John Stapp — The Fastest Man on Earth

In the nineteen forties and fifties the United States military had a problem it could not solve without answers that no one yet had. Fighter and bomber pilots were dying not from enemy fire but from the act of ejecting from damaged aircraft at high speed. The parachute technology worked, but the sudden deceleration of ejection was proving fatal.

Nobody knew exactly how much force the human body could survive, because nobody had tested it on a living person. Colonel John Paul Stapp, a physician and Air Force officer stationed at Holloman Air Force Base, set out to find the answer, and he used himself as the test subject. On a rocket sled track built on the base near Alamogordo, Stapp rode a series of increasingly fast runs.

The sled was propelled along a straight track by rocket engines, then brought to a sudden stop by a water brake. The deceleration was extreme by any measure. On December tenth, nineteen fifty-four, Stapp rode the sled to a speed of six hundred thirty-two miles per hour, making him at that moment the fastest human being who had ever traveled on the surface of the earth.

The sudden stop subjected his body to a force of forty-six times the normal pull of gravity. He survived, though he suffered temporary loss of vision and bleeding in his eyes. His work directly informed the design of automotive seat belts and improved aircraft ejection systems.

His work is credited with saving many lives.