The Forest Republican. [volume] (Tionesta, Pa.) 1869-1952, 1886-01-20
ORIGIN OF THE LIFE CAB.
A DEVICE WHICH BROUGHT FAME
70 JOSEPH FRANCIS.
sympathy for ShipwrecISed sailors
nadc Him nm Inventor when a
school ROy-His Life story.


Joseph Francis, who is famous the
world over as the inventor of the first
practical life saving apparatus, and who
quarter of century ago was one of
the most conspicuous citizens of the
country, now lives quietly in a New
York hotel at the ripe age of eighty
live years. Francis tried his first eX-
pertinent in deyising his future life
saving apparatus in the boat building
mandatory that a relative owned in his
native town of Boston. The little eleven
year-old inventor made small boat
rugged up with a contrivance in the bow
and stern that he made by enclosing big
cakes of cork in wood. He filled the
boat chock full of water one day, and
was almost beside himself with boyish
glee when he found that it would not
only hold the water and float, but that
four men could climb into it beside and
paddle around without sinking it. He
had built the first real lifeboat ever made
In America. He kept on making boats
and getting them more and more buoy
ant and in 1919 sent light, fast going
rowboat that wouldn't sink to the first
fair CT the Massachusetts, Mechanics
Institute. The fair managers had never
seen anything like it before, and they
awarded it a favorable mention. This
was the first bit of encouragement that
the boy inventor had ever received in
his pursuit of his pet idea. People had
seen him at work in the boat house, but
none of them was able to comprehend
what the boy was driving at. They
laughed and said he was MISSIONARY. !"
Men with brains and money began to
get interested in the boy after the fair,
and in 1925, when he brought to New
York the first buoyant wooden boat that
he called "lifeboat," he hadn't any
difficulty in getting the leading shipping
merchants of the town to go down to the
foot of Wall street and watch what hap
pened when the boat took water at the
end of the old wooden dock. The boat
had cork slowed at the bow and the
stern, and air chambers ran along the
sides and the thwarts.
Young Francis tossed the boat over
board endwise and bottom upward, and
she righted instantly because of her pecul-
lar model, and the water went through
her perforated bottom as it would have
passed through sieve. Young Francis
next hauled her up to the yardarm of
ship and cut her loose. She struck the
water with an awful thump, and went
out of sight. She came right up again
right side up, and was then loaded with
men. They tried every which way to
upset or sink it, but they couldn't succeed.
Young Francis tried the same experiment
before thousands of sightseers in Phila-
delphia, and finally old England came
along and ordered two boats of the same
kind for service on the Canada coast.
Fortune began to boom for the young
inventor then. He had all he could do
to fill orders for lifeboats that poured in
from all over. People ordered him to
build yachts and pleasure boats, too, and
the emperors of Brazil and Russia sent
on royal orders for state barges. Young
Francis, all this time, kept making
experiments tc improve the lifeboat. He
wanted 10 make something that would
fetch people off wreck without drag
ging them through the tremendous seas.
These experiments resulted, in 1888, in
the perfection of plans for the construc-
ton of covered life car built of wood
to run on hawser drawn from wrecked
ship to the shore. He got patent for it
the same year, and built boat after the
plans in 1910. 1t looked nice, but he
smashed it to pieces almost Immediately.
He saw that it could not stand being
banged on the rocks or against the bul.
warks of wreck by the heavy seas.
Then he set to work to make a boat of
irCn that could stand being banged
around promiscuously in storm. 1t was
a tedious and discouraging struggle.
10 fhok . l.. u i
of iron being used in constructing any
kind of small boat. He kept on trying,
and at last built two huge cast iron
dies, 1Ot feet long, and forced them
together over ahuge sheet ofiron. When
the dies were opened the sheet of iron
was found pressed in the shape of the
side Of boat, with deep corrugations at
the edges. Francis pressed out dupli-
cate sheet, and then riveted the two
together, and had the thing he had been
striving after completed at last He got
patent for the idea of corrugated boat
in 1845.
But he discovered soon that it was one
thing to make such boat and quite an
other to make people believe that it
would do what he knew it would. When
he told the secretary of the national
treasury about it. that official told him
that there never had been nor ever could
be Loaf built that would carry people
off a wreck. The secretary said, how
ever that if Francis had a mind to
amuse himself by taking his new-fangled
contrivance down on the Jersey coast
and waiting till a wreck came along to
try it on, the government would like to
know the result. II the thing did half
what Francis said it would. then the
government would look into it.
Francis was willing to take the
chances. He put a boat on the Jersey
coast at his own expense. At last, on
January ~, 1850, the British ship
Ayrshire came driving ashore in a furi-
Gus snow storm. She had 200 souls
aboard. The life-savers rushed down to
the beach and shot line at the wreck
They aimed so perfectly that the line
fell just amidships. The sailors on the