Life Raft

A life raft is a small rigid or inflatable boat carried aboard ship for emergency evacuation if the vessel is lost, typically packed collapsed inside a heavy-duty fiberglass canister and inflated automatically by high-pressure gas, usually compressed air on commercial models. In the late 1880s the inventor Maria Beasley improved the design of the life raft and patented a life-saving raft in both the United States and England in 1880, work that predates the modern inflatable version. During the Second World War the United States developed a balsa-wood life raft built so it would not sink no matter how many holes were punched in it. The source consulted for this entry does not identify who first developed the modern gas-inflated life raft or when, so that origin is recorded here as a gap rather than guessed.