For a time in the 1950s, Baylor graduate John Paul Stapp was the holder of the land speed record and was as famous as Col. Chuck Yeager. Once featured on the cover of Time magazine, Stapp is considered the “Father of the Seat Belt” in the United States and is even credited with coining one of the most ubiquitous laws of nature in the English language.
Stapp’s momentous life is the stuff of books and movies – and it was shaped by two almost unimaginable tragedies.
Born on July 11, 1910 in Bahia, Brazil, the son of Southern Baptist missionaries Charles F. Stapp (BA 1909) and Mary Louise Shannon (who attended Baylor from 1907-1909), John Paul was the eldest of four brothers, all of whom also attended Baylor (Robert Grady, Carlos Celso, and Wilford Lee). Father Charles was the president of the American Baptist College in Bahia and his sons grew up with Portuguese as their first language.
After a family furlough in Brownwood, John Paul was sent to the San Marcos Baptist Academy and lived with relatives in Burnet during the summers, where he picked cotton for two cents per pound to earn spending money. The shy and bookish Stapp arrived in Waco in 1927 underfunded and ill-prepared for college life. As missionaries, his parents were unable to help financially and the Great Depression soon made life even more difficult for hundreds of millions of people.
Stapp appears occasionally in The Lariat during his first two years on campus. From The Round Up yearbook, we know he studied music, played piano and cello and even played bassoon in the Golden Wave March Band, joined the drama fraternity Alpha Psi Omega, and helped found the Baylor Little Theater. He’s also shown as a smiling member of the Latin Club, the track and cross-country teams, and lived in a nearby boarding house. During the summer, he sold aluminum cookware door-to-door and, in the process, became a noted campus chef. He was, his friends and family noted, pleasant and easy-going.
In a matter of days, everything changed.
In Burnet for the Christmas holiday of 1928, a two-year-old cousin was briefly left unattended in front of the fireplace. When the child threw part of the Sunday newspaper into the fire, it ignited his cotton pajamas. Badly burned, the child only survived five pain-wracked days before dying. John Paul told biographer Craig Ryan that he stayed up with the child the entire time. He angrily accused the country doctor of incompetence, claiming that his little cousin should have immediately been taken to the closest hospital.
“I’d never seen anyone die before,” he said later. “It seemed that the medical treatment in those days was considerably lacking. I decided then and there to become a doctor and see if I couldn’t do better.”
When the grief-stricken Stapp returned to the Baylor campus for the spring semester, he was immediately devastated by another horrific tragedy. He was informed that his first girlfriend, the daughter of missionaries to China, had been killed by a drunk driver at the Los Angeles intersection of Hollywood and Vine over the holidays. He told his brothers that the two had even talked of marriage.
She was, Ryan writes, the love of his life, and Stapp was devastated.
In the spring semester of 1929, his fellow students found a different, more intense, more focused John Paul. He switched to pre-med, vowed to strengthen his thin body, and spent his days and nights buried in the science laboratories.
As the Depression deepened, he was forced to budget himself 50 cents a day. At one point, he lived for two weeks on water and pecans he found on the Baylor campus. He raised mosquitoes in a big glass jar and caught grasshoppers along Waco Creek to sell to biology majors. He caught pigeons on the roof of the boarding house, then took them to the science labs where he prepared and expertly cooked them for dinner in the ovens and on Bunsen burners. And when times were particularly difficult, he told the San Antonio Express-News that he skinned, prepared, and ate the lab guinea pigs, which he pronounced “tasty.”
John Paul reinvented himself in the science laboratories, particularly biology and zoology. Thirty years later, legendary Baylor professor Dr. Cornelia Marschall Smith told the Waco Tribune-Herald that she remembered Stapp as an “uncouth, retiring, but surprisingly capable” student.
During this time, he somehow managed to continue working with the Baylor Little Theater, acting in the productions of Miss Lulu Bett and Candida, and even serving as stage manager for The Importance of Being Ernest, which by then also featured brothers Celso and Robert.
