Weekly commercial herald. (Vicksburg, Miss.) 1884-18??, 1886-01-22
ORIGIN OF THE LIFE-CAR.
A DEVICE WHICH BROUGHT WORLD
WIDE FAME TO JOSEPH FRANCIS.
Sympathy for Wrecked Sailors Made Him
an Inventor When a Boy-His
First Experiment-Wreck on
the Jersey Coast.

noon nowadays, any one who saunters
into the Stevens house on Broadway can
see a hale and cheerful old gentleman
pacing up and down the tiled corridor in
serene and pleasant reverie.
The quaint old guest is Joseph Francis,
who is famous the whole world over as
the inventor of the first practical life
saving apparatus, and who q quarter Of
a century ago was one of the most con-
spicuous citizens Of the country.
Il am s. years old now" he said, "and
/ have outlived every single relative ex-
cept my son, who is 50 years old. The
whole Of my life, ever siuce l was IL
years old, l have given up to the study of
I~fe-saying methods, because I couldn't
help it. When l WIS a little bit of q fell
low at school | useI to read about the
terrible shipwrecks Of those days, and l
set right to work then and there trying
to make something that would save peo-
pie who were shipwrecked."
Francis tried his first experiment in
deyising his future ~life-saving appar-
atus in the bodybuilding mandatory
that a relative ownedinh his native town Of
Boston. The little l1-year-old inventor
made a small boat rugged up with a con
|trivancein the bow and stern that he
made by inclosing his 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 besides and paddle around with
out sinking it. He had built the first
real life-boat ecer made in America. He
kept IN making boats and getting them
more and more buoyant, and in 1919 sent
o light, fast-going row-boat that
wouldn't sink to the first fair of the Mas
sachusetts Mechanics institute. The
managers had never seen anything like
it before, and they awarded it q favorable
mention.
WHEN FORTUNE BEGAN TO BOOM.
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 q "life-boat" he hadn't any diff
Guilty in getting the leading shipping
merchants of 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 stern,
and air chambers ran along the sides
under the thwarts.
Young Francis tossed the boat over
board endwise and bottom upward, and
she righted instantly because of Ler Pc
culiar model, and the water went through
her perforated bottom as it would have
passed through a sieve. Young Francis
next hauled her up to the yard-arm Of a
ship and cut her loose. She struck the
water with an awful thump, and went
down 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 didn't sue
coed. Young Francis tried the same ex-
pertinent before thousands of sightseers
in Philadelphia, 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 life-boats that poured in
from all over. People ordered him to
build yachts and pleasure boats, too, and
and the emperors Of Brazil and Russia
sent on royal orders for state barges.
Young Francis, all this time, kept max
ing experiments to improve the life-boat.
These experiments resulted, in 1888, in
the perfection of plans for the construc-
ton of a life-car, built Of wood, to run on
a hawser drawn from a wrecked ship to
the shore. HE got q patent for it the
same year, and built q boat after the
plans in 1910. 1t looked nice, but he
smashed it to pieces almost Immediately.
He saw that it couldn't stand being
banged on the rocks or against the bull
warks of q wreck in the heavy seas.
Then he set to work to make o boat of
iron that could stand being banged
around p~romiscuously in u storm, and
got a patent for the idea of a corrugated
boat in 1915.
WRECK ON THE JERSEY COAST.
But he discovered sOon that it was one
thing to make such a boat and quite
another 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
there never had been or never could be q
boat built that would carry people off q
wreck. The secretary said, however,
that if Francis had a mind to amuse
himself by taking his new-fangled con-
trivance down or the Jersey coast and
waiting until a wreck came along to try
it on, the government would like to
know the result. If the thing did half
what Francis said it would the govern
ment would look into it.
Francis was willing to take the chance.
He put q boat on the Jersey coast at his
own expense. At last, ON Jan. 12, 1850,
the British ship Ayrshire came driving
ashore in a furious snow-storm. She had
200 souls on board. The life-savers
rushed down to the beach and shot a line
at the wreck. They aimed so perfectly
that the line fell just amidships. The
sailors on the ship seized it and hauled
aboard q huge hawser that was made
fast to it. They secured the hawser to
the mast. The life-sayers slung the new
tangled life-car on the hawser, and
then fired another line aboard the
wreck. A minute afterward the queer
looking car was hanging over the passen-
gers heads on the wreck, and five people
clambered into it. 1t was all the car
could hold. The crew shut down the
hatch over the five, and the car started
on its fight back through the waves for
shore. It got there safely in two min
utes' time. 1t shot back and forth forty
different times in the next two hours,
and brought a shore all the passengers
save one. That one was a man whose
two nieces were safely slowed away in
the car. He vaulted on top of the car
just as it started from the wreck, and