A CENTURY OF
PROGRESS SOFT HULLS TO HARD BOTTOM RIBS
T
HIRTY or so years ago, if you lived in New Zealand and wanted an inflatable tender, you had to source one from overseas or purchase a cast-off from a visiting yachtsman. Like Hoover is to the vacuum cleaner and Xerox is to the copier, Zodiac was coined as the generic name for inflatable boats. And rightly so, as it was Zodiac that was the first to successfully establish a recreational RIB market. The modern inflatable represents one of the world’s oldest boat-building technologies. The sight of bloated animal carcasses floating past in the flood season may have been what inspired some unrecorded scientific genius to invent an alternative technology. Inflatables began as inflated animal hides proofed with tallow and sealed with tar or bitumen. The Phoenicians first left shore aboard them, and in 880 BC, an Assyrian army mass-produced inflatables to cross a river. But after reaching a development peak some 2,500 years ago, the technology became arrested due to a lack of alternative 124
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RIB ANNUAL 2021
materials. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the development of rubber coatings that made fabric waterproof offered a breakthrough. In 1846 a British expedition to the Arctic was accompanied by circular inflatable boats made by Macintosh, the firm founded by the inventor of the raincoat. Subsequent designs cropped up from time to time but were never developed until 1913. Albert Meyer in Germany developed a ‘pneumatic’ boat that was later used in small numbers by the German army and marketed commercially.
