If someone said that only one U.S. president has a patent and asked you to guess which one it was, who would you say? Thomas Jefferson? Theodore Roosevelt? No, the answer is Abraham Lincoln.
With all of Lincoln’s other accomplishments, it is understandable that his patent flies under the radar, especially because it was before he became president. But it is no less impressive.
It has been 177 years since Lincoln officially received a patent for his invention that lifted boats over river obstructions. He filed the patent application in March 1849 and received its approval two months later.
Lincoln reportedly got the idea for his invention when he was traveling by steamboat from Massachusetts to Illinois. However, in the Great Lakes, the boat at one point got stuck on a sandbar, and in order to get it unstuck, the captain had to tie empty barrels to the side of the boat.
At the time, the common practice when this happened was to remove cargo and people, making the boat lighter and better able to go over the sandbar. But Lincoln came up with a better idea, one where people and cargo did not have to be removed from the boat and empty barrels did not have to be on hand.
Lincoln’s idea was to attach “buoyant chambers” to a boat and inflate or deflate them as needed. These chambers would go underwater and propel the boat upward, over the sandbar. Because the chambers would go underwater, they would need to be made from waterproof material. They would also be attached to ropes and pulleys so they could be controlled from the ship’s deck and not the side of the boat.
However, Lincoln’s invention was never put into practice, though the Smithsonian Museum has a version of the buoyant chambers. Today’s engineers noted that it would be hard to inflate Lincoln’s device enough for the chambers to go underwater, so that could have contributed to why it was never used.
But Lincoln was already making a bigger name for himself – not as an inventor, but as a politician.
