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Helmet
A protective hat. The so-called "leather hairnet" was commonly worn by bicycle racers until better designs with actual impact protection superseded it. A few cyclists, notably Dr. Eugene Gaston, medical columnist for Bicycling magazine, had taken to wearing hockey or mountaineering helmets around 1970. Club riders and racers saw the need for head protection, but there was not yet a helmet optimized for best protection compatible with a cyclist's need for light weight, unobstructed vision and ventilation. Around 1973, Mountain Safety Research introduced a modified mountaineering helmet which used cloth webbing attached by eight deformable side clips to provide impact absorption. MSR later added EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam inserts between the webbing straps. The next year, Bell introduced the Bell Biker, the first helmet designed from scratch specifically for bicycling. It used EPS as its impact-absorbing material, and had tapered ventilating inlets, as do most other bicycle helmets made since. Bicycle helmets are designed to mitigate the impacts resulting from a fall to the ground from riding height. These impacts are entirely able to cause permanent brain injury or fatalities, and account for most impacts in bicycle crashes.
