So it was obvious, I thought, that the new belt would have to be

easy to put up. And he succeeded. The three-point seatbelt was and is easy to put on.

I should point out here that seatbelts did exist in 1958, but they were only attached at two

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