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MARINE REVIEW. | [August 15 THE EVOLUTION OF THE SCREW STEAMER. BY BENJAMIN TAYLOR, F.R.G.S. Who invented the screw propeller? Lindsay, the author of the "His- tory of Merchant Shipping," says it is impossible to ascribe the invention to any one man, as the subject had engaged the attention of so many men for upwards of a century. But it is possible, notwithstanding Lind- say, to get a little nearer than he did to the origin of this now common object of the ocean. The New Jersey has been sometimes described as the first screw propelled vessel in America. She was an iron vessel, built by Laird of Birkenhead in 1838, and originally called the Frank R. Stockton, after her owner, who sold her to the Delaware & Rariton Canal Co. But Stockton took the idea from Ericsson, to whom, indeed, he gave the commission to design the engines after he had watched the operations of Ericsson's ex- perimental boat, the Fran- cis B. Ogden, on the Thames. To John Erics- son, Pettie Smith, and Bennet Wood- croft has been ascribed equal credit for actu- ally putting the "screw" into ae : ele tte working order. Hecctft Let us look ae Se a little further, : however, without going into ancient history, as John McGregor did when he endeavored to find the origin of the screw propeller in China! In one part of his "History" Lindsay says that, "In May, 1804, Mr. J. Stevens of the United States put to sea with a steam-boat propelled by a screw, turned first by a rotatory engirie, and then by Watt's recipro- cating engine; and as this small craft steamed from Hoboken to New York she has by some writers been considered the first sea-going screw of which there is any certain account." But further on he says, "The screw which Mr. Stevens used in his boat cannot have been of a practical character, or the Americans would not have allowed so valuable an-in- vention to lie dormant for 35 years.' That is to say, Stevens's voyage was made in 1804 but the New Jersey did not appear in American waters until 1840, and even then from the hands of English ship builders, with engines designed by a Swede. Nevertheless, there is evidence that the screw propeller put in opera- tion by Colonel John Stevens on the Hudson river between 1802 and 1806 was actually the first of the kind to navigate the waters of any country. E This Col. John Stevens was certainly a very remarkable man. He was born at New York in 1749, graduated at King's college, was admitted to the colonial bar in 1772, and was treasurer of the state of New Jersey during the war of independence. Afterwards he purchased the island of Hoboken and lived there until his death in 1838. In 1791 Stevens took cut three patents for improvements in the steam engine, one of which had reference to a method for propelling a vessel by the reaction of water. In 1798 he was engaged along with the elder Brunel and some others in a series of experiments in steam propulsion on the Passaic river in New Jersey, and among the many things they tried was an elliptical paddle- wheel. But in 1794 a patent was granted to one William Lyttleton, in England, for a screw propeller worked by manual labor with an endless rope. This screw was tried on the Thames, and gave a speed of two miles an hour--a little fact which seems to have escaped even Lindsay's lynx eye. : Lindsay only briefly refers, in a couple of lines, to a patent taken out by Edward Shorter in 1800 for "a perpetual sculling machine having the action of a two-bladed propeller."' But, as a matter of fact, Shorter had v THE FIRST AMERICAN STEAM ENGINE, 1801. "two schemes. One was a sort of duck-foot paddle, the pair working al- ternately; and the other was a two-bladed screw at the end of an inclined shaft from the deck of the vessel. With the latter he propelled a heavy transport at the rate of 1% miles an hour--eight men working the screw at a capstan. But long before either Stevens or Shorter or Lyttleton, viz., in 1752, Bernouilli, the mathematician, elaborated a plan for propelling a boat by means of a screw worked by hand. The idea of the screw propeller, then, did not originate with John Stevens, though quite possibly he may not have heard of either Ber- nouilli's or Lyttleton's inventions. But, as far as we can gather, Stevens seems to have been really the first who applied steam as the motive power. He began his experiments in 1801, and he had a screw steamer on the Hudson river in 1802--not in 1804 as mentioned by Lindsay. He tried a succession of non-condensing engines between 1801 and 1804°and it is interesting to note, he got a high pressure of steam out of multitubular boilers, for which he had taken out a patent. And he used not a two- bladed but a four-bladed screw. In a letter to a New York Journal in 1812, Stevens thus wrote an account of his experiments: "To avoid the mischievous effects necessarily resulting from the alternating stroke of the engine of the ordinary construction, I turned my attention