[83] Historic Times, March 1849.
This syndicate built the steam-ship Archimedes, the first seagoing vessel driven by a screw propeller. She was of 232 tons, and had engines of 80 horse-power. The cylinders were 37 inches in diameter and of 3 feet stroke, and the screw, being geared in the proportion of a fraction over five to one, made 140 revolutions per minute to about 27 revolutions of the engine shaft. The screw was formed of plates of iron fastened to arms of wrought iron, keyed upon a wrought-iron shaft. The boiler was suited to the shape of the vessel. The engines, chimney, boiler, coal-boxes, driving machinery, and propeller weighed altogether rather more than 64 tons. The propeller was fitted in such a way that it could be brought on deck for repair or when not required for use. The ship was 125 feet over all and 22¹⁄₂ feet beam. Various types of propeller blades were tried with her, and she was also sent on a voyage round the ports of Great Britain to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method of propulsion. On this trip she called at Bristol, where the Great Britain was under construction, and was thus the cause of the screw propeller being adopted for that ship.
One of the tests to which the Archimedes was subjected was a voyage between Dover and Calais in the company of two of the Post Office packets, which she beat handsomely. She went from London to Portsmouth in 1839, and continuing her voyage round the ports of the British Islands, to provide ocular proof to all interested, put in at Plymouth, where she was boarded by Admiral Sir Grayham Moore and the Commander-in-Chief, who were then convinced of the usefulness of the screw.
The next year the Novelty was built for the owners of the Archimedes by Mr. Wimshurst at Blackwall, to demonstrate still further the seagoing merits of a screw-propelled vessel. Her two-bladed screw was placed as near the sternpost as possible, and one of its features was that it had only a quarter of a turn to the blade. Her boilers worked at a steam pressure of sixty pounds above that of the atmosphere, the highest then attempted, and up to then regarded as impossible for a steamer. She took a general cargo to Constantinople, to which port she was the first screw cargo boat to go; but as on her return objections were raised that the pressure was too high, other engines were substituted working at only a quarter of the pressure. She was one of the few vessels in which the mast was used as a funnel, her mizzen-mast being made hollow and of iron for the purpose: she is also said to have been the first vessel to be fitted with an iron mast.
John Ericsson in 1836 patented a propeller consisting of two drums from which projected seven helical blades connected by an external hoop. The blades were inclined in opposite directions, thus forming a double screw propeller, the propellers being placed immediately behind the rudder, which had the usual “shark’s mouth” to allow of steering. The shafts were made so that one passed through the other, the outer one being tubular. The drums revolved in opposite directions, that nearer the sternpost moving at a slightly faster rate than the after drum. This method of arranging the propellers was adopted with a view to avoiding the loss caused by the motion imparted to the water by the single screw, but it was found that the trouble caused by the contrivance was not worth the results obtained. Another drawback was that the extra friction induced by one shaft operating within the other was so great that the contrivance was practically useless where a high speed was desired. The steamer Francis B. Ogden was tried with this type of propeller in 1837, and towed the American sailing ship Toronto, of 630 tons burden, on the Thames at the rate of five miles an hour. The Francis B. Ogden was about double the tonnage and power of Smith’s boat, being 45 feet long and having a high-pressure two-cylinder engine giving the propellers about 30 revolutions per minute. Ericsson’s next experiment was with the Robert F. Stockton, which was built by Laird at Birkenhead in 1838. She was 63 feet long and of 33 tons, and had engines of 30 horse-power. Prior to this his screw boat towed the Admiralty barge with my Lords of the Admiralty on board on the Thames, but the effort to convince them of the practicability of the method was doomed to failure, since they had previously decided that as the power was applied at the stern the vessel would not steer.
Model of the “Novelty.” Built 1839.
The Robert F. Stockton crossed the Atlantic under canvas in 1839, and after one of the screws had been removed as useless, she was employed for a quarter of a century as a single-screw tugboat on the Delaware, under the name of the New Jersey. Commodore Robert F. Stockton in that year induced Ericsson to resign his office in London as superintending engineer of the Eastern Counties Railway and go to the United States. Several vessels were fitted with his propellers for river and inland waters navigation in America.
Mr. Ogden, who was American Consul at Liverpool from 1829 to 1840, and at Bristol from 1840 to 1857, “is credited with having first applied the important principles of the expansive power of steam and with the employment of right-angular cranks in marine engines. In 1813 he received a patent for low-pressure engines with two cylinders, working expansively, and the cranks being adjusted at right angles, and in 1817 the first engine ever constructed on this principle was built by him in Leeds, Yorkshire. He submitted his plan to James Watt, at Soho, who declared at once that it was a beautiful engine and that the combination was certainly original.”[84]
[84] Appleton’s “Cyclopædia of American Biography.”