Lifeboat
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Lifeboat. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a boat kept at a seaside station to rescue persons from shipwreck. The modern lifeboat is thirty-three feet in length and eight feet in width. It is weighted so that it will right itself immediately if upset, and is provided with relieving tubes, a most ingenious contrivance, by means of which any water that breaks into the boat is discharged at once. It possesses great strength and is capable of carrying a large number of passengers. The lifeboat is to the station what the engine is to the fire-house. It is kept on trucks, ready for a run to any accessible portion of the coast. The carriage is an admirable contrivance. The members of the crew take their position in the boat; the carriage is then run out into the surf and the boat is launched amid breakers that would prove the destruction of a boat attempting to get away from the shore. These boats are so well constructed and so capable of riding in a rough sea that they are considered safe. Life is seldom lost in connection with their management. Lifeboats are kept in life-saving stations in which a discipline is maintained like that in engine houses. Each lifeboat has a master and several surfmen. In the United States there are nearly 300 of these stations on the Pacific, the Atlantic, and Gulf coasts. They are connected usually by telephones. They are equipped with lifeboats, signal guns, life preservers , and all sorts of devices for saving life and property. Among other contrivances is the life rocket, a projectile carrying a rope. It may be fired from a mortar in such a way as to carry the line to a distressed ship. See Boat
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a structed for saving life in storms and sand heavy seas, when ordinary boats could could not attempt to do so, except at imminent aminenk peril or certain death to those within them. The qualities necessary in a lifeboat may be thus summed up: Extra buoyancy, self-discharge of water, ballasting, self-righting, stability, speed, stowage-room and strength of build. 36-FT. SELF-BAILING AND SELF-RIGHTING LIFEBOAT
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 boat was launched from a horse-drawn carriage into the surf and pulled by oars, with a Lyle gun firing a line to the wreck; both Aiton's and Collier's list self-righting and self-bailing as the essential virtues, and those two principles still govern lifeboat design. Almost everything around them has gone: the U.S. Life-Saving Service Aiton describes, with its masters and surfmen, was folded into the new Coast Guard in 1915, and beach launching by cart, along with the breeches-buoy rescue, has long since been abandoned. Power replaced muscle within a generation, and today's standard American surf boat is the 47-foot aluminium Motor Life Boat introduced in the 1990s, which rights itself in seconds and runs at about 25 knots. The biggest change is one neither entry could foresee: since the 1940s and 1950s the helicopter, not the boat, has become the first response to most shipwrecks.
Written for this edition, 2026.