When it comes to boating, you think automatically of large yachts of considerable size. Boats that defy physics and leave an indelible memory with their beauty in the eyes of those who see them. Yachts are definitely the symbol of luxury and beauty that leisure boating can achieve. However, boating is not only this and in their shadow lives another type of boat that, although often ignored or looked at with sufficiency, has managed to become the most common among all the existing ones. Today we are talking about the inflatable boats.
I believe there are few doubts about the popularity of the latter. The low costs make them accessible to anyone and thanks to their versatility they have a huge amount of applications. A yacht, as gorgeous as it is, is challenging and difficult to manage. A inflatable boat no. The result is that it is currently difficult not to see these boats in action. In today's Tecnoseal Answers we will begin to talk about the history and characteristics of the inflatable boats, but we will also open the doors to a series of topics that we will investigate in the future.
Before we begin, I remind you that at the following link you can find a thematic index of all the Tecnoseal Answers released until today.
The genesis of inflatable boats goes back enormously in history. Think that there are ancient graffiti in the stone of boats made by inflating the skin of animals. The first turning point took place in the '800s in England with the discovery of the rubber vulcanization process by Charles Goodyear. This is initially tested by making floating pontoons (the ancestors of those who made famous the Seawork International), but in 1840 Thomas Hancock develops the first inflatable boat project.
Four years later Lieutenant Peter Halkett developed two types of inflatable boat (for one or two people) for the Arctic explorations. In both variants, the focus is on ease of transport and the possibility of using the deflated boat as a waterproof cloth. The English Admiralty sets aside the invention in a skeptical way, finding no useful application, but the explorers are not of the same idea and this type of inflatable boat starts to be used more and more in the various explorations of the globe. For example, a Halkett boat was on board the HMS Terror during the unfortunate John Franklin Arctic expedition of 1845 (recently returned to public attention thanks to the TV series The Terror).
In the following years, the enterprises made using the Halkett inflatables are multiplying, while rubber processing evolves allowing more applications. In 1848 the US Army first used inflatable pontoons during the war between Mexico and America, but the inflatable boat reached its current popularity only in 1912 following the Titanic catastrophe.
On that occasion, many human lives were lost simply because the number of lifeboats on board was inadequate, enough for less than half of the passengers on board. In order to avoid such a tragedy, the SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) was founded and its first treaty imposed the obligation to have a sufficient number of lifeboats on board each ship. This was a task easily performed by cargo ships, which had little crew and lots of space, but was much more difficult for passenger or military ships that, on the contrary, had a high number of passengers and little space on the decks.
The problem was solved only after the First World War when the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company found a way to combine the rubber with other materials succeeding in producing the first rubber boats with a rigid floor. These began to be used on board military ships, but soon thereafter also began a private marketing. The RFD in England and the Zodiac in France were companies specialized in airships that quickly converted to the development of inflatable boats alongside the Italian Pirelli that had a similar intuition.
The inflatable boats were used heavily during the Second World War. Above all, the Zodiac model became very popular thanks to the fact that governments decided to sell the models in surplus at the end of the conflict. In the 1950s the French officer Alain Bombard combined an outboard motor, a rigid floor and a boat-shaped inflatable. Zodiac developed this project and the success was immediate and so great that the French company was not able to completely satisfy the demand.
n the early 60s the Zodiac sold the license for the production of this type of inflatable boat to a dozen companies including the Humber in the United Kingdom and the Asso and the Novamarine in Italy. Subsequently this model became more and more popular also in the sectors of the rescue at sea and of the leisure boating, mostly in its V-shaped variant that allows to "cut" the waves.
Looking at the history of the development of inflatable boats it is easy to understand which are the key elements that motivated the enormous success of these boats. First of all, at the same measures, a inflatable boat is approved for a number of people and transportable weight much higher than that of traditional boats. The outer tube also makes it almost unsinkable and greatly reduces roll, both during navigation and when stationary. These two simple advantages make it perfect, as we have seen, for a whole series of applications. Nowadays it is often used both as an assistance and rescue boat and as a tender for larger ships, thanks to its versatility and robustness.
Not all inflatable boats are obviously the same. These are differentiated as propulsion type (whether inboard, outboard or sterndrive) and as typology. The inflatable boats, in fact, are divided in two big categories: the classic inflatable boats completely disassembled and the famous RIBs, the inflatable boats with rigid hull. Of all this we will talk however better in the future.
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