I’m sure I’ve reported on a future of remote control cargo ships before. Rolls Royce have created a good looking, if under-acted, promo video about life in the control centre for this one, though.

There’s a tale of future piracy in this, I reckon.

Massive crewless cargo ships plying the world’s oceans may sound far-fetched, but Rolls-Royce has been working on the idea for a number of years now. In fact, the company says it expects the first remotely controlled vessels to sail into operation by 2020.

Source: Rolls-Royce sails ahead with plan for remotely controlled cargo ships

In 1861 John Elder from Glasgow brought out plans for a circular ship. It would, he claimed, have maximum stability and minimum draught, making it an ideal gun platform.

The Russian Navy, in the shape of an Admiral Popov, liked the idea and built two circular ironclads, the Popovkas or Cyclads, to patrol the Black Sea.

A variation on the design was the imperial yacht Livadia, which was more of an ellipse than a circle. Built by John Elder for Czar Alexander II she wasn’t delivered until after he was assassinated.

Links- Circular Iron-Clads in the Imperial Russian Navy, the Cyclad Novgorod in 1:192nd scale

It’s been a while since I posted anything from this book. I’m back with one of teh longer chapters.

The Cigar Ship was the brainchild of a pair of brothers, Ross and Thomas Winans, who had made their money on the American railways. They launched their first cigar ship in 1858 in Baltimore. The idea was to remove all the flat and square sections that water could pool on or crash against on a conventional cross section and have a boat that flowed through waves rather than fighting against them and pushing over them. With a huge rotating propeller, actually a modified paddle from a river steamer, mounted amidships and rudders at each end, this first ship was not a great success.

After another two prototypes, one intended as a showcase for Russia’s czar, the largest of the Winan’s ships was the steam yacht Ross Winans, launched from hepworth’s Yard on the Isle of Dogs in 1866. This time the vessel had propellers at either end and a slightly more orthodox superstructure. A swinging “ballast donkey” counteracted the ship’s instability, swinging left or right depending on the rotation of the prop shafts and by amounts based upon the steam pressure of the engine.

The Ross Winans wasn’t a success and never truly put to sea but for a few short coastal runs and trials on the Solent. The basis of its design was reused in the 1880 in HMS Polyphemus, a ram ship, and American whaleback steamers.

Links-
The Winans’ Cigar ships. Heavily researched and with a lot more images.
Winans’ family papers
3dCAD’s model of the Ross Winans (membership required to download).
HMS Polyphemus, wikipedia entry, the ship may have appeared in War of the Worlds as HMS Thunder Child, a larger wiki entry, the National Maritime Museum has a model
The whaleback Christopher Columbus, subject of an eponymous film, Lake Superior shipwrecks, model of the Columbus, two, three, more models here

Tinselman briefly explains the history of the Mareorama, a simulated sea journey from Nice to Constantinople via Venice. The elaborate steam ship set rocked as if on the sea and a painted background unrolled to show familiar scenes from the Mediterannean.

via BoingBoing

Ships in World War 1 often sported strange cubist paint schemes designed to confuse submarines as to their direction and speed. Here’s an intersting page about Razzle Dazzle colour schemes.

via BoingBoing

Apologies for the delay in the Bizarre Ships posts, the book got lost in the move. I figured that, as you can now get a 1:72nd scale model of the Hunley, I should skip forward to the Early Submarines chapter for this post.

Sadly the illustrations for Garret’s submarine, Nordenfeldt’s later submarine and submarine Argonaut II have been ripped out leaving only these.

The Spuyten Durvil (“Devil with a Syringe”)

Nordenfeldt’s first submarine

The Monitor and its offspring were probably the first modern battleships. Having guns in a rotating armoured turret and presenting very little structure above water, the Monitor was effective against the tall fixed gun ships of the day. It’s first battle was, famously, against the Merrimac- a sort of floating fort captured and modified by the South.

More at The Monitor Centre and the US Navy’s own site.

I’m not sure what etiquette, if any, covers the scanning of pages from out of print books to post on the internet for the edification of others. So for this chapter I’m just going to sample a few pages. Admittedly, they are the ones with pictures on them.

We all know what an American river steamer looks like from Westerns and musicals. What I never knew was that they were incredibly shallow draught craft, to navigate up the rivers. Because Iron was at a premium at the time, they utilised wood for as much as possible, including the drive shaft.

There were two distinct styles of river boat, the Easter and Western. Eastern boats ran up the Hudson and in the Long Island Sound, Western boats in the Mississippi- Missouri- Arkansas- Ohio- Red River basin. Various quirks of design made them unstable and the Western boats were intentionally built for a short life because they were likely to rip their hulls apart on concealed tree trunks or be otherwise disabled within five years. (A “Sawyer” was a floating tree entangled by its roots and alternately raised and depressed by the force of the current; it usually gave warning of its presence. Presumably where Mark Twain got the name for his character as well.)

More information about modern steamboats at Steamboats.org

A terrible thing happened to me late last year. Whilst walking through the Central Library I passed a shelf with a sign on it saying “All books 50p”.

I bought a lot of them.

Most of the books have subject matter suitable for Steam Geek, so I’m going to start scanning some of the images from them and posting them here.

First up is Bizarre Ships of the Nineteenth Century by John Guthrie. Published by Hutchinson Scientific and Technical in 1970. From the Editor’s Note-

This series of books is primarily intended to be of interest to those professionally concerned with the design, construction and operation of ships and other marine vehicles. Many remarkable changes are now taking place in the size, shape, speed and capability of conventional ships of all types, while hovercraft, hydrofoil ships and other unusual vessels are beginning to have a striking effect on the maritime scene. Technical staff and management increasingly need up-to-date design data and specialist information on a wide range of topics, and it is hoped that most books in the series will be of direct value to them, and to many students at universities and technical colleges.

In addition to specialist monographs and stuent textbooks, the series also includes books having a broad appeal to all those who want to know more about the fascinating variety of craft which can be seen in ports, on rivers and at sea: this book is one of that group. Its principal purpose is to remind us of some of the odd and highly unorthodox vessels which have played a minor but not inglorious role in the development of the modern ship. This chapter of nautical history is easily overlooked and often decried, but many of the freak ships built a century ago taught a technical lesson which had to be learnt the hard way and which is not always fully understood even to-day. Quite apart from its professional value, this story of the mostly unsuccessful, but always brave, attempts of bold inventors and enthusiastic cranks has a personal appeal which is difficult to resist. It is written simply and directly by a ship surveyor with a lifelong experience of all types of craft and an enduring passion for the telling details which are essential to a real understanding of the way in which ships, large or small, successes or failure, matter to the men who design and build them and then risk their lives to test their belief in something different.

I’ll be uploading images from a chapter a week, usually on a Monday or Tuesday. And when this book’s finished, I’ll dig out another one.