His final year on campus, Stapp moved to Brooks Hall, where a former roommate told The Lariat that he “converted” his dormitory room into an experimental laboratory:
He had all sorts of gadgets in his room. He had wires and machines to record pain. He made a human guinea pig of himself. He seemed obsessed with the idea of testing the human body – his own – to see how much pain it could stand. After conducting grueling experiments on his body, he would write the results in record books he kept. He always kept careful records. I must admit we all thought he was a little odd, but we all loved him. He has done possibly more for his country than his fellow citizens realize.
Stapp graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1931 and remained at Baylor as a graduate assistant to work on his master’s degree in zoology. He must have turned a few heads. A Lariat article on November 17, 1931, reported that while still a grad student, he was tabbed to head the science department at Decatur Junior College. His graduate thesis? The Relation of Temperature to Metabolism in the Horned Lizard. Stapp graduated with an MA the following year.
Following Baylor graduation, he enrolled at the University of Texas in the fall of 1934 and soon found himself attracted to the new field of biophysics. Once again, he augmented his meager stipend by catching and selling snakes, lizards, grasshoppers, and even cotton fleas and scorpions to a biological supply company. Stapp completed his studies in 1939 and earned a doctorate degree in biophysics. His 150-page dissertation reflected his new focus: Electric Properties of Living Cell Layers and the Application of the Iodine Coulometer to the Measurement of Electric Energy Generated by Them.
From Austin, he was accepted to medical school at the University of Minnesota, the culmination of a long-cherished goal. By Christmas of 1943, he had completed his studies, passed the state medical board examinations, and – while on deferred active duty from the military – completed his hospital internships, with an eye on the emerging field of aviation medicine. When the United States Air Force was founded in 1947, Stapp had found his home.
Later that year, Stapp became an integral part of the Air Force’s seminal studies and experiments on the impact of speed and deceleration on human bodies – and minds. At first, he field-tested liquid oxygen emergency breathing systems, then used his medical training to create protocols for high-altitude bends, chokes, and dehydration – in the process spending more than 60 hours in altitudes of 45,000 feet or more, going where no human had gone before. At that altitude, and under those conditions, he told The Lariat in 1955 that “the landscape flattens out into geography, the stars don’t twinkle, the shadows are darker and the sunlight more burning, and at dusk it looks as if a solar eclipse is about to begin.”
Other early experiences at Edwards Air Force Base in California involved dummies, then smaller animals, then chimpanzees (studies later continued by Col. Herbert H. Reynolds, who would become Baylor president in 1981), and even a bear. After the 32nd test on the primitive rocket-powered sled, Stapp volunteered to be the first human subject. “If there was a fatality,” he told one magazine, “I didn’t want it to be anybody but me.”
Over the next decade, Lt. Col. (and flight surgeon) John Paul Stapp endured increasingly faster rides and increasingly shorter – and more violent – stops. In December 1947, Stapp was repeatedly strapped into a series of crude rocket-powered sleds on rails in the desert for still faster rides. During the course of these brutal experiments, he suffered multiple broken ribs, breaks in both wrists, massive bruises, abdominal hernias, a fractured coccyx, concussions, and other injuries. In time, he transferred to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, where even faster land sleds were being built.
In the years that followed, Stapp subjected his body to an increasingly punishing series of rides and stops as the speeds dramatically increased, always meticulously reporting his observations and data. As with Yeager’s flights with the Bell X-1 experimental rocket craft, the public became absorbed in Stapp’s efforts on land.
In 1949 Stapp’s rides coined an expression that still rings true today: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. The phrase known as Murphy’s Law was first uttered by Capt. Edward A. Murphy, who designed a harness fit with 16 sensitive sensors across the rider’s body to measure the acceleration, or G-force, a human could tolerate.
The results following Stapp’s rocket sled ride were shocking: zero. There was no data. The sensors had somehow been installed backward, leading to Murphy’s exclamation, “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.” Stapp recounted the phrase to a reporter, trying to explain the Air Force’s anticipation of worst-case scenarios, and its message gained traction.
