The Metal Life Car: The Inventor, the Imposter, and the Business of Lifesaving

The Metal Life Car

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Chapter One

Joseph Francis was an unusual inventor who also had the ability to organize a business to produce his inventions and the salesmanship to sell his products. His metallic watercraft were employed on a variety of missions. Narrating the story of his watercraft casts a light upon many nooks and crannies of nineteenth-century America. His metal lifeboats, first used on survey expeditions in Asia Minor and Central America, were in demand among the world's mercantile marine, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Revenue Marine Service. His corrugated iron life car was a key to the development of the U.S. Life-Saving Service. His metallic boats were critical to the outcome of the Third Seminole War in Florida. His metal army pontoon wagon bodies served in the trans-Mississippi Indian frontier. Yet few are aware of these services.

In Europe, Joseph Francis's reputation preceded him. Heads of state, military, and industrial leaders feted him. In return, he sold rights to his patents to shipyards in Liverpool and the Woolwich Arsenal in England, Le Harve in France, the free city of Hamburg in Germany, and Balakna in Russia. WhileFrancis was in Europe, Captain Douglass Ottinger, U.S. Revenue Marine Service, claimed he was the inventor of the metal life car. Ottinger used the United States Congress and the United States Patent Office to support his pretense, and the inventor and the impostor had a decades-long struggle in the patent office and in the congressional chambers. Eventually Congress extolled Francis while it withheld its decision as to who invented the life car.

During the Civil War the task of building bridges to cross rivers and streams fell to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Yet this branch of service had almost no contact with Joseph Francis or his metallic watercraft. Few engineers were aware of his devices. Then, when some Union leaders requested his metal pontoon wagons for their commands, the vindictiveness of Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs kept the Union army from employing them. Thus the army did not use these superior metal pontoon wagons. Francis was the nineteenth-century embodiment of Horatio Alger's heroes going from rags to riches and from public belittlement to public acknowledgment-but, to begin at the beginning.

Into this world, Joseph Francis was born in Boston on 12 March 1801. It is not known if some family member was involved in a shipwreck or if he was a spectator at some traumatic shipping disaster, but from early boyhood he was aware of the perils of the sea and the loss of life during shipwrecks. Gradually, throughout the years, he created the concept of a safe boat. It was a long, slow learning process to convert these concepts of additional buoyancy to fl oat under all conditions, extra strength to withstand the forces of nature and lightweight enough to be employed under normal working conditions. He was about eleven years of age when his father died, and a relative employed him in his boat-building establishment. It was the beginning of a lifelong career dedicated to saving life from the sea. With few exceptions, he directed most of his works and inventions toward that goal. Before his first year of employment was over, he produced a rowboat with cork at both bow and stern that provided the buoyancy to support four men when the boat was full of water. It was his first step along his chosen career. Evidently he had the use of tools and the shop after hours, because in 1819 he entered a fast, unsinkable rowboat in the Mechanics Institute Fair in Boston and received honorable mention.

Encouraged, he moved to New York and established a boat shop at Stryker's Bay on the North River. In 1825 he built many wooden "Life Pleasure Boats," as he called them, using cork in the bow and stern. Because of the extra buoyancy of his craft, he used "life" as part of the title for all his boats. Francis's reputation as a boat builder grew, and in 1830, the newly formed New York Boat Club ordered one of his boats. Soon after, the club presented Francis's boat to the czar of Russia. The club then ordered a second boat from Francis: the Seadrift, a thirty-foot, double- decked, sixteen- oared craft that was still in excellent condition fifty years later. Francis's work for the New York Boat Club was a financial interlude; his main objective still was to build a better lifeboat. In 1832, while working for the New York Boat Club, he received his first patent for a portable screw boat. His boat had nothing to do with propulsion, such as a screw propeller, but was a boat made in sections for ease of transportation with the sections literally screwed together when ready to use.

From 1833 to 1838, he constructed many wooden lifeboats modeled after the whaleboat and inserted metal air chambers along the sides and under the thwarts for increased buoyancy. He experimented in the East River at the foot of Wall Street, New York, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the benefit of shipping interests in both cities. The result was that he sold many of his boats to passenger ships. Based on this prototype, the U.S. Navy commissioned him to go to the Portsmouth Navy Yard to build lifeboats for the frigate Santee and the ship of the line Alabama. While working for the navy he met and later married Ellen Creamer, daughter of a Salem, Massachusetts, merchant.

