TL;DR: The football helmet traces to 1893, when a Navy player ordered a moleskin cap from his cobbler after being told that one more head impact could cause "instant insanity." Helmets were not mandatory in the NFL until 1943, and the facemask -- protected by Vernon McMillan's 1935 patent -- didn't become universal until 1962. The original patent drawings are available framed or unframed.
In the fall of 1893, Admiral Joseph Mason Reeve received a warning. A doctor had examined his head and told him that another hard impact -- after the kicks and blows he had absorbed in previous games -- risked causing "instant insanity." Reeve was a Navy football player preparing for a game against Army, and he had no intention of sitting it out. He went to his cobbler and had a moleskin hat made with earflaps.
That improvised object was the first football helmet. It protected one man from a specific threat, cost almost nothing to produce, and was forgotten almost as quickly as it was made. The game that necessitated it went on to kill 19 players in a single year -- 1905 -- before President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to abolish football entirely if the rules were not reformed. Helmets would not become mandatory in the NFL until 1943, fifty years after Reeve's cobbler made the first one.
The Origins of the Game and Its Violence Problem
American football emerged from rugby in the 1870s and 1880s, with Walter Camp's rules codification producing a distinctly American game by the 1890s. The sport grew rapidly in popularity at colleges and universities, where it became a central social event. It also became notable for its brutality.
The violence was not incidental. The formation plays of the era -- the flying wedge in particular, in which blockers formed a V-shaped human battering ram to escort the ball carrier -- were designed to be physically overwhelming. A team that could sustain more punishment than its opponent had a structural advantage. Injuries were expected, and death was not rare. The 1905 season produced 19 deaths and approximately 137 serious injuries, numbers that reached the White House.
Roosevelt's 1905 meeting with representatives of major football programs produced an agreement to reform the rules. The resulting changes banned the flying wedge, opened the game up with the forward pass, and established the line of scrimmage as the boundary between opposing teams. The rule changes reduced deaths but did not eliminate head injuries. The helmet remained a practical necessity for anyone who understood the physics of the game.
Soft Leather and the Optional Era
In the early 1900s, soft leather caps became available as optional protective headgear. They were not mandatory, and they were not popular. Players often viewed wearing a helmet as a sign of weakness -- the cultural expectation was that absorbing punishment without complaint was part of the game. Photographs from this era frequently show players in helmets alongside teammates who are bareheaded.
The material quality of helmets improved significantly through the 1920s. Hardened leather replaced the soft caps, offering substantially more structural protection. The new helmets fit more closely to the head, incorporated ear protection, and could absorb impacts that would have been directly transmitted to the skull with earlier designs. Adoption increased as players recognized that the improved helmets were both more effective and less conspicuous than earlier versions.
Even with improved equipment, the injury rate remained high. Concussions were not yet a focus of medical attention in the way they would become in the 21st century, and many impacts that would now be recognized as traumatic brain injuries were logged as headaches, confusion, or "getting your bell rung" -- phrases that acknowledged the reality of the injury without treating it as a medical condition requiring intervention.
Riddell and the Plastic Revolution
The next significant material transition came in 1939, when John T. Riddell, founder of the helmet company that still bears his name, developed the first plastic football helmet. Plastic offered structural advantages that leather could not match: it could be molded to a consistent shape, manufactured at greater volume, and engineered to distribute impact force more evenly across the surface.
The plastic helmet arrived just four years before the NFL made helmets mandatory in 1943. The timing was relevant: the availability of a clearly superior product made the mandating of helmets more practical, and the war-related shortage of leather that reduced the quality of available materials gave plastic an additional advantage. By the mid-1940s, plastic was the dominant material for professional football helmets.
The plastic helmet also enabled something that leather had made difficult: surface decoration. In 1948, Los Angeles Rams halfback Fred Gehrke painted gold horns on his leather helmet, making the Rams the first professional team with a helmet emblem. Gehrke, who had studied art before his football career, applied the design himself to 70 helmets over the offseason. The tradition of helmet decoration -- which has become one of the most distinctive aspects of football team identity -- traces to that one player with a can of paint.
Vernon McMillan's 1935 Patent and the Facemask
The open-faced helmet remained standard through the 1940s, despite the obvious vulnerability it created. Players sustained broken noses, lost teeth, and suffered cuts and lacerations from contact that a facemask would have prevented. The cultural resistance to any protection that might impair vision or seem to suggest fear of contact kept the face unprotected long after the physics of the problem were well understood.
