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You are able to see the earliest Inflatable Boats in carving done in ancient times. These early versions used animal skins and were blown up by mouth. Several people though there early drawings of inflatable boats were scuba equipment. While that would be amazing itself, they were in fact Inflatable Rafts for 1 person.

In the days of Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington in 1839, the Duke had conducted tests on the times version of the Inflatable in a Pontoon fashion. In years to follow just after the turn of the century, modern advances of the time in the rubber industry allowed the first version of an Inflatable Rubber Raft. Unfortunately, while state of art for the day, there were still many flaws in the production and the rafts developed splits in the seams due to inferior, by today's standards, in the production process.

With the 1912 loss of the RMS Titanic and then the World War I losses of war ships to torpedoes launched by submarines, inflatable boats for use as life rafts was obvious. The most prominent cause of the loss of life on the Titanic was the lack of lifeboats. There was such a shortage of life rafts that no more than 50% of the passengers could have been saved if each one had been used to its capacity.

This disaster was shortly there after created the initial SOLAS treaty to avoid such catastrophes again. The main premise of the SOLAS treaty was to ensure that there were adequate numbers of lifeboats aboard all vessels so that every person had a space on a life boat in the event of an emergency. [http://www.imo.org/Conventions/contents.asp?topic_id=257&doc_id=647]

This was not a difficult feat with cargo ships because their crews were small and the ships had sufficient of deck space. Passenger ships on the other hand had a difficult task as in order to accommodate this requirement they had to stack lifeboats one on top of the other in order satisfy the requirement for the large amount of passengers and crew. In addition, warships had a hard time with this as their crews were also large crews and deck space was not abundant.

The rubber giant Goodyear had developed a new manufacturing process for Inflatable Boats due to their R&D between WW1 and WW2. These Inflatables were predominantly Life Rafts made in a square shape using rubber cylinders with a hard floor. Since they were Lift Boats, these were stacked more easily on the decks of the War Ship and Passenger Ships. Though there were much better that the previous design, public conception held the mass production of these watercraft up and they never gained acceptance in the general public's eye.

A man named Pierre Debroutelle designed a new version of the Inflatable Boat in 1937. This model was the premier model with the now traditional U-Shaped inflatable tube. His design was so innovative that it was the first Inflatable Boat to be certified by the French Navy. Subsequently, a wooden transom was created and then patented in 1943. On modern Inflatable Boats, you will be able to distinguish the commonalities between the 1937 model and today's model.

As with many things, World War II changed the need for and thereby the industry on Inflatable Boats. Submarine attacks in the Battlefield of the Atlantic created escalated numbers of casualties among merchant ships as well as the many warships.

Now the US warships started to use rubber life rafts. And since the rubber and manufacturing processes were significantly better due to quality increases than in the prior 35 years, the Inflatable was back, bigger and better than ever before, and now it was boat-shaped.

The Inflatable Boat has now traversed the battlefield into the recreation field due to its economical and versatile nature. If you ever wanted a boat, but did not have the finances for a traditional boat, today's Inflatable Boats are a logical and safe choice.