Who Invented The Pop-Up Emergency Shelter Tent?

There are quite a few traits a bespoke emergency shelter needs to have. It needs to be hard-wearing, robust, able to handle strong winds, shifting ground and powerful storms, relatively compact when not in use and available at an affordable price.

However, more than perhaps any other trait, it needs to be available quickly. Emergencies tend not to arrive with a lot of notice, so any approach that makes a shelter easy and quick to assemble is something that is exceedingly important.

There are a lot of different approaches to making relief tents quickly, such as the simple, large-scale likes of the Rubb Hall that was for a long time used by relief organisations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres.

At the same time, the absolute fastest way to set up a shelter quickly is through pop-up designs and technologies.

Whilst the “pop-up” moniker is used for a lot of different tent systems that are easy to assemble, there are some more literal examples of small shelters that literally pop up ready to be secured in place.

Exactly who invented this is a relatively undiscovered mystery, something that has not been as widely explored as the ancient origins of tents themselves.

However, the initial origin point seems to start with a structure that is not a tent at all.

Rings Of Modesty

The earliest relevant examples of pop-up structures which would be later cited by more recognisable designs appear to start with Ernest Watson’s portable dressing booth from 1933. 

The description of its functionality and the diagrams make it clear that it uses a very similar set of rings that are lifted up and secured in place, allowing someone to change in place, before lowering the design and stepping out. When collapsed it is easy to secure and carry.

Whilst not the same as modern designs, given that it seems to rely on a series of springs rather than the more elaborate shapes that were more latterly used.

A very similar patent, but one that was far more recognisable as a pop-up tent was Charles Jolly’s sunshade from 1935, designed as an easy-to-use shade that could be taken to the beach, although it almost seems too effective as a shelter compared to a parasol.

Even earlier than this, there was a tent frame design by Abram Tennant and Sankey Elmer which featured a framing design that, from the description of the invention in the patent application, folded out like an umbrella, which whilst easier to set up likely compromised interior space.

By 1955, all three patents were looked on with great interest amongst tent inventors, taking the general concept found in the sunshade and the dressing booth and adapting it into a self-erecting tent, as first described by James Oliver and Donald Kuyper in 1956.

The concept would eventually evolve from there through many different iterations, culminating in Charles Blen and Andrew Panno Jr’s 1996 patent that very closely resembles the tents that are seen today, taking advantage of a tense, closed-loop design to provide optimal structural rigidity and a literal pop-up motion.