Steamships and their story

by E. Keble Chatterton

Let us now pause for a moment to witness some of the changes which were going on in regard to the machinery for steamships. In the engines which were installed in [the Russian ship shown opposite page 84] we saw how the beam had become the side-lever, and why it had been placed in this position in the steamboat. This had become the customary type for steamships which were still propelled by paddle-wheels, and the perfected development had been due to Boulton and Watt, dating from about 1820. Until about 1860 this type was used most generally, until ocean-going steamers discarded the paddle-wheel for the screw. It is, therefore, essential that before proceeding farther we should get well-acquainted with it, and we shall find that following the lead which had been given them, especially by the famous Robert Napier, marine engineers began to build these types, as well for deep-sea ships as for river-going craft.[ The illustration here facing], which has been taken from a model in the South Kensington Museum, represents the regular side-lever type, the full-sized engines having been made by a Poplar firm in 1836 for the Ruby, which plied between London and Gravesend, a vessel of 170 tons, and the fastest Thames steamer of that time. On referring to our illustration, the side-lever will be immediately recognised in the fore-ground at the bottom. To the left of this are the two cylinders, side by side. The side-lever is seen to be pivoted at its centre, whilst at the reader’s left hand the end of this is joined by a connecting rod. Thus, as the piston-rod is moved upwards or downwards, so the left-hand half of the side-lever will move. At the opposite, right-hand, side of the latter the connecting rod will be observed to be attached to the side-lever, whilst the other end of the connecting rod drives the crank; the latter, in turn, driving the shaft on either end of which will be placed a paddle-wheel. In this engine before us there are two cranks, of which one is seen prominently at the very top of the picture. Each connecting rod is attached to two side-levers, one on either side of the cylinder, by means of a cross-head. Similarly at the piston-rod there is also a cross-head, with a connecting rod on either side, of which one only is visible. Later on a modified form of this type of engine was introduced in order to economise space, for one of the great drawbacks of the side-lever engine was that it took up an enormous amount of room, which could ill be spared from that to be devoted to the carrying of cargo or the accommodation of the passengers. In this modification the cylinders, instead of being placed side by side, or athwartships, were fore and aft, the one behind the other.

In 1831, there was built in Quebec, to run between there and Halifax, a steamer called the Royal William (not to be confused with a vessel of the same name to which we shall refer presently). The engines were made by Boulton and Watt, and dispatched across the Atlantic to Montreal, where they were installed. In 1833, after taking on board over three hundred tons of coal at Pictou, Nova Scotia, she started on her journey to the South of England, and arrived off Cowes, Isle of Wight, after seventeen days, having covered a distance of 2,500 miles. There is some doubt as to whether she steamed the whole way, or whether she used her sails for part of the time. At any rate, she measured 176 feet long, 43 feet 10 inches wide (including her paddle-boxes), and after calling at Portsmouth, proceeded to Gravesend, and was afterwards sold to the Spanish Government.

THE “SIRIUS” (1838).

From a Contemporary Drawing in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

THE “ROYAL WILLIAM” (1838).

By permission of the City of Dublin Steam Packet Co.

We now come to the year 1838, in which a handful of steamers made history, and showed how uncalled-for had been the ridicule which the pessimists had cast at the steamship. With this year we reach the turning-point of the steamship, and from that date we may trace all those wonderful achievements which are still being added to year by year. Hitherto no vessel had crossed the Atlantic under steam power solely. Because of the large amount of fuel consumption which was a necessary failing of the early steamships, in proportion to the amount of steam developed, it was denied that it would ever be financially possible for steamers to run across oceans as the sailing packets were doing, even if they were capable of carrying sufficient fuel together with their passengers and cargo. But deeds were more eloquent than the expounding of theories, and the first surprise was quickly followed by another, far from inferior. The first of these epoch-making steamers was the Sirius. She was rigged as a brig, like many of the contemporary sailing ships which then carried mails, passengers, and cargo between the Old World and the New, whose unsavoury characters had earned for them the nickname of “coffin-brigs.” This Sirius was a comparatively small ship of 703 tons, and quite small enough to cross the Atlantic in the weather which is to be found thereon. She measured only 178 feet along the keel, was 25½ feet wide, her hold was 18¼ feet deep, and her engines developed 320 horsepower. Built for the service between London and Cork, she was specially chartered for this transatlantic trip by the British Queen Steam Navigation Company, whose own vessel, the British Queen (shown [opposite page 102]), was not yet ready, owing to the fact that one of her contractors had gone bankrupt. With ninety-four passengers on board, the Sirius steamed away from London and called at Queenstown, where she coaled. After clearing from the Irish port, she encountered head winds, and it was only with difficulty that her commander, Lieut. R. Roberts, R.N., was able to quell a mutiny among the crew, who had made up their minds that to try and get across the North Atlantic in such a craft was pure folly. Having been seventeen days out, the Sirius arrived off New York on April 22nd, and before the end of her journey had not merely consumed all her coal, at a daily average of 24 tons, but had even to burn some of her spars, so that she had got across just by the skin of her teeth. But it was her engines which had got her there and not her sails; the former were of the side-lever type to which we have just referred.

The next day came in the Great Western, a much larger craft, that had come out of Bristol three days after the Sirius had started; and in her we see the prototype of those enormous liners which go backwards and forwards across the Atlantic to-day with a regularity that is remarkable. Unlike the little Sirius, the Great Western had been specially designed for the Atlantic by that engineering genius, Brunel, who, like his ships and his other works of wonder, was one of the most remarkable products of the last century. She was built with the intention of becoming practically an extension of the Great Western Railway across the Atlantic, and in order to be able to withstand the terrible battering of the seas, which she would have to encounter, she was specially strengthened. Here was a vessel of 1,321 tons (gross), with a length of 236 feet over all, with about half her space taken up with her boilers and engines. Now the strain of so much dead-weight in so long a ship whose beam was only 35 feet 4 inches, or about one-seventh of her length, had to be thought out and guarded against with the greatest care. And let us not forget that at this time vessels were still built of wood, and that, except in a few instances, iron had not yet been introduced. She was given strong oak ribs, placed close together, while iron was also used to some extent in fastening them. The advantage of making an ocean-going vessel long is that she is less likely to pitch in a sea, and will not dip twice in the same hollow; and if she is proportionately narrow in comparison with her length, she will also roll less than a more beamy craft. But the difficulty, so long as wood was employed, was to get sufficient longitudinal strength to endure the strains of so long a span. We shall be able to get some idea of this when we consider the behaviour of a vessel in a sea. Waves consist, so to speak, of mountains and valleys. If the waves are short and the vessel is long, then she may stretch right over some of them; but if the contrary is the condition, then, while her ’midship portion is supported by the water, her fore and aft ends are inclined to droop, so that in a very extreme case she would break in two. At any rate, the tendency is for the centre of the ship to bend upwards and the unsupported ends to droop. This is technically called “hogging.” In the reverse circumstance, when the ends are supported on the tops of two mountains of waves, whilst the centre of the ship spans, unsupported, the intervening valley, the tendency is to “sag.” Now this has to be allowed for in the construction of the ship, and, as already pointed out in my “Sailing Ships and Their Story,” this was understood as far back as the times of the Egyptians, who counteracted such strains as these by means of a longitudinal cable stretched tightly from one end of the ship to the other. But with the coming of steamships there was another problem to be taken into consideration. Engines, boilers, fresh water for the boilers, coal and so on are serious weights to be placed in one part of the ship. (In the case of the Great Western, the first three alone weighed 480 tons, although the gross tonnage of the whole ship was only 1,321.)