IN A TWINKLING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 123, 27 May 1930, Page 19

IN A TWINKLING.

HOW ACCIDENTS OCCUR. POINTS FOR MOTORISTS. CONSEQUENCES OF HIC4H SPEED. Modern life, with its motor care, railway trains, aeroplanes, and with its no less speedy machinery, is pressing close on the abilities of mankind to react quickly and accurately. At the present time the chief danger is the existence of individuals seriously lower than the average. By denying drivers' licenses to such people a great improvement in the toll of highway accidents would be accomplished. Accidents usually happen at such short notice that it is interesting to see what can happen within the short spaa of a second, or, in everyday terms, in the twinkling of an eye. The latter effort takes approximately one-tenth of a second, and yet a life may be lost in that email space of time. Take, for example, a motor collision. Tests have shown that the average time needed to see a danger signal, realise its meaning, and begin to press the brake, is almost one second. Some people, however, nerd more time than that, and do not begin to put on the brake until a full second, or even two, after the danger signal has been seen. Cars thus driven would move respectively 60 feet or 120 feet even before any attempt has been made to bring the vehicles to a stop.

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Thousands of Lives Lost. An expert on moto'r traffic recently stressed this point, adding that a very high percentage of the accidents were due to speed, "too fast for existing conditions and the kind of driver." Fewmotorists know the most important thing about themselves as drivers, that w, what psychologists call the "' reaction time." - ?The menace of slow-thinking drivers on the highway is almost infinite, and no one can estimate how many millions of money they have cost themselves and others in the last ten years. It is not that they are careless or incompetent, but that their thinking machinery does not work fast enough to keep up with modern mechanical speeds. It takes a fraction of a second for a sight to register on the sensitive retina of the eye or for sound to affect the mechanism of the ear. Another fraction of a second is lost in transmitting the sight or sound messages to the thinking cells of the brain. Here again a few more valuable second-fractions are lost while the cells decide what is to be done, and still another hundredth of a second or so is lost while the necessary orders are prepared to go to the muscles that must do the work. Another brief delay is used in sending the message down the nerve to the muscle and finally there is another delay while the muscle prepares to act. All these delays added together constitute the reaction time. If this time is half a second, a driver, running at 40 miles an hour is dangerous to himself and everybody else within 30ft. If anything shows up suddenly 2->ft in front of him he will hit. it and no escape is possible, because he cannot complete the necessary thinking process in time to make the necessary actions. This, indeed, demonstrates the need for some sort of psychological test for motor drivers if accidents are to be cut down and millions of pounds saved, as well as thousands of lives. Before the Eye can Wink. The fastest thing any man can do is to wink his eye. This instinctive reaction occupies about one-tenth of a second for most people. In that flash of time a car moving at 00 miles an hour will travel nearly 10ft. A fast aeroplane will move more than 25ft. A golf ball driven at the wrong angle can hit a man 15ft away before he winks. A rifle bullet will travel 300 ft and a meteor will travel between one and two miles. If a meteor's path is towards a person it- will be no good for him to dodge. Even if the falling star were sighted two miles off it would hit the person before he would wink. Eor practical purposes, however, the quick reaction of an eye-wink need not be taken into consideration. If accidents are to be prevented, some means must be devised either to quicken human response or else to slow up cars and other machines until they fit the reaction time of the average man and woman. TMs reaction time, tested thousands of times by psychologists, has ' been proved to be scarcely less than one second. Course of Training. Germany demands a regular course of training in a driving school, followed by driving practice in a dual-control car, and a rigid test directed by a graduated engineer. The procedure of obtaining a driver's license takes up 18 days. As speeds increase, no remedy of driving tests or warning signals is likely to be of much use. To quicken the average reaction time of mankind may be possible by evolution in. a million years or so, but that is of no present aid. Science might be able to do something in the matter in the form of a photo-electric cell which could react to a light signal in less than a ten-thousandth of a second. Perhaps cars or aircraft could be equipped with these lightning-like electric eyes so that collisions could* be avoided and speeds automatically checked before the human pilot even had time for his tenth-of-a-seeond wink, let alone for any kind of though