First idea of iron ships, 1830.
Hitherto, and throughout all ages, timber alone had been used in shipbuilding. The forests of Lebanon supplied the naval architects of Tyre with their materials; Italy cultivated her woods with unusual care, so that sufficient trees might be grown for the timber, planking, and masts of the ships of its once powerful maritime republics; and, in our own time, how often have we heard fears expressed that Great Britain would not be able to continue the supply of sufficient oak for her royal dockyards, much less for her merchant fleets! Yet, when shrewd far-seeing men, no further back than the year 1830, talked about substituting iron for the “ribs” of a ship instead of “timbers,” and iron plates for “planking” instead of oak, what a howl of derision the public raised!
“Who ever heard of iron floating?” they derisively enquired. It is true they might have seen old tin kettles float on every pool of water before their doors almost any day of their lives, nay, floating even more buoyantly than their discarded wooden coal boxes; but such common-place instructors were beneath their notice. Timber-built ships had from time immemorial been in use by every nation and on every sea, and had bravely battled with the storm from the days of Noah, and were these, they sneeringly asked, to be supplanted by a material which in itself would naturally sink? Such was the reasoning of the period; and indeed, the best of the arguments against the use of iron rested on scarcely more solid foundation.[110]
It could not be gainsaid that a frame of iron was infinitely stronger than a frame of wood, which, in fact, has no strength in itself, for the longitudinal timber ends are only butted to each other, and obtain their power of resistance solely by means of the horizontal planks and the trenails which bind them together. Nor could the obstructives deny, though they argued the point, that the ribs when welded with the iron plates riveted to them, formed a hull vastly superior in strength, and much less liable to leakage than any similar body of wood, however well constructed. They must also have seen, by its displacement of water when afloat, that an iron hull was the more buoyant of the two. But these arguments, however unanswerable, were long ere they produced conviction; the fact that iron does not float, and the impression that it could not be made to do so safely, offered almost insuperable difficulties in the way of building vessels of that material; and when it was argued that they would “rip up” if they struck upon a rock, or bulge into a shapeless mass if driven on a sand bank, the opponents of progress raised objections which could be answered only by practical experience.
Proposals of Trevethick and Dickenson, 1809-1815.
The Vulcan, 1818.
Hitherto only a few very small vessels or barges had been constructed of iron, and these neither on a scale nor of a class to practically refute the objections which had been raised against the use of iron for ship-building purposes. It is true that so far back as 1809 Richard Trevethick and Robert Dickenson proposed a scheme for building “large ships with decks, beams, and sides, of plate iron,” and even suggested “masts, yards, and spars, to be constructed of iron in plates with telescope joints or screwed together:”[111] and in 1815, Mr. Dickenson patented an invention for vessels, or rather boats, “to be built of iron, with a hollow watertight gunwale.”[112] But, as these inventors or patentees did not put their ideas into practice, no other person (if, indeed, any other person gave even a passing thought to the subject) was convinced that any craft beyond a boat or a river-barge could be constructed of iron, much less that, if made in the form of a ship, this material would oppose more effectual resistance to the storms of the ocean, or, if dashed upon the strand, to the angry fury of the waves, than timber, however scientifically put together. But though no available substance can withstand the raging elements with less chance of destruction than plates of iron riveted together in the form of a boiler (the principle on which iron ships are now constructed), the public could not then appreciate their superior value; and it was not until 1818 that the first iron vessel was built by Thomas Wilson, at Faskine, on the banks of the Monkland Canal, eleven miles from Glasgow: this vessel, appropriately named the Vulcan, is even now (1875) employed on the Clyde in the conveyance of minerals from the Forth and Clyde Canal.
Aaron Manby, 1821.
Three years afterwards a steam-engine was, for the first time, fitted into a vessel built of iron. She was named the Aaron Manby, and was constructed in 1821 at Horsley, for the joint account of Mr. Manby and Captain Napier, afterwards Admiral Sir Charles Napier. She was sent in parts to London, where they were put together, and when complete was despatched to France under the command of Captain Napier. Another iron steam-vessel, intended for the navigation of the Seine, soon followed; but, in consequence of the prohibitory French navigation laws, with respect to foreign bottoms, the different parts of this vessel were, in this case, sent to France instead of to London, and put together at Charenton. Mr. Manby prepared in a similar manner two others, and shortly afterwards the building of iron vessels was commenced by an engineer at Paris for the same trade. The speculation, however, proved unfortunate.
Shannon Steam Packet Company, 1824.