The Steamboating Forum

The introduction to this section is rather disparaging about sails, but there is a long and entirely honourable history of sailing ships and boats with auxillary steam plants, and indeed steam vessels with a few sails to save fuel when the wind was favourable.

Anybody ever use sails on a steamboat?

BTW I thoroughly recommend Lady Brassey's book "A voyage in the Sunbeam. Sunbeam was a 500 ton, three masted topsail schooner-yacht, with a 70 hp steam auxillary: 10 knots and fuel capacity for 20 days steaming. The voyage in question was right round the world in 1876-7.

The only small steam boat I know that used sails was Hawk a 14 footer. Her details are on the SBA register.

Read the book " The Steam Coffin" about the first atlantic steamship crossing, the Great Eastern had masts, and what about "sailing" the Eppelton Hall across the Atlantic. Lots of early steamships had aux sails; they couldn't carry enough fuel ( at 3 or 4 psi boiler pressure) go go anywhere! The early Mississippi steamboats had such low pressure the boilers had a standpipe that went all the way up above the top deck, OPEN, the weight of the water was enough to keep the steam IN, that's where they added feed water. Watt did NOT approve of "strong" steam!

Saw David Black and Ed Langley sailing Valkyrie on Windermere one evening during the SBA rally back in about 1987 and may even have taken a pic. It was very pretty being good under steam and attractive under sail with a gaff rig if memory serves.

Slightly out of topic, these 2 photos of an old French treatise on propeller propulsion, dated from 1855 (in a very sad state, alas!), wich illustrates the, then beginning, use of sails + steam propulsion.

-> The frontispiece of the book...:


-> ... And the frontispiece engraving, fully illustrating the steam and sails combo:

ron parola wrote: The early Mississippi steamboats had such low pressure the boilers had a standpipe that went all the way up above the top deck, OPEN, the weight of the water was enough to keep the steam IN, that's where they added feed water. Watt did NOT approve of "strong" steam!

.

Indeed. Watt's big invention was the external condenser, and while he did understand some of the value of higher pressure steam, piston seals and boilers that didn't explode needed a lot of development (a lot of which was done by Boulton and Watt after Watt's bankruptcy).

There survives some writing by Watt wherein he notes that a cylinder he got back from being bored (perhaps 12" in diameter was "round to within the thickness of a shilling".

I would worry about burning holes in modern Dacron (Terline) sails from sparks as well as getting soot on them.

As an owner of an 11 meter sailboat I cannot imagine finding room for a steam power plant.

Well it's not done yet, but Befur is certainly designed to be a steam yacht. Leak Compound and Chinese Junk Rig - lots of words and pics here http://sy-befur.co.uk...

Should be in the water next spring.... (fingers crossed)