The first cars on the market could manage no more than nine miles per hour, making life-threatening collisions unlikely and seatbelts unnecessary. Cars got faster — a 1940s model could achieve ten times that speed — and early seatbelts were developed, first as lap belts and then as lap shoulder ones, but still hardly the model of safety in their earlier forms. Even low-speed collisions could jerk passengers forward enough to fold the seat along its joints, or completely tear out the seat, to which they were attached. In some ways the seatbelts were as dangerous as no seatbelts at all.

On this day, July 10, in 1962 Glenn Sheren of Mason, Michigan patented the first three-point seatbelt, also attaching the restraints, for the first time, to the floor. Mason was following up his earlier patent filed in 1952.

Patents aside, the first modern three-point seatbelts were introduced in 1959 by Swedish inventor Nils Bohlin. Volvo vehicles began to offer the seatbelts that same year. In the U.S. for many years after the introductions seatbelts were deliberately ignored by drivers, leading manufacturers to develop so-called “passive” or automatic seatbelts that would automatically slide up over the driver and front-seat passenger. The first car with such a system was the Volkswagen Rabbit, in 1975.