Allen Breed

Allen Kent Breed (born July 27, 1927 in Chicago , † December 13, 1999 in Orlando (Florida) ) was an American engineer and entrepreneur and was a pioneer of the airbag in the late 1960s .

Breed received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University and worked for RCA in the late 1940s . He became a manager there and ran a joint venture with the Gruen Watch Company. In 1957 he founded his first company, Waltham Engineering, and in 1961 the Breed Corporation (later Breed Technologies), which mainly worked in the field of security and armouring for the military. He applied the expertise he gained there in controlled explosions and sensor technology to airbag development in the 1960s. Ideas for this were already patented in the early 1950s ( Walter Linderer in Germany, John W. Hetrick in the USA), but were not practical because they worked with compressed air and were too slow. Breed introduced its first airbag system in 1968. He continuously developed the airbag systems and also produced other safety mechanisms for cars. His company, based in Lakeland, Florida, was the third largest manufacturer of auto security systems in the world in 1999 (after TRW and Autoliv). In December 1999, it had to file for bankruptcy after taking over the security division of Allied Signals for $ 710 million. Breed died of a heart attack.

He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1999 .

Web links

• Inventor of the Week, MIT
• Obituary in the NY Times, Jan. 14, 2000

Individual evidence

1. ↑ History of the airbag