Vernon McMillan recognized the problem in 1935. The patent he was granted that year covered a bar that could be attached to a helmet to protect the player's nose without impairing vision. The design was a direct, practical response to one of the most common injuries in the game: the nose-first collision with another player's shoulder pad, knee, or elbow.
McMillan's design was ahead of its time and was not widely implemented. The single face bar as a production feature did not appear on padded plastic helmets until 1955, twenty years after McMillan's patent. When Riddell began manufacturing helmets with face bars following that development, adoption was rapid: by 1962, every player in the NFL wore a helmet with a facemask. The protection that McMillan had identified as necessary and engineered a solution for in 1935 became universal -- eventually -- on a timeline driven by cultural inertia more than technical limitations.
The Complex Facemask and Modern Design
Once the single face bar became standard, the evolution of the facemask accelerated. A single bar protected the nose but left the rest of the face exposed. A second bar, then a third, then a cage-style design with multiple bars offered greater protection while remaining compatible with the peripheral vision requirements of players in different positions.
The configuration of the facemask became position-specific. Linemen, who engage in close-contact blocking and tackling on every play, typically wear heavily barred cage designs that protect the entire face. Quarterbacks and skill position players, who need wider fields of view to track downfield, often wear fewer bars. Kickers, who rarely absorb direct contact to the face, sometimes wear minimal protection. The facemask became a customizable component engineered to the specific demands of each position.
Padding technology evolved alongside external design. Early leather helmets had no internal padding -- the shell itself was the protection, such as it was. Foam padding was introduced in leather helmets in the 1930s and became a design standard in plastic helmets from their introduction. Modern helmets incorporate multiple layers of engineered foam, air bladders, and gel padding systems designed to reduce rotational acceleration of the brain during impact -- the mechanism most closely linked to concussion and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
The modern NFL helmet is a engineered system that Reeve's cobbler could not have imagined. The problem it is solving, however, is the same one that sent a Navy player to a shoemaker in 1893: how to protect a human head in a sport designed to put it in collision with other human bodies moving at speed. Every generation has found a better answer. The conversation is not finished.
Shop Football Helmet Patent Art Prints
The original U.S. Patent Office drawing that defined the football facemask. Starting at $49.99 unframed.
Football Helmet (1935), Vernon McMillan
McMillan's 1935 patent is the drawing that first solved the problem of facial protection in football -- two decades before a single face bar became a production standard, and nearly three decades before every NFL player wore one. The patent shows the bar attachment mechanism in precise technical detail, a design that was ahead of the culture that would eventually adopt it. It is one of the more telling patent stories in football history: the inventor who was right and had to wait twenty years to be proven so.
Best for: Football fans, coaches, collectors of football history, gift buyers who want a piece with a story
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the first football helmet invented?
The first football helmet was made in 1893 for Navy player Joseph Mason Reeve, who had been warned that another head impact could cause serious neurological damage. His cobbler made a moleskin hat with earflaps for the Army-Navy game that year. Soft leather helmet caps became more widely available in the early 1900s, but helmets did not become mandatory in the NFL until 1943.
Who invented the plastic football helmet?
John T. Riddell, founder of the Riddell helmet company, developed the first plastic football helmet in 1939. Plastic offered significant advantages over leather: it could be molded to a consistent shape, manufactured at greater volume, and engineered to distribute impact force more effectively. Riddell remains one of the leading helmet manufacturers in the sport today.
Who patented the football facemask?
Vernon McMillan was granted a patent in 1935 for a bar attachment designed to protect football players' noses without impairing their vision. His design was not widely adopted at the time. A single face bar did not become a standard production feature on helmets until 1955, and the facemask did not become universal in the NFL until 1962.
When did football helmets become mandatory?
The NFL made helmets mandatory for all players in 1943. The rule came nearly 50 years after the first improvised helmet was made in 1893, and four years after the plastic helmet was developed by Riddell in 1939. Before 1943, helmets were available and increasingly common but not required, and many players chose to go without them.
What football patent art prints are available?
The Vernon McMillan 1935 football helmet patent print is available as a framed or unframed museum-quality reproduction of the original U.S. Patent Office drawing. Additional football-related prints are also available, including the football field and football pants patents. Each is a reproduction of an actual engineering drawing, rendered in a watercolor style on museum-quality paper.
Written by Rider Tuff, founder of Timeless Patents. Timeless Patents makes museum-quality patent art prints from original U.S. Patent Office documents, celebrating the inventors behind your favorite sports, hobbies, and passions. Every print is available framed or unframed, starting at $49.99. Shop the full football collection →
Cover image: "Brown Bears football helmet (rear)" by Kenneth C. Zirkel, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
