Today, we wonder about sails on steam-powered
ships. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Robert Fulton's original
steamboat was equipped with two sets of sails in
1807. River boats quickly abandoned sail because
they always ran near a shore. Sail wasn't much use
in the narrow confines of a river. But
relinquishing sail at sea after using it for
several millennia was a terrifying step to take.
The American packet City of Savannah
crossed the Atlantic under steam in 1819. It hadn't
reached Ireland before it used up its coal and had
to run up its sails. When Britain's steam-powered
Great Western established regular
transatlantic passenger service in 1837, it carried
sail.
How long do you suppose it took to gain the
confidence needed to give up expensive back-up
sails, masts, rigging, and crew? Actually, the
beginning of the end of sail was the battle between
the Yankee Monitor and the Confederate
Merrimac in 1862. Those steam-powered,
ironclad ships didn't carry sail because they were
meant to be shoreline vessels. Not everyone
realizes they were only two in a great armada of
ironclad riverboats. The Union made effective use
of them in the Civil War. Ironclad gunboats helped
the Union Army to gain control of the Mississippi
River in the west.
But the Monitor had one entirely new feature
destined to change the game entirely: In its
center, where a mast might have been, there was
instead a gun turret. At this very same time, the
conservative British Admiralty was also trying to
replace the fixed guns on their ironclad warships
with rotating turrets. Their problem was that masts
and rigging interfered with the field of fire of a
turret. The flat, sailess Monitor had no
such problem.
Yet the British clung to sail. They built several
ships with both turrets and masts. All the while,
that arrangement gave them trouble. Not until 1871,
64 years after Fulton, did the British Navy launch
the first ocean-going warship without any sail --
the H.M.S. Devastation. The
Devastation set the pattern for future
British sea power, but masts were still to be found
on many merchant and passenger ships well into the
1900s, a full century after the first ocean-going
steamboats.
Since sails offer power without fuel, we must ask
whether the issue was conservation of fuel or
conservatism of mind. Naval architects today talk
about adding modern forms of sail on merchant
vessels. But though 19th-century engineers were
many things, they were never conservationists. The
long retention of sail represents an extreme
instance of conservatism in engineering.
That conservatism becomes understandable when we
consider how much more than mere technology sails
were. When steam first came on the scene, sail was
woven through our language and our thinking. Even
today, the words linger in our speech: "That really
took the wind out of her sails." "He was three
sheets to the wind." "May the wind be ever at your
back!" Leaving sails behind was far more than a
simple changeover in the way we powered ships.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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