to the construction of steam engines on the rotary principle. And the first steamboat put in motion on the waters of the Hudson was one constructed on this principle. * * For simplicity, lightness and compactness, the engine far exceeded any I have yet seen. A cylinder of brass, about 8 in. in diameter and 4 in. long, was placed horizontally on the bottom of the boat, and by the alternate pressure of the steam, on two sliding wings, an axis passing through its center was made to revolve. On one end of this axis, which passed through the stern of the boat, wings like those of the arms of a windmill, were fixed, adjusted to the most advantageous angle for operating on the water. This constituted the whole of the machinery. Working with the elasticity of the steam merely, no condenser, no air pump, was necessary, and as there were no valves, no apparatus was required for opening and shutting them. This simple little steam engine was, in the summer of 1802, placed on board a flat-bottomed boat I had built for the purpose. This boat was 25 ft. long and about 5 or 6 ft. wide. She was occasionally kept going until the cold weather stopped us. When the engine was in the best order her velocity was about four miles an hour. I found it, however, impracticable on so contracted a scale to preserve due tightness in the packing of the wings in the cylinder for any length of time. This defect determined me to resort again to the reciprocating engine." ; Here are chapter, verse and date in the inventor's own words, and never, so far as we know, called in question. In referring to his 1803 ex- periment, Stevens has written as follows: "T constructed an engine although differing much from those de- scribed in the specifications of my patents, yet so modified as to embrace completely the principle stated therein. During the winter this small engine was set up in a shop I then occupied at the Manhattan works, in Duane, near Centre street, and continued occasionally in operation until spring, when it was placed on board the above-mentioned boat, and by means of bevel cog-wheels it worked the axis and wings above-men- tioned, and gave the boat somewhat more velocity than the rotary engine. But after having gone some time, in crossing the river with my son on board, the boiler, which was constructed of small tubes inserted at each end into metal heads, gave way so as to be incapable of reparation." (Note here, also, the germ of the tubulous boiler.) In the following year Stevens adopted Watt's "reciprocating rota- tive" engine, with a 4%-in. cylinder and 9-in. stroke, working a two- bladed screw, with which he got a speed of about four miles an hour. It was probably this vessel and engine that Prof. Renwick of Columbia college saw, as related in an interesting letter which has been published in) oe of the New York historical society. Prof. Renwick wrote in : "The first time that I ever heard of an attempt to use steam for pro- pelling vessels was from a classmate of mine who resided during the summer months at Belleville, in New Jersey. He had, in the summer of 1803, seen an experiment on the Passaic river, which he stated to have been directed by John Stevens of Hoboken. According to his account 'the propulsion was attempted by forcing water by means of a pump from an aperture in the stern of the vessel(!) From some vague indications | FORE AN EARLY DESIGN OF A BRITISH SCREW STEAMER. it would appear that the elder Brunel, afterwards so distinguished in Europe, was in the employment of Mr. Stevens on this occasion. In the month of May, 1804, in company with the same young gentlemen and another classmate, I went to walk in the battery. As we entered the gate from Broadway we saw what we, in those days, considered a crowd running towards the river. On inquiring the cause we were informed that 'Jack Stevens' was going over to Hoboken in a queer sort of boat On reaching the bulkhead by which the battery was then bounded, we saw lying against it a vessel about the size of a Whitehall rowboat on which there was a small engine, but there was no visible means of pro- pulsion. The vessel was speedily under way." Fifty years later Prof. Renwick recognized, at an exhibition of the American Institute, the boat and engine which he had seen in 1804. They were exhibited. by the sons of Col. Stevens. And Renwick himself was an authority on the history of the steam engine, for he contributed the American chapter to Tredgold's celebrated "Treatise." Now we gather from these records that Stevens was not only the first to devise a screw propeller worked by steam, but that he was also the inventor of the twin-screw, for he found out the well known ten- dency of a single screw to turn the bow of the vessel. Forty years later, viz., in 1844, this old twin-screw engine, overhauled and repaired, was fitted on board a new boat and again tried on the Hudson river, when a speed of eight miles an hour was obtained. And this same engine, with iy Sepessiaess ie Ua ak