Maria Beasley Patented a Fireproof Folding Life Raft in 1880. The Story That It Was on the Titanic Doesn't Hold Up.

US226264 was issued to Maria E. Beasley of Philadelphia on April 6, 1880. The title is "Life-Raft." She had filed it the previous October, and her own statement of purpose is plain: a raft that is "fire-proof, compact, safe, and readily-launched," which "can be made instantly available when required."

What she built

The raft is a row of hollow metal floats, rectangular, with their ends beveled underneath. They are joined side by side with hinges, so the whole thing folds together for stowing on deck and opens out flat when it is needed. Hinged along the outer floats is a grated railing with a strong top rail and rowlocks for oars, and gates at each end close it into a complete rectangular enclosure.

The fireproofing is in the material. Wooden lifeboats burn, and a ship's fire was one of the disasters a lifeboat existed to escape. Beasley's floats were metal.

She improved it two years later. US258191, issued May 16, 1882, lets the railing swing either upward or downward, so the raft is usable whichever side lands up in the water, which is a real problem for anything thrown overboard in a hurry.

Where the money actually came from

Beasley held fifteen US patents, and the life rafts were not what made her wealthy. Barrels were.

Her first barrel patent, a machine for driving hoops onto barrels, came in 1881, and she refined it repeatedly through the 1880s along with machines for making and setting up the barrels themselves. Refineries were the customers. Standard Oil reportedly licensed one machine for $175 a month, and by 1912 the hoop-driving patent was reportedly bringing in about $20,000 a year in royalties, a very large income for the time. Her company was later bought by the American Barrel and Stave Company for $1.4 million.

Her other patents ran from a foot warmer in 1878 to a way of preventing railroad cars from derailing in 1898.

The Titanic story

Beasley is very often described as the inventor of life rafts that saved hundreds of people from the Titanic. It is a satisfying story, and it does not survive a look at the ship.

The Titanic carried lifeboats, not life rafts: wooden boats on davits, plus four collapsible boats with canvas sides. Those collapsibles were a different design from hers, and nothing ties Beasley rafts to the ship. Four collapsible boats could not have carried the hundreds of survivors the story credits to her in any case.

She died in 1913, the year after the Titanic sank.

Why she still matters

Strip away the legend and what remains is more unusual than the legend. Beasley was a nineteenth century woman who held fifteen patents, licensed industrial machinery to Standard Oil, and lived on the royalties. The life raft is the invention people remember, because it connects to a story everyone knows. The barrel machine is the one that paid.

See the original

The full text and figures of US226264 are on Google Patents.