In 1958, Volvo hired an aircraft engineer named Nils Bohlin to become the company's first chief safety engineer.

Bohlin had spent years designing ejection seats, building systems that had to hold a man's body still under forces that could break bone. Cars had a different problem. The belts in use at the time crossed the lap only, and in a crash they could cause severe internal injuries on their own.

Bohlin studied how the body moved in a collision. He wanted a belt that held the chest and the hips at the same time, one that a person could fasten with a single hand and would not loosen or shift.

He worked through 1958 and into 1959, testing designs against real crash data. The result was a V-shaped strap that crossed the shoulder and the lap in one motion, anchored low near the hip.

Volvo installed it as standard equipment in its cars in Sweden in 1959. It was the first seatbelt of its kind sold to the public.

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Bohlin and Volvo held the patent. They could have licensed it to every other automaker in the world and charged for each one. That was the plan under any ordinary patent.

Volvo made the belt's patent available to other manufacturers, free of royalty, so that any car company could use the same design without paying for it.

The decision gave up what could have been decades of licensing revenue on a device that would end up in nearly every car built on earth.

Other manufacturers adopted the three-point belt through the 1960s and 1970s. Regulators in country after country eventually made it mandatory equipment.

Volvo's own safety research estimates the three-point belt has saved more than a million lives worldwide since Bohlin designed it. Government researchers in the United States separately estimate the design has prevented several hundred thousand deaths in that country alone.

Bohlin kept working in automotive safety for Volvo until his retirement. He died in 2002, at 82. Volvo buried him with one of his own belts.

Most men who invent something the whole world will use are also the men who profit most from it. Bohlin's name is on the patent. His bank account was never built on it.

He had already made the thing that mattered. Giving it away cost him a fortune he chose not to collect.

A man who builds wealth for his family thinks about what he can pass down. Bohlin passed down a strap of nylon that nobody in his own family will ever be able to claim credit for by name, and it outlived every dollar it could have made him.

If you built something that could save a million strangers, would you have given away the rights to make sure it did?