08/05/2026
In 1961, a guy who built parts for race cars patented a tool that had nothing to do with racing — a massive hydraulic spreader that could pry open crushed metal in seconds instead of an hour.
George Hurst got the idea after watching a rescue crew spend over an hour cutting a driver out of a wrecked stock car at a track. He figured there had to be a faster way. His first version worked, but it weighed 350 pounds — basically useless for most crews to actually carry around. It took him and his engineers about a decade to get it down to something portable, around 65 pounds.
The tool got shown to the public in 1971 at a trade show in California, and fire departments started putting it on their rigs pretty quick after that. Guys who used it started saying it "snatched" people "from the jaws of death," and the name just stuck — Hurst ended up trademarking it as the Jaws of Life.
For the generation of firefighters who came up after that — heavy bunker coats, leather helmets, tools laid out on the pavement after a job, like in this photo — that spreader became just as much a part of the job as the hose. Long before the lightweight battery tools departments run today, it was gear like this that quietly changed what was possible in the first few minutes after a crash.
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