Lincoln Info Worth Knowing

In 1849, a future president patented an ingenious addition to transportation technology as report by Smithsonian magazine.

Upon hearing the name Abraham Lincoln, many images may come to mind: rail-splitter, country lawyer, young congressman, embattled president, Great Emancipator, assassin's victim, even the colossal face carved into Mount Rushmore. One aspect of this multidimensional man that probably doesn't occur to anyone other than avid readers of Lincoln biographies (and Smithsonian) is that of inventor. Yet before he became the 16th president of the United States, Lincoln, who had a long fascination with how things worked, invented a flotation system for lifting riverboats stuck on sandbars.