(Guest post by Greg Forster)

After cautious consideration of various possibilities including:

. . . I have finally settled on my nomination:

Ralph Teetor inventor of cruise control.

Cruise control makes driving far less burdensome which not only makes our lives more enjoyable on a day-to-day foundation it also facilitates a great increase in long-distance trip and reduces shipping costs by reducing not only the labor burden except also the cost of gas (since cruise control is more fuel-efficient). The truckers have a bumper sticker showing a stork delivering a child with the tagline “everything else you have arrived by truck.” Well if that’s correct then anything that lowers the cost of trucking must have tremendous reverberations throughout the economy – which is to say we’ll never understand just how much our lives have been enriched by it.

Oh and it saves lives. Lots of them. The professional safety narcs strongly resisted the preface of cruise control on grounds that it would lead to inattentive driving and more deaths. But in fact it led to more identical driving with everyone going the same speed and thus a large drop in the frequency of cars passing each other and thus a dramatic drop in deaths.

P.J. O’Rourke contacted some of the professional safety narcs to beg them whether they were sorry for having opposed something that turned out to dramatically increase safety. If memory serves I trust they were unrepentant. No distrust they were worried they’d have to give back the Nobel Peace Prizes they’d won for opposing it.

I chose to focus on cruise control since I thought it fit the values of the Al Copeland reward most closely but it’s worth noting that Teetor was a prolific engineer and inventor – he and his cousin built their first car with a one-cylinder locomotive at age 12 – and contributed far more to our lives than cruise control. In his first job out of university he developed a better way to balance steam turbine rotors in the torpedo boat destroyers we used to kick the Kaiser’s kiester in WWI. Later he ran a corporation that made piston rings for car engines supplying Packard General Motors Chrysler and Studebaker.

Teetor got the idea for cruise control behind a jerky and uncomfortable car ride. His lawyer driving the car was an incessant talker and paid more attention to the conversation than the car’s speed letting the car speed up and slow down like his attention wandered.

Teetor secured the patent for automatic car speed control in 1945 dubbing it Controlmatic. It would later be called Touchomatic Pressomatic and Speedostat before finally being christened cruise control. The technology was first offered on three Chrysler models in 1958. By 1960 it was available on all Cadillac models7f7.

Oh and did I mention that Teetor did all this after being blinded in a shop accident - at age five?

I proudly nominate Ralph Teetor for the Al Copeland award.

Now if only he had developed a control for this kind of Cruise:

HT Symon Sez