How Were Made Masts Repaired At Sea

No. 1338:
THE LAST MASTS

past John H. Lienhard

Click here for sound of Episode 1338.

Today, we wonder nigh sails on steam-powered ships. The University of Houston's College of Technology 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 2 sets of sails in 1807. River boats quickly abandoned sail because they always ran nigh a shore. Sail wasn't much apply in the narrow confines of a river. Only 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. Information technology hadn't reached Ireland before it used up its coal and had to sew its sails. When Britain's steam-powered Great Western established regular transatlantic passenger service in 1837, information technology carried sail.

How long do you suppose it took to gain the confidence needed to requite upwards expensive back-up sails, masts, rigging, and coiffure? Really, the beginning of the cease of sail was the boxing betwixt the Yankee Monitor and the Confederate Merrimac in 1862. Those steam-powered, ironclad ships didn't carry canvass because they were meant to be shoreline vessels. Not anybody realizes they were only two in a dandy armada of ironclad riverboats. The Union made effective use of them in the Civil War. Ironclad gunboats helped the Union Ground forces to gain command of the Mississippi River in the west.

But the Monitor had one entirely new characteristic destined to change the game entirely: In its center, where a mast might accept been, there was instead a gun turret. At this very aforementioned time, the bourgeois British Admiralty was likewise trying to supplant the stock-still 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 problem. Not until 1871, 64 years after Fulton, did the British Navy launch the first bounding main-going warship without whatever sail -- the H.Chiliad.S. Destruction. The Destruction set up the pattern for future British sea ability, but masts were still to be found on many merchant and rider ships well into the 1900s, a full century after the first ocean-going steamboats.

Since sails offer power without fuel, we must inquire whether the issue was conservation of fuel or conservatism of mind. Naval architects today talk about calculation modern forms of canvass on merchant vessels. Simply 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 get-go came on the scene, sail was woven through our language and our thinking. Even today, the words linger in our voice communication: "That actually took the current of air out of her sails." "He was 3 sheets to the wind." "May the wind exist e'er at your back!" Leaving sails backside was far more than than a simple changeover in the style we powered ships.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the mode inventive minds work.
(Theme music)

This is a revised and expanded version of Episode 31.
From Picturesque European Scenery, Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1883
A Steam-driven, sail-assisted, ship on the southward declension of England not long before 1883 (76 years after Fulton's boat).

Image courtesy of Special Collections, UH Library
A Frigate Powered past both Steam and Sail
from Human on the Ocean, 1874

Paradigm courtesy of Special Collections, UH Library
Isambard Brunel'south Great Eastern
from Man on the Ocean, 1874
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright © 1988-1998 by John H. Lienhard.
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