In 1837 Francis built a self-bailing, self-righting wooden lifeboat that he demonstrated to New York merchants and ship owners. The self-bailing devices consisted of a convex, watertight deck just above the load line, the line of immersion when the boat was loaded. Then, above the load line, he placed valves piercing the sides of his boat to complete his self-bailing features. Part of his test took place at the dock at the end of Wall Street where two fire engines poured water into the boat. The incoming streams, confined to the space above the load line, discharged through the open valves.

The self-righting devices were cork bow and stern and air chambers along the sides and under the thwarts. Francis demonstrated its self-righting ability by attaching a line to the stern of his lifeboat and hauling it up to the yardarm of the brig Madison. He released the boat after it reached its vertical position with its bow well above the water. The boat plunged into the water, sank a couple of feet, and then bobbed up to an upright position. The cork and the air chambers produced an opposite reaction to the downward pull of the ballast and keel weights. His lifeboat received great approval among maritime interests. Francis repeated his experiments in June 1837, for the owners and shippers of Philadelphia, and received the same enthusiastic response as that given in New York.

News of his superior lifeboats spread abroad to foreign maritime interests. He received orders from the English government to provide boats for the coast of Canada. A British regiment ordered a racing boat from him that, according to Francis, bested the English boats in its first trial. He sold the emperor of Brazil an imperial life barge. As time passed, more and more of the world's commercial ships carried his lifeboats.

In 1838, Francis began to think about an enclosed boat to carry people through a heavy surf during a storm or to transport people from ship to ship at sea under conditions too extreme for the normal open boat. Edward Wardell claimed that his father, Henry Wardell, gave Francis the idea for an enclosed boat when the father and son stood on the Long Branch, New Jersey, shore and watched a broached schooner breaking up in a winter storm. As the crew dropped off into the icy water and died, Henry Wardell said, "If I only had a gun to fire a shot with a line to it over the vessel, we could save them if we had nothing better than a hogshead to haul them ashore in." His father repeated his story to Francis. Shortly after hearing Henry Wardell's account, Francis drew some drawings, but he only had an initial concept for a covered boat, and his business demands limited his time to think of an enclosed boat. It would be three more years before he resumed work on this concept.

In 1839, he patented his life and anchor launch designed to assist ships that had run aground. His launch had two wells fore and aft, each with a windlass on deck, and tackle running down the well, to house a ship's anchor. The launch could then carry the ship's anchor out to deep water and drop it to the bottom. This allowed the grounded vessel to pull against its anchor and warp itself offshore. The packet ship Duchess d'Orleans used an anchor launch capable of carrying a seventeen-hundred-pound anchor.

Later that same year the American Institute, after conducting many tests with Francis's lifeboats, recommended their use among all sea- going vessels. Further it stated that his boats were especially desirable for naval ships, reasoning that even if the enemy shot perforated one or two sections of his boat there would be sufficient buoyancy to sustain the crew and allow the sailors to board the enemy ship or to perform other exigencies.

The great interest in his lifeboats exceeded the capacity of his boatyard. In October 1840, he wrote the Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett requesting the use of the empty Fort Gansewood in New York City to build his lifeboats. He noted the increase in demand for his lifeboats rose after his recent experiments at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Francis said he would cover the public area and the army guns with canvas awnings to protect them from the elements. Further, he would give bonds as surety for protecting and delivering the government's property back at a moment's notice.

The endorsements appended to his letter give an insight into the workings of the bureaucracy. Poinsett sent the letter to the quartermaster general, asking about the proposed selling of the property. In reply Poinsett learned of the completed plans for the April sale. Still buyers wanted a general warranty from the government before reaching any reasonable price. Later in the year, the price of real estate in the city plummeted. The quartermaster recommended the government withhold the sale until prices improved. Francis's letter then went to Major McKay to report "on the propriety of complying with the request" and on the prospects of selling the property while in Francis's charge. Evidently Francis found the process too drawn out, or the army decided not to enter such an agreement; in any event, no further action took place.

The year 1841 was both encouraging and challenging. On 2 March, the Chamber of Commerce of New York endorsed and recommended his lifeboat to the public. Later in the month, he received his third patent for life and other boats. Then on 11 October, he obtained his fourth patent for building boats, vessels, and other seafaring craft. Finally, he decided to set to work on his ideal lifeboat, one that would be strong enough and secure enough to protect its passengers regardless of the conditions of the sea and surf. Francis transferred his business of providing boats to government agencies and the merchant marine to others to run.

He sent his family to the country and moved into a building at 83 Anthony Street in New York City. For a year he experimented on a proper material to resist the pummeling his boat would receive traversing rocks and shoals.

