Before Lifesavers were a Candy...Life Jackets were Cork!

Hardly anyone gets in a boat or goes near water these days without a life jacket. There are water sports life jackets and vests, fishing life jackets, even light weight boating vests. The list goes on and on. If it's a sport and involves water, there's a life belt, life vest or life jacket tailored to it.

The beginnings of the life jacket are humble and go back a long way in time. The history of the life jacket is a little muddy in the beginning, but most experts agree that life jackets can be traced to the blocks of cork Norwegian sailors used to stay afloat in case of shipwreck.

The life jacket, as we know it, probably originated with the 1854 invention of Captain Ward of the British Royal Navy. Ward's invention was a cork vest designed to offer lifeboat crews buoyancy and weather protection at the same time.

Cork vests developed into cloth-covered vests, and in the early twentieth century the cork was replaced with the fiber kapok. While cork does float very well, it was also stiff, hard and uncomfortable to wear. Kapok, a vegetable fiber, is much softer, and offers great buoyancy because the fiber is filled with air-trapping honeycomb structures.

Kapok became the standard life vest, or life jacket, material, and was welcomed on board naval ships where sailors wore their life vests around the clock, even while they were sleeping. For many years, cork and kapok vests were the norm.

World War II brought a change in life jacket technology. Sailors and submariners were issued inflatable life jackets, at first inflated by mouth and later by a gas cylinder. These life jackets meant the difference between life and death for many military personnel, and their use was publicized around the world.

Civilian manufacturers after the war remembered the lesson of the military life jacket, and  inflatable life jackets became quite popular. They were lightweight, easy to stow, and easy to use. They also carried with them an aura of being “military-style,” which no doubt increased the sales rate of life jackets. An increase in the popularity of water sports also helped improve the popularity of and market for life jackets, as more people took to the water.

In the 1960s, the development of new synthetic foams led to the invention of the foam life jacket, which is basically what we know today. The original foam life jacket was the boxy foam jacket you may still find on some boats.

In recent years, developments in technology and in manufacturing have allowed life jacket manufacturers to style their jackets especially for each individual sport. While we still may not like wearing a life jacket on our jet ski or while bass fishing, the variety of life jacket available makes it likely that we can find one we like the look, fit and feel of.

And we can always be grateful that we're not floating around on big blocks of cork, like the Norwegian sailors who predated life jackets.