Today, we wonder about the use of sail on 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 sails in 1807. American riverboats
quickly abandoned sail because they always ran near
a shore, and because sail wasn't much use without a
lot of room for navigation. But abandoning sail at
sea, after using it for several millenia, did more
than just violate tradition -- it was a very
frightening step to take.
The American packet Savannah made the
first transatlantic steamboat trip in 1819 -- at
least it got almost to Ireland before its coal ran
out and it had to run up its sails. When the
British Great Western established regular
transatlantic passenger service in 1837, it still
carried sail.
How long do you suppose it took to gain the
confidence to abandon the expensive backup
protection of sails, masts, rigging, and extra
crew? Actually, the beginning of the end of sail
traces to the battle between the Yankee
Monitor and the Confederate
Merrimac in 1862. Of course these
powered, ironclad ships didn't carry sail because
they were shoreline vessels. But the
Monitor had an entirely new feature:
in the center of the boat, where a mast might have
been, there was instead a gun turret.
At this time the conservative British admiralty was
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 -- a problem that the
Monitor didn't have. The British clung
to sail during the 1860s and built several ships
with both turrets and masts. They had a lot of
problems with them.
Finally, in 1871 -- 64 years after Fulton -- they
took the bold step of launching the first
ocean-going warship without any sail -- the H.M.S.
Devastation. It 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.
We have to ask whether we're looking at
conservation of fuel or conservatism of mind.
Indeed, some naval architects today talk about
adding modern forms of sail to boost the power of
merchant marine vessels. But, though the engineers
of the 19th century were many things, they were
never conservationists. The long retention of sail
represents a remarkable instance of conservatism in
engineering.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
