Click here to zoom in History of Inflatable Boats

Click here to zoom in History of Inflatable Boats

Click here to zoom in History of Inflatable Boats

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Origin And Genesis Of Inflatable Boats

Speculating on the origin and genesis of various objects and phenomenons has always been a favorite hobby among academicians everywhere. However, while countless academics are constantly engaged in endless speculation regarding 'firsts' ne interesting question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily pertains to the origin of the inflatable boat.

One interesting theory is that our early ancestors discovered the concept of an inflatable boat when they came across a bloated dead animal floating in the water and saw how it could easily support their weight on the water. Later develo nts leading all the way up to the development of the inflatable boat in its modern incarnation do seem to support a theory of this sort.

Historical Inflatable Boats

Killing an animal and waiting for it to bloat in order to use it as a boat was most definitely not a convenient solution to the problem of crossing water bodies however and our ancestors had to find some other solution. The solution that ey eventually hit upon was to create flotation devices using just the skin of the animal. By skinning animals and inflating the resulting pieces of skin, early peoples were able to create crude inflatable boats.

In his accounts, Herodotus details an amphibious assault by the soldiers of Cyrus the Great against the soldiers of King Croesus of Lydia in 550 B.C. using the inflated hides of bullocks as rafts. In 218 B.C., Hannibal used enormous plat ms made of wood and supported by inflated ox hides to transport his elephants across the River Rhone.

Today, some people living in developing nations still make use of animal hides as flotation devices, and it is not uncommon to see animals skins coated in tallow, tar or pitch being used as makeshift flotation devices for rafts or boats. >

Modern Inflatable Boats

One question to which few people would know the answer is what a raincoat, a dirigible and an automobile tire have in common. The answer, in fact, is that the technology of all three objects formed the basis for the development of the in table boat in the form that we know today.

The very first proper rubber inflatable boat ever made was developed by Charles Macintosh in 1847, who was perhaps better known for his invention of the macintosh raincoat. The boat developed by Macintosh consisted of two tube-shaped bla rs made using cotton cloth that had been impregnated with rubber. The process used in the production of Macintosh's raincoats would eventually be combined with the process developed by Charles Goodyear for the vulcanization of raw latex, re sulting in the development of those enormous airships also known as dirigibles. Although the first dirigible was completed in 1852, dirigibles remained relatively unknown until Ferdinand von Zeppelin completed his first airship flight in 19 00.

In the early twentieth century, the French firm Societe Zodiac profited tremendously from its business manufacturing dirigibles. That came to an end in 1937, however, with the Hindenburg crash and the subsequent decline in the era of the rship. Societe Zodiac thus found itself specializing in a product that there was no longer any market for. Fortunately for them, however, the differences between dirigibles and inflatable boats are mostly with regards to scale, Societe Zodi ac thus shifted its manufacturing focus to small inflatable boats. This proved to be fortuitous, as World War II took place soon after, causing a great spike in the demand for inflatable life rafts.

After the commercial success of its two-man inflatable kayak beginning in 1934, Societe Zodiac began to manufacture an inflatable catamaran that measured 12 feet in length. The French Navy found this inflatable catamaran suitable for its rposes, and Societe Zodiac soon prospered due to the government contracts it garnered for the craft.

All of the early inflatable boats were manufactured using the same vulcanized-rubber-over-canvas material that Charlie Macintosh had used in his famous raincoats. As the was progressed and the Japanese came to control most of the world's bber production, however, manufacturers soon found themselves with an expanding market for products that they no longer had the raw materials to manufacture.

The Chemistry Of Inflatable Boats

One effect that the worldwide shortage in rubber supplies had was to goad the American government and military and countless industries which had been dependent on supplies of raw rubber to develop the synthetic rubber discovered by the ed chemist Charles Williams, a native of Britain.

Produced from an extract of turpentine, synthetic rubber would take a year and a half of research and $700 million in government funding before becoming a viable replacement for natural rubber. Scientists at the DuPont company were the f t to successfully produce synthetic rubber, in the form of neoprene and Hypalon. Both of these synthetic rubbers are still used in modern inflatable boats.

Neoprene is manufactured using ethylene, which is then polymerized to form polyethylene. The polyethylene is then reacted with sulfur dioxide, a preservative commonly found in packaged foods.

Chemically, Hypalon is almost identical to Neoprene, except for the addition of three chlorine atoms to the Neoprene molecule. While this may seem like a rather slight difference, the effect that it has on the properties of Hypalon and N rene is extremely large.

After the end of World War II, surplus military life rafts were sold to the public at incredibly low prices, and these low prices suppressed any further development in the field of inflatable boats designed for private use.

In 1952, Dr. Alain Lewis Bombard, who had long been a champion of inflatable boats being used as a survival tool, set out to prove his point by rowing and sailing an inflatable dinghy from the Canary Islands across the Atlantic without a food or water. Bombard wanted to prove that a shipwrecked sailor could indeed survive for months at a time with an inflatable raft and nothing else to eat but fish and plankton. 65 days after setting sail, Bombard beached his 15-foot Zodiac inflatable boat on Barbados on the Eve of Christmas. Though he was nearly dead from the hardships of the journey, the fact remained that he had survived the voyage, thus proving his point quite admirably.

