By Peter Weiss
A decade ago, Philip H. Rittmueller was a man on a mission. By the early 1990s, the automobile industry knew that airbags, while successful at saving lives in crashes, could also prove deadly to children and small adults (SN: 9/26/98, p. 206: https://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc98/9_26_98/bob3.htm). As an engineer with NEC Technologies Automotive Electronics Division at that time, Rittmueller was looking for a technological fix for this lethal threat. Yet none of the approaches Rittmueller knew about for the automatic sizing up of car seat occupants—including weight sensing, ultrasonic scanning, and optical imaging—seemed good enough. “I was looking under all sorts of rocks,” Rittmueller recalls.
Then, in the fall of 1994 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rittmueller found the right rock. He was visiting the university’s hotbed of invention, known as the Media Lab, when he saw what looked like a throne flanked by two lighted Plexiglas poles, and he viewed a startling video showing how such a “spirit chair” was used in magic shows by the famous duo Penn and Teller.