Yet he worried wood might not be strong enough. To decrease weight, he had the deck rest on the carlings, but then it would not support a man's weight. When he put extra frames or knees in the car, it became too heavy and difficult to maneuver, and it reduced the passenger space. After many attempts Francis had to admit defeat; he destroyed his prototype wooden car.

Next, Joseph Francis began experimenting with metal. Most experts were skeptical of a metal boat, believing it would be too heavy and would sink if it shipped water. Yet as Francis worked with metal, his basic concept of a lifeboat changed. Instead of relying on self-bailing and self-righting devices, he thought of a vessel so buoyant that it floated on top of the water. His more pressing problem was shaping the metal and reducing the metal's weight to achieve the desired buoyancy. He began by making a two-foot-long model boat. Then he covered it with paper strips soaked in paste, layered four strips thick, and when the strips dried the paper retained the shape of his model. Encouraged, Francis hammered a sheet of iron to his model, but upon removing the mold, the iron snapped back to its original flat shape. After more thought, Francis made a concave mold to fit his convex piece. The two units now formed matching dies. He placed a sheet of iron between his wooden dies and exerted pressure by hammering the two parts together. When he let up on the pressure, the iron sheet remained between the two dies; however, when he opened the dies, the iron snapped back to its original flat shape.

Francis thought that if the dies were larger the pressure might imprint upon the metal. He made wooden dies 10'6? long, which was his projected length for his life car, just in case it succeeded. It was much more difficult to join the two dies together. He pounded with a hammer and used wedges and even a screw vice to force the two parts to close. Yet upon opening the dies the metal snapped back to its former shape.

Francis now worried that if he had to revert to frames and timbers to force the metal to retain its shape it would share the fate of his wooden car. He wanted a vessel buoyant enough to remain on top of the water regardless of the surf, but he needed to find a practical way to work metal without increasing its weight. After much thought, he recognized that the common tin table waiter (lazy Susan) might be the answer. The table waiter was made of a light tin sheet with its edges rolled up, a process that provided the strengthening element. By plaiting or corrugating sheets of metal for his boat, Francis could strengthen the metal without increasing the weight of the sheet. He then put a half round molding one inch wide on his two dies. Then he placed the metal sheet between the dies and exerted pressure. This time when he opened the dies the metal retained the shape imparted by the dies. This first success led Francis to corrugate the entire side of the metal. This increased the metal's strength so that it resisted the powerful concussions rendered in later tests.

His next problem was to develop some way to shape the iron or copper sheets into a boat. It was an easy process to corrugate a sheet of metal alone; however, a boat's shape was a fl owing form running back from the bow to stern, widening at the beam, and contracting at either end. From the keel to the gunwale, amidships contained much more metal than at the bow or stern. How could he shape his sheet to expand and contract its size depending upon its position within the boat? To answer that question, Francis turned to the hydraulic press. Since it is easier to conceive of a metal boat than to find the means to create it, it was a long and slow process, but in the end, Francis thought that a set of dies with corrugations grooved in the dies would produce the desired result.

The realization that more time and money were necessary to improve their product may have damaged the relationship between Francis and his partner George E. McKay, for in 1843, Francis wrote to the Secretary of War John C. Spencer that his and McKay's partnership in the Life Boat Association had been discontinued and he alone would conduct the business. Francis continued telling the secretary of war that his U.S. patent protected his lifeboat from inferior imitations by unscrupulous boat builders.

Continuing with his work, Francis had to produce the machinery to impart great pressure to stamp the sides with one imprint. Francis ordered and received a set of cast-iron dies from Stillwell, Allen & Co., known as the Novelty Iron Works in New York City. Further, Francis had to design a hydraulic press capable of exerting eight hundred tons of pressure to stamp out his metal boat. Horatio Allen, one of the partners of the Novelty Iron Works, became interested in Joseph Francis after he ordered the huge cast-iron dies from his company. The dies cost Francis six thousand dollars, and he still had to construct the hydraulic pump. While Allen was investigating Francis and his business, Francis was preparing to join the Novelty Iron Works because he needed money and the type of equipment the company could provide. Francis submitted to Allen his plan, a list of his patents, and the reasons why the two businesses should merge, resulting in an agreement whereby Francis conveyed half of his patent rights already issued and half of any future patents to the Novelty Iron Works, and in exchange, the company provided the space and machinery for Francis to work. It also stipulated that Francis had complete management and control over his corrugated metal works, including control of orders, contracts, and collection of bills for his enterprise.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Metal Life Car by George E. Buker Copyright © 2008 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
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