Annals of Safety

Tucked away in a corner lot off I-95 in Lake Worth, florida is a 60,000 square foot facility with the name “Patten company” on the door. its founder, Fred Patten, who died two years ago at the age of 96, is generally credited with inventing the one-man inflatable life raft. That was back in 1939, five years after his older brother robert, a naval academy graduate, died off the coast of Panama after his plane crashed into the sea and he awaited rescue. he had no life raft. Pilots in those days had a life vest at best, and often nothing. rafts were rigid structures, made of wood or cork, and impractical for aircraft.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Fred went on to join U.S. rubber, just in time for World War II, where he became head of Product development. The company produced thousands of one-person rafts for the army air corps and u.S. navy. The seven-person raft followed in 1942. countless lives were saved, including that of a future president. when George H.W. Bush’s avenger bomber was shot down over the Pacific on September 2, 1944, he drifted for
hours in his one-man inflatable before being rescued by the submarine Finback. Many years later, when fred Patten turned 90, he received a letter from then-florida Governor Jeb Bush that read, in part: “Thank you for designing and developing the inflatable life raft. This remarkable raft has been responsible for saving many lives. I am told that number includes my father.”

The Untold Story of the D-Day Invasion

One of the little-known and all-but-forgotten stories of world war ii is the elaborate attempt to deceive the nazis on the eve of the Normandy invasion. To disguise the actuallanding site, the u.S. government commissioned Fred Patten – and U.S. rubber – to construct a series of life-size decoys of airplanes, tanks and landing craft, all made of inflatable rubber. At a meeting in dayton, ohio, in 1943, the four major rubber companies – B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, Goodyear and U.S. rubber – divvied up the assignments, all under the leadership of Fred Patten. Secrecy was of the utmost importance, and the workers didn’t know what they were working on until the individual pieces were shipped overseas and assembled by the military.

General George S. Patton was put in command of the decoy army, which was strategically positioned along the shoreline near Dover, England, across the channel from Calais, France, some 150 miles from the actual invasion site. With GeneralPatton in command, the Nazis could not
have doubted the threat of this army. Nazi aircraft reported the Dover operation to their high command, and the enemy was
sufficiently confused that it had to string out its defenses along the entire length of the Channel coast of France with a major
portion assigned to the Calais area.

Historians have credited the decoy operation with contributing immeasurably to the success of the D-Day invasion and saving countless lives.
Following the war, Fred Patten struck out on his own and finally founded his own company in 1947 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Safety concerns –the low New England humidity was a cause of static electricity and made fire a constant threat in the manufacture of inflatable products – prompted him to move the operation to Florida in 1955, where the relatively high humidity provided an ideal, and safer climate for production.

Bladders and Balloons

Tire tubes, life vests, inflatable toys and balloons – these are all things we take for granted and never give a second thought.
They’ve been around us since childhood, and we often associate them with child-like activity. Yet there was actually a time when they didn’t exist. And it wasn’t that long ago. It took a tinkerer like Fred Patten to invent the first practical version of an inflat-
able life raft. Why inflatable? So it would collapse and fit into a small place, like strapped to the pilot’s back, where it would
be instantly available when needed. The technology is simple, yet remarkably adaptable. You sew or glue together strips of rubber or rubber-like material and then inflate the finished product. Heat-sealing and radio-frequency sealing are modern updates, yet old-fashioned glue is just as strong and reliable in most applications. The one-person raft is a single tube composed of individual units called “bladders.” For larger rafts, you add more tubes.

Seven-, 20- and 50-person rafts employ “stacked” tubing to create a bigger and more stable platform. Most of the larger rafts are reversible, meaning it doesn’t matter which side is up. This comes in handy when your ship sinks or airplane crashes and you’re being tossed around in the waves with an upside-down raft. Because the company’s biggest customer is the military, quality control is all important, and the Patten Company puts all its products through a rigid series of tests before finally
shipping them out.

