Everything about Sidewheeler totally explained
A
paddle steamer is a ship or boat driven by a
steam engine that uses one or more
paddle wheels to develop thrust for
propulsion. It is also a type of
steamboat. Boats with paddle wheels on the sides are termed
sidewheelers, while those with a single wheel on the stern are known as
sternwheelers. Paddle steamers usually carry the prefix "PS". Although generally associated with steam power,
paddleboats, or
paddlewheelers have also been driven by diesel engines, animal power, or human power.
The paddle wheel was the first form of mechanical propulsion for a boat, but has now been almost entirely superseded by the
screw propeller and other, more modern, forms of .
Paddle wheels
The paddle wheel is a large wheel, generally built of a
steel framework, upon the outer edge of which are fitted numerous paddle blades (called
floats or
buckets). In the water, the bottom quarter or so of the wheel is underwater. Rotation of the paddle wheel produces
thrust, forward or backward as required. More advanced paddle wheel designs have featured
feathering methods that keep each paddle blade oriented closer to vertical while it's in the water; this increases efficiency.
Types of paddle steamer
There are two basic ways to mount paddle wheels on a ship; a single wheel on the rear, known as a
stern-wheeler, and a paddle wheel on each side, known as a
side-wheeler.
Stern-wheelers have generally been used as
riverboats, especially in the
United States, where they still operate for tourist use on the
Mississippi River and some other locations. On a river, the narrowness of a stern-wheeler is preferable.
Side-wheelers, meanwhile, have also been used as riverboats, but also commonly as coastal craft. While wider than a stern-wheeler, due to the extra width of the paddle wheels and their enclosing
pontoons, a side-wheeler has extra maneuverability since the power may be directed to one wheel at a time.
Early developments
The use of a paddle wheel in navigation appears for the first time in the mechanical treatise of the Roman engineer
Vitruvius (
De architectura, X 9.5-7), where he describes multi-geared paddle wheels working as a ship
odometer. The first mention of paddle wheels as a means of propulsion comes from the 4th-5th century military treatise
De Rebus Bellicis (chapter XVII), where the anonymous Roman author describes an ox-driven paddle wheel warship:
Tang emperor. The Chinese
Song Dynasty (960 - 1279 AD) issued the construction of many paddle-wheel ships for its standing
navy, and according to historian
Joseph Needham:
"...between 1132 and 1183 (AD) a great number of treadmill-operated paddle-wheel craft, large and small, were built, including stern-wheelers and ships with as many as 11 paddle-wheels a side,” .
In 1543 the
Spanish engineer
Blasco de Garay in
Barcelona made an experimental vessel propelled by a paddle-wheel on each side, worked by forty men. In the same year he showed
Carlos I of Spain (also known as
Charles V, the
Holy Roman Emperor, a new idea - a ship propelled by a giant wheel powered by steam, but Carlos wasn't interested in it.
In 1787
Patrick Miller of Dalswinton invented a double-hulled boat, which was propelled on the
Firth of Forth by men working a capstan which
drove paddles on each side.
The first paddle steamer was the
Pyroscaphe built by Marquis
Claude de Jouffroy of
Lyon in
France, in 1783. It had a horizontal double-acting steam engine driving two 13.1 ft (4 m) paddle wheels on the sides of the craft. On
July 15,
1783 it steamed successfully up the Saône for fifteen minutes before the engine failed. Political events interrupted further development.
The next successful attempt at a paddle-driven
steam ship was by the
Scottish engineer
William Symington who suggested steam power to
Patrick Miller of Dalswinton. The Great Western’s more successful crossing however began the regular sailing of powered vessels across the Atlantic.
Beaver was the first coastal steamship to operate in the
Pacific Northwest of North America.
Paddle steamers
helped open Japan to the Western World in the mid-19th century.
The largest paddle-steamer ever built was Brunel's
Great Eastern, but it also had an additional screw propulsion and sail rigging. It was 692 feet (211 m) long and weighed 32,000 tons, its paddle-wheels being 56 ft (17 m) in diameter.
In oceangoing service, paddle steamers became obsolete rather quickly with the invention of the
screw propeller, but they remained in use in coastal service and as
river tugboats, thanks to their shallow draught and good maneuverability.
Modern paddle steamers
Mississippi River, and
Willamette River, as do a few in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe.
The
Washington Irving, built in 1912 by the
New York Shipbuilding Company, was the biggest passenger-carrying riverboat ever built with a capacity for 6,000 passengers. It was operated on the
Hudson River from 1913 until it was sunk in an accident in 1926.
PS Waverley, built in 1947, is the last sea-going paddle steamer in the world. This ship sails a full season of cruises every year from ports around
Britain, and has sailed across the
English Channel to commemorate the sinking of her predecessor of 1899 at the
Battle of Dunkirk.
PS
Skibladner is the oldest
steamship in regular operation. Built in 1856, she still operates on lake
Mjøsa in
Norway.
PS
Adelaide is the oldest wooden-hulled paddle steamer in the world. Built in 1866, she operates from the
Port of Echuca, on Australia's Murray River, which has the largest fleet of paddle steamers in the world. The paddle steamer
Curlip is currently being reconstructed in
Gippsland Australia.
The
Elbe river
Saxon Paddle Steamer Fleet in Dresden (known as "White Fleet"), Germany, is said to be the oldest and biggest in the world, which over ca. 700.000 passengers per year. The 1913-built
Goethe
is the last one on the
Rhine river. It is the world's greatest sidewheeler with a 2-cylinder steam engine of, a length of 83 m and a height above water of 9,2 m.
Switzerland has a large paddle steamer fleet, most of the "Salon Steamer-type" built by
Sulzer in
Winterthur or
Escher-Wyss in
Zürich. There are five active and one inactive on
Lake Lucerne, two on Lake Zürich, and one each on
Lake Brienz,
Lake Thun and
Lake Constance. Swiss company
CGN operates a number of paddle steamers on
Lake Geneva. Their fleet includes three converted to
diesel electric power in the 1960s and five retaining steam. One,
Montreux, was reconverted in 2000 from diesel to an all-new steam engine. It is the world's first electronically remote-controlled steam engine and has operating costs similar to state of the art diesels, while producing up to 90 percent less air pollution.
In
USSR, the river paddle steamers of the type
Iosif Stalin (project 373), later renamed as type
Ryazan class steamship, were built until 1951. Between 1952 and 1959 ships of this type were build for Soviet Union by Obuda Hajogyar Budapest factory in Hungary. In total, 75 type
Iosif Stalin/Ryazan paddle steamers were build. Few of them still remain in active service, as in 2007.
Iosif Stalin/Ryazan paddle steamers are side-wheelers. They are 70 m long and can carry up to 360 passengers.
A small paddle steamer fleet operates on the lake of
Como, Italy, mostly but not only for touristic purposes.
The restored paddle steamer 'Waimarie' is based in
Wanganui,
New Zealand. The Waimarie was built in kitset form in
Poplar, London in 1899, and originally operated on the
Whanganui River under the name 'Aotea'. Later renamed, she remained in service until 1949. She sank at her moorings in 1952, and remained in the mud until raised by volunteers and restored to begin operations again in 2000.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sidewheeler'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://paddle_steamer.totallyexplained.com">Paddle steamer Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
