Eli Beeding

Eli Lackland Beeding Jr. (December 17, 1928 - December 21, 2013)^[1] was a U.S. Air Force captain and rocket test subject. In 1958, a series experiments using a miniature rocket sled began at Holloman AFB under the supervision of Colonel John Stapp and Captain Beeding. Participants rode the "Daisy Sled" (so-called because it was originally designed to be air, and not rocket, powered) at various speeds and in many different positions — even head first — in an attempt to learn more about the g-force limits of the human body.

On May 16, Capt. Eli Beeding prepared to make a 40 g run. The Daisy shot down the track, reached a top speed around 35 mph, and came to a screeching halt in less than a tenth of a second.^[2] "When I hit the water brake," Beeding recalled in a recent interview, "It felt like Ted Williams had hit me on the back, about lumbar five, with a baseball bat." Beeding had barely informed flight surgeon Capt. Les Eason of his troubles when he began to experience tunnel vision and passed out.

It was a scary moment, since the standard protocol for shock would be to elevate Beeding’s feet. Yet there was a chance his back was broken, in which case he shouldn’t be touched. Taking a calculated risk, Eason and Tech. Sgt. Roy Gatewood gently moved Beeding onto the side of the sled and elevated his feet. Ten minutes later, Beeding emerged from shock and was rushed to the base hospital. Doctors determined his back was only badly bruised. "I thought that was the big excitement of the day,” Beeding recalls. "But later my boss came to me and said, ‘The chest accelerometer tracing shows you got 82.6 g!’"^[3]

Subsequent tests with bears showed that the reading was not a fluke, and that Beeding had indeed endured a massive g load. When word got out, the young captain made headlines as the man who had topped John Stapp's g-force record. Beeding however is quick to point out that he rode the sled backwards, and that his time at 83 gs was “infinitesimal” compared to the 1.1 second durations Stapp faced during his own tests. “That doesn’t sound like much (time),” Beeding notes, “But I guarantee you, having been through it at lesser durations, one second is an eternity.”

Still, the incident was wholly remarkable and made Beeding a hero and, for several decades thereafter, his name appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records.^[4] Guinness and many other sources incorrectly reported that Beeding endured 82.6 gs for 0.04 seconds. Beeding's sled in fact deccelerated at 40.4 gs for 0.04 seconds as it slowed from 35 mph to a stop over a distance of one foot. 82.6 gs was a brief peak acceleration measured by a sensor on his chest due to elastic response of his rib cage.^[5]

Beeding retired from the Air Force in 1971, later moving to Colorado where he died in 2013 at the age of 85.

References

1. "Eli Beeding Jr". Deltacountyindependent.com. Retrieved 2014-01-25.
2. "This New Ocean - Ch2-4". History.nasa.gov. Retrieved 2014-01-25.
3. http://www.amug.org/~jpaul/may16.html
4. Guinness Book of Records 1994. 1994. p. 69. The highest g value voluntarily endured is 82.6 g for 0.04 sec by Eli L. Beeding, Jr. on a water-braked rocket sled at Holloman Air Force Base. NM on 16 May 1958. He was subsequently hospitalized for three days.
5. Impact Acceleration Stress. Washington, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council. 1962. p. 129. The severest and most persistent signs of shock were observed in a backward-facing deceleration during which Captain Eli Breeding was exposed to 2,139 G per second to a peak of 40.4 G for a duration of .040 second. This corresponds to 12-14 cycles per second as shown in Table 1. The dynamic response to the impact was a peak measured on the sternum of 82.6 G, at 3,826 G per second-- approximately double the rate-of-onset and magnitude of the applied impact, which corresponds to about 12 cycles per second of resonant response. The impact force was apparently amplified with a dynamic load factor of 2.0 by the elastic response of the rib cage.