My name is Bruce Jackson. Bill Jackson’s son. In 1988 my father wrote an article called “Air Cushions the true story”. Bill’s original article can be read soon on our website at Billjacksonlegacy.com. As I was around for most of this story, I have taken parts of his story and added some memories of my own.
He wrote his article in 1988 because there were companies who had copied his system and were claiming that they had invented the air cushion, which was not true.
The real story of the air cushion started in 1961 when George Jackson, Bill’s father was involved in a car accident. A fully loaded dump truck had lost its brakes on a hill and had rolled back over the car that my grandfather was driving. He was not badly injured but was trapped with the weight of the truck pushing down on top of him. The fire department did not have any equipment to lift this dump truck up, so after a couple of hours, he just suffocated. By the time my dad got to the morgue that day, all he could do was think of ways that could have saved his father.
In 1961, my dad had a wrecker service in the United Kingdom using Holmes twin-boom equipment. He knew that even his Holmes 750 would not have been able to lift the loaded dump that killed his dad.
He had a friend who was the local fire chief, Stanley Pellow who told him that often they were unable to save people in accidents like this, as they just did not have any way to get them out of their vehicle in time. Stan also told him that they were carrying out trials on a small rubber bag filled with only 5 lbs of air, to see if it could work. He watched the tests on the small air cushion that was inflated by the fireman’s air bottle. It did work but owing to the size and lack of rigidity, was very limited. He realized that if a small bag of wind could lift a small load, a larger bag could maybe lift a heavier load.
He got in touch with a rubber company in Wales that made him a bigger version of the little bag. It was very soft like a balloon. He bought an old oil tanker lifted it up with the Holmes 750, put the cushion underneath it, and blew it up with an air-line from the workshop.
That was his first mistake as the workshop air was high pressure-low volume. It took around two hours to fill it up. Then he watched with amazement when the tanker did lift up on the one air cushion, but then it spun around on the cushion and fell off.
Back to the drawing board. He tried a mat-type high-pressure cushion but that just made a hole in the tanker. He tried several other shapes and sizes of the low-pressure cushions. Finally, he asked if he could get some higher cushions with more rigid sides and a harder top and bottom. A series of straps inside the cushion held the shape.
He had a mobile crane company at that time and one of his crane drivers suggested holding the tank steady with one of the nylon straps that were used on the cranes.
It sounds simple now, but nobody had done this before. As soon as he used the three taller air cushions and held the tanker steady with the nylon straps, the Air Cushions worked. This was and still is one of the ways to upright a tanker/ trailer.
We are talking about 1963 when this happened.
Soon after this, he started working on how to get the load 6 inches off the ground so you can put your air cushions in place. Again the answer was simple to us now. He designed a small square air cushion that lifted about 12 inches, just enough to start the lift, these he called “starters”.
In 1965 he used his new system to lift a fully loaded tanker with just three of his 60-inch black cushions and did film this. You can see this video on our website at: billjacksonlegacy.com, It was 1965 when the new Air Cushion (or Air Bag system) was ready to sell.
Then came another problem, nobody was interested in buying it. To combat this, he put on several PR demos, one to lift a 100-ton rail tanker using 13 cushions, that took way too long, then a 200-ton locomotive that he did manage to lift with only 8 cushions. I was there for this demo, it was pretty impressive. In 1970 after five years of demos like this, air cushion sales in the UK were beginning to take off.
Fred Noble, Peter Kingsnorth and I set off on a two-month Trans-America demo trip. When we got to Indianapolis, Fred Noble went home. We were then joined by Bill and Cicely my mother, for the second leg of this trip. After a lot of demonstrations in some odd places, we arrived on the West coast with an air cushion distributor in Indianapolis, Ross and Roger Kinman as well as one in Los Angeles, Will Freeman of Continental Towing.
In 1971, Ross Kinman, myself and Mark Anderson (who worked for Ross) were invited to show the air cushions at the Massachusetts tow show on October 24th. We were given a loaded trailer to upright and a loaded tanker. I am sure the organizers did not think we would be able to do either of these two lifts. Mark and Ross did the trailer demonstration and I was able to upright the tanker using three starters and ONE three-section BR1 cushion. Five thousand people watched this demonstration.
Today Towing and recovery companies all around the world use Bill Jackson’s Air Cushion System. He did not invent the air cushion but was the first person to use air cushions and nylon straps (they are called straps now) for road and rail accidents. He went on to research the shape of the air cushion, redesigning it to a safer square shape. The Bill Jackson Jumbo orange air cushion system is still sold and used worldwide.
Bruce Jackson March 2020
