When Inflatable Boats Began to Float

The Guinness Book of Motorboating places the first inflatable boat at around 800 BC, when King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria orderd his troops across a river in boats made of greased animal skins, which they kept inflated simply by continuously reinflating them until they were across the water.

The ancient Chinese also used inflated skins for water crossings during the Sung and Ming dynasties.

These early inflatable boats were a tribute to their creators' ingenuity, but nothing like what we have come to expect from such craft today.

In 1839, the Duke of Wellington tested the first inflatable pontoon, as we would recognize it. An Englishman named Thomas Hancock designed inflatable boats in 1840 and published a monograph on the subject a few years later. And in 1844, Lieutenant Halkett designed a round inflatable boat later used in Arctic expeditions.

As might be expected, inflatable boat design flourished, and a military use was soon found for the boats. In 1913, Albert Meyer came up with a design for a “pneumatic boat,” which the German army began using even before the pneumatic boat went on the market in 1920.

Boating aficionados are familiar with Zodiac and RFD, both of which claim to be the originator of the modern inflatable boat. RFD's first inflatable boat was the ancestor of the inflatable life raft.

The Zodiac design of 1937 was built in a U-shape, which is what we see today in inflatable boats for personal sporting use.

World War II provided an excellent opportunity for inflatables to prove their worth. Navies used rubber life rafts to rescue sailors from sinking ships, both warships and merchant marine. Inflatable rafts were used to transport cargo, including dangerous torpedoes. They were instrumental in shallow water landings, and they could be transported over land easily because of their light weight and compact size when uninflated.

Another important military use was in saving the crews of aircraft forced to ditch over the ocean. Catalina and Canadair's PBY was the first aircraft to carry an inflatable life raft. The life raft was optional, at first, but was later added as standard equipment, and was upgraded to inflate with a gas canister rather than by mouth.

In civilian use, inflatables remained rafts with paddles until the early 1950s, when adding an outboard engine to the raft became popular. About this time, French biologist Alain Bombard added a rigid floor to an inflatable boat with an outboard motor. Diver Jacques Cousteau was enamored with this vehicle, which widely came to known as a “Zodiac” after the manufacturer. Soon all inflatable boats were known generically as “Zodiacs.”

The Zodiac company could not create enough boats to meet demand, and licensed their design to a dozen companies around the world for production.

All of this developed into the modern rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RIB), an inflatable boat with, as suggested, a rigid floor and solid hull. The hull is V-shaped to cut through waves more efficiently, which makes the boat ride easier in rapids and ocean waves. The hulls of RIBs are designed to support transom-mounted outboard engines, which are more powerful than rear-mounted engines, or even an inboard engine.