In 1955, the supply of military surplus life rafts finally dwindled to nothing, and the Zodiac company finally found its way back into the market for commercial inflatable pleasure boats. Many other companies followed the same path, and ay, the inflatable boat has gone from being a relatively amorphous one-size-fits-all craft to having its original design altered specifically for certain activities.

One of the great advantages of inflatable boats is their versatility. Inflatable life rafts aside, no inflatable boat is single-use, and an inflatable dinghy can just as easily serve as a life raft as a vessel for making your way down ri rapids or floating gently across a serene lake.

Inflatable Boats Over The Centuries

The first references in history to people making use of inflatables to cross bodies of water come from the year 880 BC, when the Assyrian King Ashynasirpal II led his soldiers across a river, the soldiers continuously inflating animal sk in order to keep themselves afloat. In Ancient China, during the periods of the Sung Dynasty (960 A.D. to 1274 A.D.) and the Ming Dynasty (1368 A.D. to 1644 A.D.), people used goatskins inflated with air as primitive forms of transportatio n over water, in what could be described as being the world's first inflatable boats. This was a practice also followed in Tibet.

During that period, these inflatable rafts were known as 'spear rafts', as they typically involved the joining together of 5000 or so spears, supported by two floating sponsons, each comprising approximately 20 inflated animal skins. By 1930s, however, records suggest that the goatskin and ox-skin rafts of the time were sometimes comprised of up to 800 inflated animal skins. Similar rafts that made use of inflated animal skins as a means of flotation were also used in Ind ia, Persia and Mesopotamia.

In 1839, the Duke of Wellington began to test the very first inflatable pontoons. The pontoons were manufactured using heavy canvas, and waterproofed with the substance then known as india-rubber. These pontoons were then used as support or floating military bridges. The first test involved having forty foot soldiers sitting on the raft as it was towed along the river. Once it was proved that the inflatable raft was stable while the soldiers were sitting down, the soldiers were then made to lie down. Finally, satisfied that the raft worked, the Duke ordered the raft to shore and the soldiers disembarked.

In 1844, Lieutenant Peter Alexander Halkett RN finished designing the very first proper inflatable boat, and proceeded to test his design. He called his inflatable boat the 'Boat Cloak', and it consisted of a piece of material semi-circu in shape, measuring 9 feet in width by 4 feet 4 inches in depth. The body of the inflatable boat was inset in this semi-circle, and it had an oval shape. The boat could be inflated by blowing air into a nozzle.

The Boat-Cloak's first test run took it from Kew to Westminster Bridge, a journey of approximately 12 miles. On that very first test run, a Metropolitan paddle-steamer very nearly collided with Halkett. Following that first trial, Halket ade trial runs at Portsmouth, Brighton, Plymouth, Spithead, Cove of Cork, Firth of Tay and the Bay of Dublin. Finally, Halkett found himself in the Bay of Biscay, where, with the aid of a convertible umbrella sail, he successfully paddled t he Boat Cloak from HMS Caleonia to HMS St Vincent, both ships from the Experimental Squadron.

In 1845, the Admiralty built and tested a bigger model of the Boat Cloak at Spithead and Portsmouth. Eventually, however, their Lordships decided that, while the Boat Cloak would be an ideal vessel for geographical expeditions and the li it was simply not suitable for military application in the Naval Service.

During the years from 1846 to 1857, Halkett's Boat Cloaks provided transportation for several expeditions to the Arctic, most notably by Dr John Rae. Rae was so delighted by how the Boat Cloak performed that he named an area on the West st of Melville Peninsula in Halkett's honor. Today, the Boat Cloak that Rae journeyed in is on display in the Stromness Museum and can be seen there. Despite Rae's approval and general approbation, Halkett's Boat Cloak never found its way i nto mainstream usage.

At around the same time as his Boat Cloak was being used in the Arctic, Halkett had also developed another inflatable boat, this time made out of Indian-rubber, also known as 'Gutta Percha'. Halkett's ultimate goal was to design an infla le lifeboat able to accommodate up to 40 people, but his duties in the Royal Navy prevented him from realizing this goal. Halkett lived to the age of 65, and died in Torquay on 23 March 1885.

In 1901, the Frenchman Clement Ader successfully designed the very first motorized inflatable three-pointer. The outboard engine drove a pump, which in turn was used to inflate the sponson-like wings and tails, and the engine also drove ubmerged propeller, providing the boat's source of locomotion. While Ader's design worked well, most people found it too complicated to manufacture and too ungainly for regular use.

Then, in 1919, Reginald Foster Dagnall (RFD) became the first English inventor to develop an inflatable boat. He tested his boat on Wisley Lake in Surrey, England. After a successful trial, he created the RFD Company to manufacture flota n equipment for the aircraft designed and manufactured by the Short Brothers. In 1926, RFD's factory in Guildford, Surrey was the site of manufacture of the 'Doughnut Ring', a flotation device used to mark the site of downed aircraft. RFD l ater developed the first inflatable life-rafts used in airplanes in 1932, working in conjunction with R. T. Youngman.

In the decades that followed, up to the present day, more and more innovations were made in the field of inflatable boats, leading up to the inflatable boat as we know it today. Modern inflatable boats are sturdy and durable, mostly made synthetic rubbers and driven by powerful outboard motors that run on either gasoline or increasingly, electricity.

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