“We save lives,” said Bob Patten, son of the founder and co-owner, with his brother Steve, of the company. “It’s very tangible, very real.” Saving lives is not a respon- sibility you take lightly, and the Pattens have been doing it for years. That is one reason why they have never been without a government contract in the long history of the company. Product failures are nonexistent. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico in April, the company received a large order for its bladders, which were inserted into the massive booms used to contain the spill. The bladders keep the booms afloat. When not saving lives, the company is busy protecting the environment.
Like his father, Bob Patten is a tinkerer, always thinking of new applications for his inflatable technology. When MarEx paid a visit in September, he had in his office a full-scale version of an Inflatable Vehicle Jack, to be used by U.S. Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan to put air back into blown-out Humvee tires. “Ever try to jack up a car in the sand?” he quipped. “It ain’t gonna happen. But with this gizmo, you’ve got a steady foundation that won’t sink.”

He was once asked to design a balloon that would attach to a bomb so that low- flying aircraft would have sufficient time
to get out of the blast area before the bomb exploded. The balloon would inflate after the bomb was dropped and theoretically slow its descent. “We nixed that one,” he noted, One-man inflatable life raft (1939). “too dangerous. There are tons of people with ideas out there waiting for me to develop them. I just have to find the time.” He smiles and laughs a lot when talking about his “creations,” one of which was the giant boulder in an Indiana Jones movie, and it’s obvious he’s having fun.

In the Sago Mine disaster in 2006 in West Virginia the company was asked to build decontamination shelters that could be easily installed on site. It also provided inflatable habitats that could be lowered into the mine shafts to provide shelter for trapped miners. Noxious gases are a constant threat in underground operations, so the company designed an airtight Mine Shaft Barrier that could be stretched across the mouth of the shaft to seal out deadly fumes. For the recent earthquake in Haiti the company shipped inflatable Quonset huts for use as temporary shelters.

The use of 3D CAD has greatly simpli- fied the design process and made measurements infinitely more precise and rapid. This too is extremely important when making products that more often than not are the difference between life and death. Sketches on napkins and note paper are fed into a bank of computers and sophisticated engineering specs eventually emerge. This is how concepts are translated into reality. But Patten notes that precise mathemati- cal calculations are not enough. There’s always a touch of the artist, of the intuitive, because rubber doesn’t always bend the way you want it to: “It always wants to go in a circle, but most of the time you don’t want a circle. So you have to design the product in a way that allows for the mate- rial’s natural tendency.” He compares it to ductwork or dressmaking – every product is unique.

Ups and Downs

2009 was the worst year in the company’s history, when it got down to just 10 em- ployees, but things are looking up. Orders are pouring in. Employment can range between 10 and 200 and currently stands at close to 100. The company’s warehouse is full of products in various stages of production, and cartons of finished items stand ready for shipment. “We have no marketing or sales department,” Patten said, “never have. Companies, the govern- ment, the Air Force, the Navy – they all come to us.” The company does employ a third-party contractor to handle foreign military sales and service, but only to those countries which buy their equipment from the U.S. government. “We’re used to ups and downs,” Patten remarked. “We’ve had our share of them.” And indeed the company has, having changed hands several times over the years before the family finally regained control for good in 1987. Now the third and even the fourth generation of Pattens are waiting in the wings, ready to take over when the time comes.

The U.S. Navy is still the company’s biggest customer, and the one-person raft its biggest product. Seven- and 20-person rafts are used by the Air Force on C-130s and the Navy on small vessels. Larger vessels – destroyers, frigates, battle ships, aircraft carriers – use the 50-person version, dozens of them per ship. NASA used the company’s inflatables on its first Apollo missions and continues to use them to this day on the Space Shuttle. Every astronaut has one. In an era of increasing consolidation and “size does matter” thinking, it’s good to see a private, family-owned company that can hold its own while remaining small. It restores one’s faith in the individual entrepreneur, in the power of ideas and the value of old-fashioned tinkering. Rugged individualism. Isn’t that what America was built on?