Transportation - Overview
Americans have always been a people on the move—on rails, roads, and waterways (for travel through the air, visit the National Air and Space Museum). In the transportation collections, railroad objects range from tools, tracks, and many train models to the massive 1401, a 280-ton locomotive built in 1926. Road vehicles include coaches, buggies, wagons, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and automobiles—from the days before the Model T to modern race cars. The accessories of travel are part of the collections, too, from streetlights, gas pumps, and traffic signals to goggles and overcoats.
In the maritime collections, more than 7,000 design plans and scores of ship models show the evolution of sailing ships and other vessels. Other items range from scrimshaw, photographs, and marine paintings to life jackets from the Titanic.
"Transportation - Overview" showing 4 items.
Patent Model, Method of Building Wood Boats
- Description
- The inventor Joseph Francis (1801-93) was best known for developing corrugated-iron lifesaving boats. This 1841 patent model reveals his ideas about a new method for constructing boats made of wood.
- Trade and communication in 1840s America relied heavily on waterborne transportation, and boat building was an important related industry. With this invention, Joseph Francis sought to reduce the cost of constructing boats by simplifying the process. He proposed setting up a reusable frame over which very narrow planks would be bent to form the hull. The planks would be fastened together by bolts or nails driven through their edges, and no complicated joinery was to be done where the curves of the hull converged at bow and stern. “Ordinary workmen and machinery” could build this simple boat, he wrote. It would save on material, as none of the planks would overlap, and it would not require caulking, “as the narrow planking is drawn so closely together by the . . . nails . . . .” Finally, Francis claimed that the boat’s metal fasteners, buried between the planks, would not be likely to corrode and loosen the structure. Francis may have used this technique in his own boat works, but it was otherwise ignored by the nation’s many skilled boat builders.
- date made
- 1841
- patent date
- 1841-10-11
- patentee
- Francis, Joseph
- inventor
- Francis, Joseph
- ID Number
- TR*308538
- accession number
- 89797
- catalog number
- 308538
- patent number
- 2,293
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Patent Model, Life Boat
- Description
- In 1845, Joseph Francis patented the use of stamped corrugated metal to make boats. Through collaboration with the Novelty Iron Works in New York, he began to manufacture lifeboats, military cutters, and coastal rescue craft, along with other marine safety gear. His sturdy products proved popular, and he sold many to commercial steamship operators, life-saving stations, and the United States Navy. By 1853, strong sales warranted the construction of a dedicated factory at Green Point, New York, where each hydraulic press could turn out parts for 40 boats a day. Francis continually experimented with new designs for his stamping process, and this patent model reflects changes to the shape of his boats’ corrugations that he developed in the late 1850s.
- Joseph Francis (1801-93) is best known today for designing an enclosed rescue craft called a life-car, which was extensively used in coastal life-saving stations in the second half of the 19th century. The first life-car he made was used to spectacular effect in the rescue of all but one of the passengers and crew of the immigrant vessel Ayrshire, which ran aground on the New Jersey shore in a storm in January 1850. The Smithsonian preserves that life-car in addition to numerous models and ephemera documenting Joseph Francis’s work.
- Date made
- 1858
- patent date
- 1858-03-23
- patentee
- Francis, Joseph
- manufacturer
- Novelty Iron Works
- inventor
- Francis, Joseph
- ID Number
- TR*308546
- catalog number
- 308546
- accession number
- 89797
- patent number
- 19,693
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Joseph Francis Life-Car
- Description
- As maritime traffic expanded in the early 19th century, especially with the rise in passenger travel, water safety became a top priority for American shipping inventors. This life-car, patented by Joseph Francis in 1845, was one of the most successful life-preserving devices developed at the time. Buoyant and pod-shaped, the metal life-car was used to rescue shipwreck victims when the vessel was foundering near land. While standing on the beach, a person from a lifesaving station used a cannon-like gun to shoot sturdy lines out to the ship, which would then be tied to the ship’s mast. The life-car was attached to, and pulled, along these lines. Up to four people were bolted into the airtight compartment. They laid flat as they were hauled through the rough waters to the safety of the shore.
- This life-car was first used on January 12, 1850, to rescue the stranded British bark Ayrshire. The ship, most likely filled with Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine, ran aground on a sand bar off the New Jersey shore at Squan Beach, now known as Manasquan. A blinding snow storm made the ocean too dangerous to launch a surfboat, the usual method of rescue, so local lifesavers decided to launch the newly installed, experimental life-car. Although never tested in an actual emergency, the Francis life-car performed as envisioned.
- Out of 166 passengers and 36 crew members on the Ayrshire, only one was lost, perhaps needlessly, in the short journey from ship to shore. A male passenger insisted on riding on top of the life-car while his family inside was hauled to safety. He could not hold on and was washed away by the surf. Over the next three years, this device rescued at least 1,400 people on the New Jersey shore alone, as well as countless amounts of valuable cargo. The original, groundbreaking life-car used in the Ayrshire wreck was donated to the Smithsonian Institution by Joseph Francis in 1885.
- date made
- late 1840s
- patented
- 1845
- Life-Car first used to rescue Ayrshire
- 1850-01-12
- Life-Car donated to the Smithsonian Institution
- 1885
- patentee
- Francis, Joseph
- ID Number
- TR*160322
- catalog number
- 160322
- accession number
- 16136
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Patent Model, Life Boat
- Description
- Joseph Francis of New York (1801–93) made a name for himself in the 1840s and 1850s manufacturing light and sturdy corrugated-iron lifeboats and other nautical gear. This 1841 patent model shows his design for a wood or metal boat fitted with airtight copper tanks. These tanks were to be charged with gas or air to provide buoyancy and, in an emergency, would work in conjunction with several holes through the bottom of the boat. When the boat started taking on water in rough seas, the holes would be opened. That action, combined with the buoyancy of the tanks, would permit drainage.
- The well-known inventors of mid-19th-century America—Elias Howe, Cyrus McCormick, and Samuel F. B. Morse—were celebrated as national benefactors. Aspiring inventors regarded applying for a patent not just as a key step on the road to potential wealth, but as a patriotic duty—a contribution to the country’s betterment and future. Solidly within this style, Joseph Francis confidently called his buoyant boat the “great American life boat.” He declared with pride that “the model and application of the buoyant power which I now claim . . . is the best and safest for life boats and all other boats and vessels . . . it is different from and an improvement on all former invention by me and any other person . . . .”
- In fact, the 1841 patent represented by this model is but a minor alteration to his first patent, an 1839 design for a double-bottomed boat fitted with buoyant air cylinders. His second attempt simply added additional tanks to the boat’s ends and flattened the bottom of the hull to enable it “to sit upright when left by a retiring surge upon a rock bar or beach, where other modeled boats would be upset.”
- Date made
- 1841
- patent date
- 1841-03-26
- patentee
- Francis, Joseph
- inventor
- Francis, Joseph
- ID Number
- TR*308542
- catalog number
- 308542
- accession number
- 89797
- patent number
- 2,018
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center