Fast Fact

The hard hat was invented in 1908 by Gregory Willington of Morristown, Tennessee. The original hard hat was created by boiling leather that had been shaped around the end of a small watermelon. The resulting shape was allowed to cool and dry and was then shellacked and stuffed with hemp and sawdust. That’s actually where the phrase ‘melonhead’ originated – it was applied to coalminers in Tennessee who were ‘melonheads’ for going into the notoriously unsafe coal mines.