05 July 2024

Inventions in Everything: A Corking Good Life Jacket

Summer has arrived, and with it, so has swimming season. The water's warm and for many, it's time to take the plunge!

Swimming, of course, is an activity that is not without risk. Every year, there are stories of tragedy involving swimmers that, in many cases, would be preventable if only they had made use of what are now commonly available safety flotation devices.

In the middle of the 1800s, things were quite different. That's when the first incarnations of what became the modern life jacket began to be developed in earnest.

The first of these consisted of vests that were filled with blocks of buoyant balsa wood or cork. They worked, after a fashion, but were bulky and difficult to swim in while in the water. By 1882, Paschal Plant recognized these limitations and the opportunity for improvement they presented. His solution was to craft a swimming-suit made out of small, shaped corks, for which he was awarded U.S Patent 267,799. Here's Figure 1 from the patent's illustrations depicting Plant's idea of a corking good life jacket:

U.S. Patent 267,799 Figure 1

He describes his invention and its advantages in the text of the patent:

The object of my invention is to produce a swimming-garment which shall not interfere at all with the perfectly free motions of the body and limbs; which shall be buoyant and thus aid swimmers, especially feeble swimmers; which shall permit the perfectly-free circulation of the water in contact with the skin, and which shall so fit and envelop the body as to cause but slight resistance, and perhaps none at all, tor progress in he water, on account of its pliability and buoyancy.

My invention consists of a jacket or garment, which is substantially a netting of small strong cords and small pieces of cork, fitting like an ordinary knit undershirt or small-scale armor....

The advantage of this netting over cloth for bathing-suits are obvious. Cloth does not permit the free circulation of water in contact with the skin, and is liable to rapid decomposition or deterioration, and, besides, more or less impedes muscular action. The threads or cords used for netting the corks together are preferably saturated with any suitable substance that will render them impervious to water, and at the same time leave them perfectly flexible.

Plant's invention was certainly an advance for its era, but was far from where the form factor for the modern life jacket would ultimately settle. Which is to say you cannot go out today and buy a life jacket made from a netting of wine-bottle-size corks.

That's probably a good thing, because we did find a modern incarnation of Plant's innovative life jacket, which has been put to use as a fashion statement in recent years.

Dave Hamilton's Corkxedo concept

Wine Spectator covered the fashion in 2007 in its Unfiltered column:

Unfiltered is always on top of the latest fashion trends. Today we present the future of formal wear: the Corkxedo, a tuxedo fashioned from the entirely renewable resource of cork. Conceived of, designed and hand "sewn" by Los Angeles wine lover Dave Hamilton, the top hat, cane and jacket took an estimated 800 man-hours to put together and is composed of nearly 900 corks (everything from Two Buck Chuck to 1935 Lynch-Bages). Hamilton assured Unfiltered he had already come up with the idea--while relaxing in a Jacuzzi, no less--before Robert Mondavi donned a cork jacket at the Napa Valley Auction in 2005, which Jay Leno auctioned off for $95,000. Hamilton has worn the Corkxedo to numerous wine auctions and events, as well as to the annual Burning Man festival, and has yet to need to replace a cork (though he does admit that as he mingles at events, the Corkxedo tends to "squeak like an old car"). Hamilton estimates the size 44 jacket's value to be in the $35,000 to $40,000 range, and is open to the idea of auctioning it off.

At those prices, it's no wonder Plant's cork swimming-suit never took off as a commercial product!

From the Inventions in Everything Archives

The IIE team has previously covered other patented fashion statements. Here's a list:

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