PREFACE
COLONEL (ER) JACQUES LEGENDRE

March 19, 1979 was a beautiful day. At the time, I was Head of Operations at the Paris Fire Brigade. That afternoon, I had met the engineers from a company called Fenzy, to go over the idea of a totally new form of head protection for firemen. At that stage, it was just a project to develop new equipment and I had no idea that it was going to become a personal issue for me. But that night, I was officer in charge of an intervention on a gas leak in the Place Saint-Ferdinand in the seventeenth quarter of Paris. Lacking adequate protection from my helmet, I received multiple facial injuries and lost one eye. From that moment on, the idea of equipping firemen with a helmet that would really protect them became an obsession for me. But at the time, we would never have thought that twenty years later, the new helmet, with its distinctive shape that caused a revolution in its day, would go on to become a world reference. Even though I initiated it with great vigour, the success of the F1 helmet is above all collective. It belongs to a group of men who trusted each other in the face of scepticism, lack of support and the archaic views of the firefighting profession. Without the friendship of Adrien Gallet and Yannick Bersihand, the collaboration of the engineers from the Paris Fire Brigade and the ideas of Jean-Paul Noyerie and the other engineers from the Gallet company, none of this would have been possible. I would like to pay a special tribute to Adrien Gallet who is no longer with us. In trusting me, he took enormous financial risks for his company and showed an incredible degree of courage. For the general public and most of the people who wear it, the F1 helmet is just a nice-looking object that shines in the sun or makes them look impressive. “Nice motorcycle helmet”, as some clever fellow once said to me. Most people are unaware of the incredibly difficult conditions in which it was conceived and the colossal amount of work that it represents. The great industrialist Marcel Dassault once said, “A good aeroplane must be a beautiful aeroplane.” If the F1 helmet is beautiful from the outside, it’s because it’s beautiful on the inside. You can see how well it does the job it’s supposed to do, how perfectly the shape integrates all the different functions. It is the ultimate human protection, the first piece of head protection equipment that was genuinely created on a scientific basis to include all forms of protection. The story of the F1 needed to be told and I thank Mr. Carlo Zaglia for doing it in this magnificent work

Colonel (ER) Jacques Legendre
Retired officer of the Paris Fire Brigade
Civil/Mining Engineer
Engineer from the Higher School of Military Engineering