By Larry LaTourette


Recently a Northwestern fan on the Rivals.com NU Football Message Board¹ cited a page on the Helmet Hut website that credited Northwestern with wearing the very first modern plastic helmet.  Helmet Hut tracks football helmet history.  The page in question features an Acme Newsphoto² image of a player in 1940 posing with the new helmet:


Helmet Hut also helpfully included an image of the back of the old photo:



Both Helmet Hut and the poster on Rivals.com assumed Northwestern was the team that had worn the new helmet: "[Did NU's] 40-0 win [vs. Syracuse] have anything to do Eastman Kodak's Tenite cellulosic plastics?" Helmet Hut asked in its post.

The image and the Acme description, however, left in doubt which team wore this helmet.  The player in the image is clearly not wearing a Northwestern uniform, and the helmet looks more like Syracuse's helmet at the time (orange leather, with vertical stripes) than NU's (plain black leather).  Acme's caption also did not clear up which team wore the helmet.  In fact, Eastman Kodak's involvement seemed to point to Syracuse, given the campus's proximity to Eastman's offices.

As it turns out, the player in the photo is a model, wearing a prototype, and Northwestern actually was the team that first wore a modern plastic helmet onto the football field.  An obscure industry journal, Chemical Industries, provided an image of a Northwestern player sporting the prototype before the game with Syracuse:



And, no, your eyes are not deceiving you: that helmet is see-through!  Here is the caption that Chemical Industries provided: "It had to come: plastics are now sported on the gridiron.  A member of the Northwestern football team adjusts a helmet molded of Tenite, a resilient plastic developed by Eastman Kodak."^{3, 4}

The player in the Chemical Industries photo is definitely wearing an NU jersey, but he cannot be identified.

While the Tenite used for the helmet was produced by Eastman, the helmet itself was the design of John Riddell's equipment manufacturing company.  Riddell, an NU grad school alumnus and former Evanston H.S. coach, had been experimenting with the plastic for over a year.

The photo at right, taken from the Riddell Company's website, shows Riddell's first plastic prototype, which he developed in 1939.  It does not appear, however, that any major college football team actually used the helmet in a game until the 'Cats did in 1940, an assumption backed up by the caption on the Acme Newsphoto image: "This molded helmet. . . will get its first college gridiron test when Northwestern plays Syracuse next Saturday." It is a shame that the Wildcats did not keep the helmets see-through for their 1940 debut vs. Syracuse, which would have made Northwestern the kings of crazy helmets, a title that even Oregon would not be able to take away. Instead, Riddell used dark purple shells.  The vertical strip of material that covered the center seam was painted black, and the front of the helmet was given a white stripe.

[Riddell]

The new helmets did indeed make their debut at Northwestern's 1940 season opener at Syracuse, the Orangemen's homecoming game:



The team continued to wear the Tenite helmets during the 1940 season.  George Zorich, the team's starting right tackle, added a Tenite facemask in the middle of the season, after losing a tooth during the Indiana game⁵.  While this was not the first facemask to be used in college football, it was among the earliest to employ plastic.  An ironic twist: many people credit Northwestern alumnus Otto Graham with having worn the very first plastic facemask, during his time with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1950s.⁶


The influence of Riddell's new Tenite football helmets was wide-reaching.  As the following 1941 article from the Daily Northwestern (here given in its entirety) notes, the helmet was the inspiration for the American parachute helmet, eventually used for training in World War II.  The article also reveals that Northwestern, thanks to Riddell, was among the first college teams to use removable cleats on their shoes:


The team continued to use Riddell's plastic helmets through the mid-1940s.  During his time with the 'Cats, Graham only wore leather helmets in practice, and wore the iconic white-striped Tenite helmet in every game:


By the early '40s, several NFL teams were also using plastic helmets.  However, some of the teams encountered trouble with the headgear, including incidents of the helmets shattering.  Most of these teams switched briefly back to leather helmets before returning in the '50s-- for good-- to plastic shells.⁸

It is not known why, exactly, but NU also reverted to leather helmets in the mid-1940s.  Perhaps the school faced the same issues that hampered the NFL; it is not recorded.  The 'Cats continued to use plain black leather helmets until 1954, when NU also switched back permanently to plastic shell helmets (Kralite, rather than Tenite, this time).  For several years in the early 1940s, however, Northwestern was on the cutting edge-- at least, where the sport's helmet was concerned.

Many thanks, as always, to Northwestern University Archivist Kevin Leonard and the rest of the staff of the University Archives, for their help and valuable resources.

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UPDATE: Another photo has surfaced of the see-through tenite helmets.

This clipping from 1940 shows (photo #3) an unidentified NU player wearing a purple practice jersey and the see-through helmet. [The magazine or newspaper source is unknown.  Photos from Dispatch Photo News.]



1. Thanks, WildBillCat!
2. Acme Newsphoto was a wirephoto service, which eventually merged with United Press International.
3. Chemical Industries, vol. 47, 1940, p 533. 
4. Cf. Daily Northwestern, February 13, 1941, p 7, which also mentions the new helmets.
5. Daily Northwestern, November 12, 1940, p 8.
6. Cf. Paul Lukas's 2004 post for ESPN.com, which gives more details about the earliest facemasks.
7. Daily Northwestern: Summer Northwestern, August 5, 1941, p 5.  The article itself, however, was syndicated, and appeared nationally on August 1, 1941.
8. Popular Mechanics.