First steam yacht

[Charles Dawson]

I've discovered that Henry Maudslay, the English engineer who founded the famous firm Maudslay, Sons & Field in London, built the first steam yacht , which he named "Endeavour" , registered on 28 January 1828! She was propelled by an oscillating engine patented by his son Joseph, (British Patent No. 5531 of 1827).

[Lopez Mike]

Reading about Henry Maudslay and what he went through to make a decent lead screw is worth the time. If I remember correctly, he 'chased' the first lead screw by hand using a hand cut scraper that looked rather like a short segment of a saw blade with the correct profile. Then used that screw in a lathe with a long nut for averaging out the errors to make a better screw. I believe that by the time he got to the third screw he was near to modern specifications. All of us are to some degree unaware of how much history is behind each of our common shop machine tools. Until the mid nineteenth century it was all happening in Britain.

[S. Weaver]

Belay that, Mike. With respect to marine engineering, it was all happening in Britain until 1914, at least. We owe a great debt to the cousins across the pond ...

[Lopez Mike]

Yeah. Until Parsons came along with Turbina, marine engineering was getting into diminishing returns. Critical point steam and reciprocating engines aren't that good of a match.

For me, I'm of the school that loves relatively slow turning engines running on steam that is not that far from a muggy day in the tropics.

Getting off of the topic again.

Until high speed cutting tool steel came along around the end of the nineteenth century, there wasn't that much happening in machine tools. Why build a lathe or a mill that can whack off great gobs of metal when the tool won't take it? Even now, I seldom remove more than a cubic inch of material per minute per horsepower. I'm stuck in about 1930 in my shop. Fast enough for me.