MONTROSE, ALABAMA — You may not know the name George F. Kirchoff, but the invention he pioneered is most likely one that you sit within inches of every day yet hope never to see — the automobile airbag.

“A surgeon once told me, ‘You’ve saved more lives than I have,’” recalls Kirchoff, 79.

He is not one to brag. But between 1987 and 2008, airbags saved 25,782 lives according to federal statistics.

In the automotive world, Kirchoff is known as “the father of the airbag,” but the 1955 Auburn graduate emphasizes he was not alone.

It was a team effort, he explains, sitting at his home overlooking Mobile Bay, where he retired in 1998 with his wife, Gene. He stayed involved in the industry for another decade as president of the Automotive Occupant Restraints Council.

For 35 years at Thiokol Inc., Morton International and Autoliv Inc., Kirchoff led the efforts to create the airbag, and holds numerous patents for its assembly.

He spent the early part of his career in rocketry, and his knowledge of pyrotechnics resulted in insights into how to detonate the gases that whoosh into a nylon bag.

In his home study are photographs of him in airbag tests — his younger self leaning back in a car seat as a white balloon billows toward his face.

He is used to playing a powerful role, but behind the scenes.

“The inventors of the airbag technology have remained anonymous for too long,” consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader said while presenting Kirchoff a safety award in 1992.

In 2011, German automaker BMW AG recognized Kirchoff with a lifetime achievement award, its citation praising him for “many years of tireless innovation on automotive airbags to help save lives and reduce serious injuries, anonymous to those you protected.”

He fell in love with cars as a youth in Birmingham, the son of George Kirchoff, who worked for a dairy company, and Regina Marino, a native of Mobile.

His father drove a Hudson. When the fan belt broke, young George fixed it.

He got hold of a 1936 Ford from a junkyard and got it running.

At Auburn, where he studied engineering physics, he had a 1946 Ford convertible.

He and a buddy, who also had a car, only had seven wheels between them, though. They took turns sharing a wheel.

While still in college, he worked for a bus company and repaired cars for friends.

“My dad thought I was going to be a grease monkey,” he says.

His father was killed by a car, not while driving, but as a pedestrian.

After Auburn, Kirchoff went to Navy flight school and met Gene Golson, a Prattville native who was a student at University of Montevallo. The couple began a life together that now spans 55 years, with three children and four grandchildren.

Kirchoff’s first job after the Navy was developing a rocket to record weather data. In his next berth, he worked on a solid rocket motor, flares and munitions.

The family cars kept pace with the times — a Chevrolet Bel Air, turquoise with chrome, then a robin’s-egg blue Ford station wagon.

In 1972, between jobs, he began to feel that he “needed to do something for other people.”

That yearning deepened as he spent time as a lay speaker in the Methodist church.

Then he got his chance to turn his expertise in rocketry to saving lives.

The airbag was not a new concept, he says, but car companies had been unsuccessful in developing it.

He moved his family out to Thiokol headquarters in Utah, and soon headed up the first airbag program.

Gene Kirchoff recalls the years that her husband worked long days and nights, determined to find the right combination of factors.

The initiator — the pin that starts the airbag explosion — had to be perfectly calibrated. The inflator, releasing nitrogen gas, had to work just so.

And the airbag had to open in 35 milliseconds.

“There was hundreds of trials and errors,” he says.

Once he got all the elements in place and car companies began to place orders for Kirchoff’s airbag, there was the public resistance to deal with, too.

People worried that it would take away their “freedom,” says Kirchoff.

Some resented the government imposing the device, he says.

But by the 1980s, airbags became a part of American life.

Kirchoff feels deeply gratified at how this safety measure has become used in many parts of the world. Along with driver and passenger frontal airbags, he says, side curtain airbags are becoming more common, too.

Ever more attention is needed, he says, to rear seat airbags and inflatable seatbelts.

In 1981, Kirchoff’s own car, a 1981 Mercedes Benz S-class, was the first model in the Mercedes North American line to be equipped with an airbag.

He gave that car to the Browning-Kimball Classic Car Museum in Ogden, Utah.

In his garage today is a Mercedes.

He climbs in and runs his fingers over the letters on the hub of the steering wheel, SRS — supplemental restraint system — the technical term for airbag.

He talks about the innovations on the horizon — a car that can sense if a driver is sleepy or intoxicated, a car that can avoid crashes, a car that takes over from a driver when needed.

How much control, he asks, should a car be able to assume?

That’s one of the philosophical questions facing the industry, he says.

Nearing his eighth decade, active in an automotive consulting group, he is still pondering the biggest question of all.

How can we make a safer car?