History
In the 19th century, countries like France with its long history of disaster preparedness, the Netherlands with two thirds of its land below sea level and Britain where swimming pools gained so much popularity, were aware of the danger of water and establishing the methods of drowning prevention and rescue.
In 1891 the Royal Life Saving Society was created to affiliate British and Irish lifesaving and lifeguarding clubs. It expanded its operations to Canada and Australia in 1894.
The first international lifesaving conference was held in Marseilles, France in 1878, but it was not until 1910 that the first international lifesaving organization, FIS (Fédération Internationale de Sauvetage Aquatique), was founded. FIS members included Algeria, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia and Turkey.
In 1913 the DLRG was founded in Germany.
In 1971 Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States founded another international organization called World Life Saving (WLS).
FIS and WLS merged into a new organization, International Life Saving Federation (ILS) in 1993 with its headquarters in Leuven, Belgium.
Read more about this topic: Lifesaving
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)