No immediate use of the double hull in naval vessels of the maritime
powers resulted from the construction of the _Steam Battery_. The
flat-bottom chine-built design employed by Fulton in _North River_,
_Raritan_, and other early steamboats was utilized in the design for a
projected steamer by the British Admiralty in 1815-16. This vessel was
about 76 feet overall, 16-foot beam, and 8-foot 10 inches depth in hold.
Her design was for a flat-bottom, chine-built hull with no fore-and-aft
camber in the bottom, a sharp entrance, and a square-tuck stern with
slight overhang above the cross-seam. Her side frames were straight and
vertical amidships, but curved as the bow and stern were approached. She
was to be a side-paddle-wheel steamer, and her hull was diagonally
braced; the wheel and engine were to be about amidships where she was
dead flat for about 14 feet. However, the engine and boilers were not
installed; the engine was utilized ashore for pumping, and the vessel
was completed in the Deptford Yard as a sailing ship. Under the name
_Congo_ she was employed in the African coast survey. Her plan is in the
Admiralty Collection of Draughts, at the National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich, England.
The double hull continued to be employed in both steam and team
ferryboats in the United States and in England and France. A few river
and lake steamers were also built with this design of hull. Continued
efforts to obtain fast sailing by use of the double hull produced a
number of sailing catamarans; of these the Herreshoff catamarans of the
1870's showed high speed when reaching in a fresh breeze.
Designs for double-hulled steamers appeared during the last half of the
19th century; in 1874 the _Castalia_, a large, double-hull, iron,
cross-channel steamer, was built by the Thames Iron-works Company at
Blackwall, England. She was 290 feet long, and each hull had a beam of
17 feet. The paddle wheel was placed between the hulls and, ready for
sea, she drew 6-1/2 feet. She ran the 22 miles between Dover and Calais
in 1 hour and 50 minutes, a speed much slower than that of the
paddle-wheel, cross-channel steamers having one hull. Another
double-hull steamer was built for this service by Hawthorn, Leslie and
Company, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Scotland, in 1877. First named _Express_,
she was renamed _Calais-Douvres_ when she went into service in May 1878.
Her length was 302 feet, her extreme beam 62 feet, and each hull had a
beam of 18 feet, 3 inches. She drew 6-foot 7-1/2 inches ready for sea
and the paddle wheel was between the hulls. On her trials she made 14
knots and burned coal excessively. Sold to France in 1880, she was taken
out of service in 1889. Though popular, she was not faster than the
single-hull steamers in this service and had been a comparatively
expensive vessel to build and operate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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