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Show Not all bags are full of hot air BRIG HAM CITY George F. Kirchoff was among eleven inventors in-ventors and technical pioneers of the airbag honored recently in Washington, D.C., with the H.H. Bliss Award of Appreciation presented by consumer advocate and crash survivors who have escaped serious injury thanks to an air bag. A Brigham City resident since the early 1970s when he came with Thiokol, Kirchoff studied engineering and physics at Auburn University Uni-versity and was a Navy pilot for four years. Using experience based on rocket ignition technology, he developed de-veloped a pyrotechnic inflator that produces nitrogen gas. Thiokol funded that initial testing, along with car manufacturers and the federal fed-eral government. It is a variation of that inflator which is used in today's airbag, in which a donut-shaped bag pops out of a car's steering steer-ing wheel and fills with 60 liters of nitrogen at eye-blink speed as a head-on collision occurs. The H.H. Bliss Award for Appreciation was named for a New York City pedestrian who, in September 1899, became the fust recorded traffic fatality. |
