Calspan
Calspan Corporation is a science and technology company founded in 1943 as part of the Research Laboratory of the Curtiss-Wright Airplane Division at Buffalo, New York.As a part of its tax planning in the wake of the war effort, Curtiss-Wright donated the facility to Cornell University to operate "as a public trust.[3] However, a group of lab employees who had made a competing $15 million offer organized a lawsuit to block the sale.Under the name of Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory were inventions of the first crash test dummy in 1948, the automotive seat belt in 1951, the first mobile field unit with Doppler weather radar for weather-tracking in 1956, the first accurate airborne simulation of another aircraft (the North American X-15) in 1960, the first successful demonstration of an automatic terrain-following radar system in 1964, the first use of a laser beam to successfully measure gas density in 1966, the first independent HYGE sled test facility to evaluate automotive restraint systems in 1967, the mytron, an instrument for research on neuromuscular behavior and disorders in 1969, and the prototype for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's fingerprint reading system in 1972.CAL served as an "honest broker" making objective comparisons of competing plans to build military hardware.