The 1851 jumble
... it’s where the chandlery business got going
Since 1967 PBO has made a massive contribution to popularising sinking, not least through the stirring and inspirational efforts of our readers as chronicled in our terrifyingly compelling Learning From Experience feature. Indeed, the fact readers have been discovering new ways to do it for over 50 years shows commendable commitment and is a tribute to the spirit of innovation that makes you proud to be British.
Yet, even before the advent of PBO, when sinking-related leisure drowning was mostly the preserve of a lucky few within a five-mile radius of Cowes on the Isle of Wight, there were moves afoot to democratise the pastime. I’ve found evidence that in addition to inventing everything else including the Spinning Jenny, Sinclair C5 and rickets, Britain also invented sinking and drowning, as this photograph of a rubber dinghy at the 1851 Great Exhibition of that year proves. I really am not kidding, and if any PBO reader can find an earlier photo of one I’ll give you one of my three-dozen spare Seafarer echo sounders (PP9 battery not included).
The race to revolutionise recreational drowning dates back to 1823 when Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh developed a way of bonding rubber to fabric to create a waterproof raincoat, several years before the invention of rain by another Brit. In 1839 the Duke of Wellington who invented the sandwich or cardigan, or possibly the rather rubbery Wellington sandwich – I’m never sure which – devised an inflatable pontoon. Its success at floating can be gauged by the fact that he then developed the Wellington boot.
Meanwhile in the early 1840s Macintosh got into a patent spat with an uppity American you’ve never heard of by the name of Charles Goodyear over the vulcanising process of stabilising rubber. This in turn led to the invention of lawyers, which further spurred the greatest scientific minds in Britain to develop a means of drowning them.
An early attempt was the ‘boat cloak’ personal drowning system developed by naval lieutenant Peter Halkett which transformed a rubberised poncho into a rubber dinghy by means of built-in bellows in the pocket. As some lawyers had partners in their practice he then invented a two-man version.
Despite accidentally inventing the puffer jacket Halkett was rather deflated when the Admiralty wrote back saying: ‘My Lords are of an opinion that your invention is extremely clever and ingenious, and that it might be useful in exploring and surveying expeditions, but they do not consider that it would be applicable for general purposes in the Naval Service.’ Snooty, or what!
Nevertheless explorer John Franklin used a larger version on his 1845 Arctic expedition and was never seen again.
Evolutions of Halkett’s poncho boat can be seen at every boat show and every crowdfunding website offering investors the opportunity to get in at the bottom – quite literally – of what promises to be a buoyant market.
Back at the 1851 Great Exhibition the extraordinary photograph of the stand with the rubber dinghy on was captioned ‘Articles in Indian Rubber’, and intriguingly ascribes it to Macintosh, presumably as the manufacturer of the products.
This fascinating 1851 glimpse of the future is astonishing in another way, because the photograph was credited to none other than Henry Fox Talbot who granted exhibition organisers use of the new pioneering technique he first made public in 1835. Yes, I know Louis Daguerre was also up to something at around the same time, but he wasn’t British.
The six million visitors who thronged to the Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park – around a third of the population of Britain – included luminaries such as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens and Thomas Cunliffe Esquire who bunked off school for the day to bag this ex-display early Avon Redcrest at a massive discount. To this day he swears by it, and quite often at it. The rest is history. Come to think of it, I regret what I said about lawyers. I’ll be sunk without one.
‘A rubberised poncho was transformed into a rubber dinghy’