Steaming Questions

I’d like to look into how captains learnt to handle the enormous sailing-steamships of the early Victorian era. They were well versed in the immense technical knowledge of handing a large sailing ship, but maneuvering a paddle-wheel or propeller driven ship is entirely different. How did they know what to do? Mechanics could teach them how the engine itself worked, but then, mechanics wouldn’t have known much about ships. And, no one would have known how the two technologies—ships and steam engines—would work together, because no one had put the two together before. What rpms would produce what speeds? how would the engine respond to the constant pitch, roll, and yaw, as well as increased salt and humidity, of the sea? how would the boat respond to changes in the engine? how would boats handle going to new speeds with the use of propellors? For that matter, what kind of speeds did ships reach with steam engines? The ss Great Britain museum pointed out that steam-driven paddlewheels or propellers on a ship would create an ever-present headwind. How would the sails function in this case? Wouldn’t they just create more air resistance and slow down the boat? Or, if angled, they would carry the boat away from the designated course. There must have been a period in which captains and mechanics had to partner together and learn from each other. Brunel did confer with a former captain from the Royal Navy, Christopher Claxton when he designed the ss Great Britain and the Great Eastern, so there was a good deal of consulting going on, if not collaboration. I don’t know the answers to all these questions I’ve been asking, though, and I probably don’t know enough about boats or engines to understand the answers. But I think all these basic questions in this entry demonstrate how mysterious this new technology of steam must have been. What did it feel like, to put this strange iron contraption in a cart or on a boat for the first time, and then to pull a lever and see what happened?

This is the ss Great Britain steaming/sailing through the icebergs of the South Atlantic.