“Without imagination, science is nothing,” said self-proclaimed eccentric, the late, great Troy Hurtubise. Unfortunately for this 1998 winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for Safety Engineering, Troy’s weird and wonderful ideas weren’t always supported by hard scientific fact.
Troy’s route into the R&D arena wasn’t typical, it has to be said. After coming face-to-face with a grizzly bear in 1984 and seeing the blockbuster RoboCop three years later, Troy’s mission in life had been to design a suit of body-armour impervious to grizzly attack.
Several decades, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a whole lot of high-tech plastic, liquid rubber, chain mail, galvanised steel, titanium and duct tape later, he unveiled the virtually indestructible Ursus Mark VI. Capable of surviving being struck by a tree trunk, crashed into by a three-tonne truck and blasted by a 12-gauge shotgun at point black range, this triumph of protective packaging over practicality (the suit weighed 150 pounds and Troy couldn’t stay upright in it on uneven ground) made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most expensive research suit ever made.
Sold at auction for a fraction of its development cost, Troy had been working on a new, improved version of his grizzly-resistant suit before his untimely death earlier this year.
