The Biographical Dictionary of America/Francis, Joseph

FRANCIS, Joseph, inventor, was born in Boston, Mass., March 12, 1801. He developed a peculiar skill as a boat builder and when eleven years old exhibited his handiwork. In 1819 he was the prize winner for a fast row boat, exhibited at the Mechanics institute fair, Boston. When he reached his majority he established a boat yard in New York city. He built wooden life-boats for the Santee and for the Alabama at the Portsmouth navy yard, but won his greatest reputation as designer of life-boats, life-cars and surf lifeboats adopted by the life saving service and constructed from iron. At this time, 1842, only wooden boats were supposed to be practicable. His metallic life car was built at his own expense and furnished to the life-saving station at Squan Beach. N.J., the crew saving 200 of the 201 persons on the Ayrshire, which was wrecked on the beach in January, 1830, and during the first four years, 1850–53, of the use of his life-boats, 2150 lives were saved. His inventions were adopted by the governments of every civilized nation in constructing life-saving apparatus, steamships, floating docks, harbor buoys, pontoon bridges and wagons and other marine devices, from corrugated sheet metal. The sovereigns of Europe recognized his genius long before the U.S. congress honored him, and in 1842 he was presented with medals and diplomas by the life saving societies of France, of England and of the Imperial Royal European society. He received a gold snuff box set in diamonds, valued at 17,500 francs, from Napoleon III. in 1836, and was made a Knight of St. Stanislaus in 1861. The congress of the United States recognized his "life-long services to humanity and his country" in March, 1897, and in August, 1898, ordered a special gold medal to be struck and presented to him as "the inventor and framer of the means for life-saving service of the country" President Harrison presented the medal, which cost $3000, April 12, 1890, when Mr. Francis was in his ninetieth year. He published Life Saving Appliances (1885). He died at Cooperstown, N.Y., May 10, 1893.