While the use of the life car in saving 200 lives from the ship Ayrshire in 1850 is well known and the car is in the Smithsonian Institution, the first major use of the apparatus on LBI is less well-known. But the circumstances were just as dramatic and the men just as heroic.

After William Newell was able to get the U.S. Congress to appropriate money to establish life-saving stations between Little Egg Harbor and Sandy Hook in 1848, the job of setting them up was assigned to Capt.