The experiments culminated in December 1954 aboard the rocket sled Sonic Wind No. 1 on the 35,000-foot-long tracks in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin. With reporters and uneasy technicians in attendance, 44-year-old Stapp calmly double-checked the last fasteners on the elaborate safety harness. The engines howled to life, propelling the sled to a speed of 632 mph – faster than the flight of a .45-caliber bullet – and ending in a bone-jarring full stop in 1.4 seconds after plowing through a series of specially designed pools of water. In that moment, the “Fastest Man on Earth” was born. Moments before the twin rockets ignited, Stapp said he whispered to himself, “John, it’s been a good life.”
Stapp had survived an astounding 40-G pull and the equivalent of an automobile hitting a wall at 60 mph. He suffered numerous abrasions and blood blisters and a frightening bout of temporary blindness when his eyeballs were pulled from their sockets, with the resulting “two of the most beautiful shiners any man ever had,” he told New Mexico magazine. He had practiced dressing in total darkness, he told one magazine, “so if I was blinded, I wouldn’t be helpless.”
Stapp told The Lariat in 1962 that he never feared for his life during the experiments. “We didn’t make our lives,” he said, “so why the anxiety about them. The big thing we should be concerned with is the work we have to do. As missionaries, my parents’ work was saving souls; as a doctor, mine is saving lives. No matter what the job, we can all learn something from the missionaries. When your life does not belong to you, you cannot be afraid for it.”
Eventually, after another test run hit 995 mph on Sonic Wind No. 2, the Air Force deemed Stapp too valuable to risk on further experiments and pulled him from the trials before he could reach his dream goal of 1,000 mph. But not before his notoriety was such that he appeared on the popular This is Your Life television series.
Stapp had vowed to never marry until he was no longer personally involved in the land speed tests – an Air Force Magazine article called him “a bachelor with a philosophical bent, a quiet sense of humor, a love for classical music and unquenchable curiosity.” But after the last trials, he met and later married a recently retired dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Lillian Lanese, in December 1957.
Stapp’s ground-breaking research even resulted in the creation of a new unit of measure. Writer Alan Nelson noted that when the Air Force was searching for a unit that could express the combination of time and force that a pilot endured in rapid acceleration and deceleration, it settled on the term of “one stapp” – the force exerted by one G for one second.
But his adventures were not quite over. Two years later, while on a training flight in a T-33, the jet’s engine malfunctioned. Stapp ejected and survived his first parachute flight with only a badly injured right ankle. Tragically, Capt. Harry B. Davis’ parachute streamed instead of opening and the pilot plunged to his death.
It was as Chief of the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, Stapp saw a disturbing statistic – more Air Force officers died annually from car crashes than plane crashes. This led him on a journey that eventually took him to medical and staff positions with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and as a consultant to the U.S. Surgeon General, among other agencies and organizations. It was there that his research and very public advocacy helped force the automobile industry to adopt stronger safety belts and harnesses, giving him another unofficial title as the “Father of the Seat Belt.”
The Stapps eventually retired to Alamogordo and the Baylor grad frequently returned to Waco to speak at commencement. As he told The Baylor Line in 1975, his passion for the subject never waned: “We wanted to prove to engineers that the body is better constructed than an airplane fuselage. The ideas for much of the automobile protection in use now originated then.”
He received numerous awards in his lifetime, including Baylor University Distinguished Alumni by the Baylor Alumni Association in 1986, the Air Power Award for Science, and the Medal of Technology. He became president of the American Rocket Society, and served as Chair of the Stapp Foundation, which hosted the annual Stapp Car Crash Conference, bringing together automobile engineers and trauma surgeons.
Stapp died on November 13, 1999, at the age of 89. His obituary appeared in The New York Times on November 16 and included a host of anecdotes and accolades, including one from the New York Herald Tribune which called him “a gentleman who can stop on a dime and give you 10 cents change.”
