Automakers in the 1920s experimented with mounting literal pedestrian catchers on the front bumpers of early cars to scoop up people walking in the street instead of violently running them over.

The logic behind the front-mounted pedestrian catcher

Early cars had little between a person in their path and the vehicle’s wheels. In the 1920s, designers explored devices fixed to the front bumper that would intercept a pedestrian before the car reached them. A net or scoop was meant to catch the person and guide them up and away from the wheels, turning a potentially fatal run-over into a less dangerous collision.

The design treated the car’s front end as a problem that could be reshaped: instead of letting someone fall beneath the vehicle, give them somewhere to go. That mattered especially because early cars lacked many of the protective features familiar today, and street traffic was still adapting to the arrival of motor vehicles.

Catching someone was not the same as stopping them

A catcher could change where a pedestrian went, but it could not make the car’s momentum disappear. The vehicle still had to strike the person, and the device had to work quickly enough to catch and lift them without trapping or throwing them into another hazard. Its success would depend on the person’s position, the car’s speed, and the catcher’s shape and strength.

That is the central engineering tradeoff: the device aimed to prevent the wheels from passing over a person, not to prevent the initial impact. It was an attempt to manage the consequences of a crash through hardware mounted ahead of the car—a striking reminder of how early designers tried to make rapidly growing traffic safer before modern vehicle-safety systems took shape.