The amazing story of the inflatable canoe

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The inflatable canoe: It seems like a nice piece of modern technology that we recently invented whereby you can fold and store your boat and inflate it when you need it. You certainly can’t blame him for guessing that it’s a relatively new invention.

The surprising truth is that the inflatable has been around for a very long time, a very long time in fact. Not just a hundred years or so, but rather thousands. Hard to believe, but it seems that our ancestors thought well a long time ago: they saw a problem, thought about it, and then found a solution.

You can imagine a cave dweller sitting on the bank of a river and trying to figure out how to get across. He maybe he saw the animals cross and wished he could. In any case, that caveman did some good lateral thinking because he came up with something pretty nifty. He (or she) thought of making a boat out of animal skin and inflating it through the mouth. And there are ancient images carved on cave walls depicting a floatation device of a single man crossing a river to prove this fact.

In the mid-1800s, naval and military personnel in England and the US began creating flotation devices, more out of necessity than anything else. There was an expedition to the Arctic that needed something effective to negotiate small passages through the ice and there was a war between Mexico and the United States that needed some kind of bridge, so a general came up with the inflatable pontoon bridge. In 1839, the Duke of Wellington tested the first pontoons.

The renowned name in rubber, Goodyear, cannot be left out of this story as it was Charles Goodyear who created a process to vulcanize rubber, manipulate it and stabilize it to a point of flexibility and durability. And so the idea of ​​a device that literally floated on air (with air) arose.

So while the idea is not new, the technology has obviously moved on. The materials of the inflatable canoe and other inflatable boats are more advanced. Today, an inflatable canoe or kayak comes in single and 2-person models. In some of these models you will have fabric floors and in others foam floors. The foam floor adds rigidity, but the drawback here is that it will make it less portable. One of the biggest advantages of owning an inflatable, probably the main reason to get one, is mobility and ease of transportation.

The beauty of an inflatable canoe is that you can store one in a closet in your functional city apartment, load it into the car, and head out into nature. Do some foot pumping action on the river bank and you’re good to go! A perfect canoe for whitewater rafting or river paddling. Once the day is done, simply discharge the air and roll up your boat, store it away and you’re good to go. For convenience and mobility, the inflatable canoe is a great option, all thanks to early pioneers in the past.

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