Army veteran Edward W. Bullard patented the first construction hard hat, inspired by helmets worn in WWI trenches
Hard hats are the team headgear of working-class America — the people who built the United States with their bare hands. The people who still build the USA today.
Tip your safety cap to Edward W. Bullard (1893-1963), a U.S. Army veteran who crafted the world’s most important piece of industrial protective equipment after returning from the carnage of World War I.
“Hard-hat workers are brave people doing important work,” said Wells Bullard, CEO of E.D. Bullard Co. in Kentucky, a manufacturer of personal safety equipment. She’s also a great-granddaughter of the hard-hat inventor.
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“They are the people building our roads, bridges and infrastructure, moving our economy forward,” she added.
The effort requires a lot of Bullard’s hard hats.
Some 33 million Americans, about 10 percent of the national population, work hard-hat jobs today, according to Cam Mackey, president and CEO of the International Safety Equipment Association. Edward Bullard helped found the nonprofit trade association in 1933.
The hard hat today is more than just an important piece of personal safety equipment.
It came to symbolize the growing schism between working-class Americans and leftist elitists during the Vietnam War, most notably during the New York City Hard Hat Riot of 1970.
Construction workers, incensed by images of people burning American flags, walked off their job sites en masse and clashed with largely college-educated, white-collar anti-American protesters in Lower Manhattan.
About 150 people were battered and bloodied on the streets, 40 of them suffered head wounds, six men were beaten unconscious, David Paul Kuhn, author of “The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution,” told basicdailyexpress.
“After that day, the hard hat became a political symbol,” he said.
The nation is still dealing with the fallout today.
The hard hat carries symbolism far from the job site.
Edward R. Bullard was born in Liberty, N.M., on Dec. 1, 1893 before moving as a young boy with his family to California.
His father, Edward D. Bullard, founded the E.D. Bullard Co. in San Francisco in 1898, providing lamps and other gear to miners who flooded the region during the Gold Rush. The company in recent decades moved its operations to Kentucky.
The younger Bullard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley before shipping off to France in World War I.
“He was in the trenches in Europe,” Wells Bullard said, then returned from war to work at the family business.
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“Realizing the need for greater safety within the mines, Bullard designed a hard hat for miners inspired by the steel doughboy helmet he wore as a soldier,” states a Bullard company biography.
“The helmet was made of canvas, glue and black paint, and given the trademarked name ‘Hard Boiled’ because of the steam used in the manufacturing process,” the National Museum of American History reports.
The Hard Boiled Hat, first developed in 1919, quickly evolved with better designs and safety measures, including webbing to provide a cushion of space between the helmet shell and a worker’s head.
Bullard applied for a patent for his product in 1927, receiving approval in 1929.
His hard hat soon played a crucial role in some of the nation’s most ambitious — and most dangerous — construction projects.
The Golden Gate Bridge, built between 1933 and 1937, was the first major construction project to require hard hats on the job — Bullard’s hard hats.
He was inspired to help with the project after realizing the deadly danger posed by falling rivets. More than 1.2 million rivets hold together the majestic bridge.
Any one of them could prove deadly.
Bullard’s hard hat worked. Eleven men died on the project, a horrific figure by today’s standards — but the death total was far better than the standards of the day.
Projections indicated as many as 35 workers would die while building the Golden Gate Bridge, reports Constructors Inc.
The Hoover Dam and various New Deal projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, also served as proving grounds for the protective equipment.
Hard hats became mandatory on most job sites with the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in December 1970. The year proved critical in the history of the hard hat.
Hard hats were at the center of America’s culture war in 1970, when blood spilled on the streets of Manhattan.
Anti-American protests erupted around the nation in the wake of the killing of four Kent State University students on May 4 that year.