What dreams had Lionel Luken, coach-builder of London, in the year 1780, or thereabouts? The perils to machines, or coaches, in those days were many and varied; the roads were often rough, and dangerous enough to equal the pleasing variety and exciting accompaniments of a cross-country gallop; the bridges were very few, and the fords very many. Did Lionel Luken lose coach, or customer, or both, in a rushing flood which overwhelmed some burdensome coach and unhappy travellers at one of these fords? and, thinking over the disaster sorrowfully, patiently, and profitably, as great minds and great hearts will think, did he conceive the idea of a coach warranted against sinking, with air-tight compartments? and then, expanding the idea, did the noble thought occur to him of building a boat that would not merely float in the rush of a flood, but that would defy the troubled waters of a raging sea? And was it thus, that Lionel Luken gained unto himself the immortal honour of being the first inventor of the Life-boat? In whatever manner the idea presented itself to him, and however it was developed in the mind of the skilful and humane coach-builder, certain it is that it seized him very thoroughly, and that he, being one of the race of God's heroes, alike humane, brave, and earnest, was not content to let his happy, his blessed thought die barren of result, but made noble and persevering efforts to bring his invention to a successful issue. He had high courage, for his courage was inspired by the great hope that his boat might be the instrument of plucking many poor sailors from dread peril, carrying them through threatening seas, snatching them from the very jaws of death, and of restoring them to their loving ones in their loved homes. With this holy ambition, Lionel Luken laboured nobly, as, urged by a like ambition, many now labour nobly for the good life-boat cause. But the old days were not days of quick sympathy, or of ready enterprise, and Luken, although supported, to a certain extent, by royalty, uselessly clamoured at official doors, and sought public patronage in vain. People seemed then to have no strong objection to other people being drowned, just as they had no strong prejudice against others suffering the tortures of miserable prisons, the worst asylums, or any of the many horrors which a more enlightened age has sought with some degree of success to lessen or remove. In the year 1785 Luken took out a patent for a boat which, to a great extent, embodied almost all the more needful properties possessed by the present model life-boat; he at the same time published a pamphlet; "Upon the invention, principle, and construction of insubmergible boats." He suggested that such boats should be protected by bands of cork round their gunwales, that they should be rendered buoyant by the use of air-cases, especially at the bow and stern, and that they should be ballasted by an iron keel.