PADDLE STEAMER
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The paddle wheel was the first form of mechanical propulsion for a boat, but has now been almost entirely superseded by the screw propeller and other, more modern, forms of marine propulsion.
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 riverboat in the United States where they still operate for tourist use on the Mississippi River.
Side-wheelers are used as riverboats and 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. Due to this extra maneuverability side-wheelers were more popular on the narrower, windy rivers of the Murray-Darling system in Australia where a number are still in operation today.
Seagoing paddle steamers
The first seagoing trip of a paddle steamer was that in 1808 of the Albany', which steamed from the Hudson River along the coast to the Delaware River. This was purely for the purpose of moving a river-boat to a new market, but the use of paddle-steamers for short coastal trips began soon after that.
The first paddle-steamer to make a long ocean voyage was the SS Savannah, built in 1819 expressly for this service. Savannah set out for Liverpool on May 22, 1819, sighting Ireland after 23 days at sea. This was the first powered crossing of the Atlantic, although Savannah also carried a full rig of sail to assist the engines when winds were favorable. In 1822, Charles Napier's Aaron Manby, the world's first iron ship, made the first direct steam crossing from London to Paris and the first seagoing voyage by an iron ship anywhere.
In 1838, Sirius, a fairly small steam packet built for the Cork to London route, became the first vessel to cross the Atlantic under sustained steam power, beating Isambard Kingdom Brunel's much larger Great Western by a day. Great Western, however, was actually built for the transatlantic trade, and so had sufficient coal for the passage; Sirius had to burn furniture and other items after running out of coal. The Great Western’s more successful crossing 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 screw propulsion and sail rigging. It was 692 ft (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.
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