The Most Surprising Facts About Safety Clothes

For being one of the most ubiquitous sights on a construction site and somewhat rigidly regulated when it comes to standardisation and capabilities, trade workwear often emerges due to somewhat fascinating stories.

Before a time when you could get personal protective equipment suitable to meet the safety requirements of any risk assessment, safety equipment was developed in rather unusual circumstances.

Here are some of the most unusual and surprising facts about safety uniforms.

Franz Kafka May Have Invented The Hard Hat

Few pieces of equipment have saved more lives on construction sites, dockyards and warehouses than the hard hat, which through a lightweight, affordable, effective design could help absorb an impact caused by falling objects and reduce the level of injury.

It has also led to one of the most interesting connections between safety and literature, as the enigmatic writer Franz Kafka, of Metamorphosis and The Castle fame, might have been the inventor of the hard hat as we know it.

According to writer and management consultant Peter Drucker, during Mr Kafka’s time at the Kingdom of Bohemia Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the Czech Republic) in Prague, he was tasked with assessing compensation for injuries to workers owing to poor occupational safety.

 He was very good at the job but hated it, and developed the first hard hat designed for civilian work (as opposed to a military helmet) around 1912 in order to reduce the number of claims.

This is unsupported, and even if it were true, he might not have been the first. The E.D. Bullard Company sold leather protective hats soon after it was incorporated in 1898, and before that, dock workers would soak their hats in tar and let them cure in the sun to create a makeshift protective layer.

A Walk In The Hills Inspired Safety Straps

It is difficult to find a safety vest or harness that does not use velcro in some form. The hook-and-loop fastening system is easy to put on, take off and adjust, yet at the same time will stay secured from accidental removal.

Its inventor, George De Mestrel, came up with the unique material during a walk in the woods near the Swiss Alps.

Whilst he was walking his dog, Milka, he noticed that there were hundreds of burdock seeds clinging to her fur, as well as his woollen coat and thick socks.

A curious electrical engineer by trade, he wondered how the spiky burrs were attached to him without some kind of adhesive, and found out their secret by peering at one under a microscope.

The burrs had hundreds of tiny hooks that attached to any kind of loop, and he found a way to manufacture a synthetic version that became known as velcro, a combination of velvet (“velours”) and hook (“crochet”) in French.

Wooden Clogs Are Rated Safety Shoes

Whilst typically seen as a traditional form of footwear or even a souvenir for tourists, wooden clogs provide more safety from acids and penetration damage than steel-toe cap boots can in certain extreme accidents.This means that traditional Dutch klompen are officially rated as safety shoes, complete with a CE mark, making them arguably the first safety shoes ever made, although they were not necessarily designed for that purpose.