 Radiology
Support Devices (RSD) and its predecessor companies owe their
specialty of duplicating the human body to the fact that a
former wife of the founder of these companies, Samuel W.
Alderson, was always late for appointments. One evening,
late in World War II, one of her friends came over for dinner,
and Mr. Alderson chatted with her pending the arrival of his
wife.The friend was depressed by working in an amputee center,
and she bemoaned the poor arm prostheses being fitted to the
amputees.
At that time Mr. Alderson was working at the Bell Telephone
Laboratories on the first missile-guidance system, which
contained powerful, miniature permanent-magnet motors. He
wondered why such motors could not be used to power improved
arm prostheses. He began to explore this possibility at the
same time that IBM, which had promised to President Roosevelt
that they would turn their technology to the improvement of
artificial arms, was looking around for a project engineer for
this task. Mr. Alderson was recommended to IBM for this post
and was hired by IBM to head a special laboratory to pursue
this development.
By 1952 Mr. Alderson had developed an arm with which an
amputee with no stump could perform many tasks, using toe
controls. He then went on to controls using the skin currents
that accompany the contraction of muscles which had previously
powered lost arms. Unfortunately, the electronics could not be
miniaturized enough at that time, so the project was put on
hold until technology caught up with its requirements. IBM
then helped Mr. Alderson establish his own company to bring
the electric arm to a plateau until such time as further
development could be undertaken.
As a result of this experience in duplicating the human body,
his new company entered this field more broadly, pioneering
dummies for testing military-aircraft ejection-seats. His
company then received a contract from a major aircraft company
to develop special dummies to test the survivability of the
Command Module of Project Apollo. The contract became more
complicated when it was found that the Command Module could
not be relied upon to survive a ground landing, and its work
statement had to be changed to permit a splash-down landing.
The complications caused by this program led to insolvency of
the company. Mr. Alderson then moved to California, where he
had grown up, and started Humanetics Inc., devoted to the
further development and manufacture of crash-test dummies for
auto safety and to a phantom (a medical term for
a dummy) which was the first such device to guide radiation
treatments for cancer by measuring the dose that would be
delivered to a patient, as determined in a corresponding
phantom.The Alderson RANDO phantom, and its successor the
Alderson ART phantom, have become worldwide standards and are
used in nearly every radiation therapy clinic in the world.
Humanetics was sold to a British company, but Mr. Alderson
bought back the radiation part of the business and proceeded
to develop PIXY, which is virtually an American standard for
training radiologic technologists in taking x-rays. The new
company, Radiology Support Devices (RSD), took over from the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories the production of a
phantom to calibrate in-vivo counters to determine the amount
and nature of radioactive particles absorbed in the bodies of
nuclear workers. Today RSD is known as the world leader in the
development of phantoms for Diagnostic Radiology, Radiation
Therapy, Nuclear Medicine, and Health Physics.
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