Category:Paddle steamers

1928: Model of paddle steamer PS Britannia [image info]

1928: Model of an unnamed single-funnel paddle steamer, made by Twinings Models [image info]

1928: Model of an unnamed single-funnel paddle steamer, made by Twinings Models, side view [image info]

The history of paddle steamships goes back almost as far as the history of the first practical steam engines.

Currently (as of 2025), the last working sea-going example of a paddlesteamer is PS Waverley (until recently it was presented as the last ocean-going paddle steamer).

Paddle ships pre-steam

People who associate paddle ship with steamship may be surprised to find that the earliest records of paddlewheel-powered ships dates back to the fourth or fifth Centuries, with systems developed apparently independently in both the Mediterranean and in China, powered by humans and/or oxen.

The early realisation of the possibilities of paddlewheel propulsion was probably inspired by “water wheel” technology, as most civilisations had already developed and refined the water-driven wheel as a way of powering equipment such as grindstones, and a paddlewheel was essentially the same technology used in reverse.

Steam

The first working paddle steamer, Palmipède, was built by Marquis Claude de Jouffroy in 1774 and sailed in 1776. This was followed in 1783 by Pyroscaphe, whose first trip lasted for 15 minutes before it broke.

William Symington built at least three working boats (and got to test them in 1802).

Commercial steamboat services started to spring up on both sides of the Atlantic from about 1812 onwards.

1938 saw Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western cross the Atlantic, followed by the massive Great Eastern in 1858, which had three propulsion methods – side-paddlewheels, screw drive, and sails.

After this, paddleships began to be superseded by the newer-technology ship propellers, which had now proved their ability.

Paddlesteamers were still popular for tourism, and useful as minesweepers due to their wide decks for equipment, shallow draught, and (after WW1) ability to get close to magnetically-triggered mines without setting them off (due to the ships' wooden hulls).

Technical developments

"Feathering": One inefficiency of the paddlewheel system was the limited time that the paddles pent in the water, and the amount of wasteful splashing and churning that happened when the blades entered or left the water. This could be improved using an additional offset wheel and coupling bars to automatically tilt the blades at different stages of their travel, mostly as they entered and left the water. A version of this technique was later used in helicopters to automatically tilt their vanes differently at different parts of the rotation cycle. The term is probably a reference to birds tilting their main flight feathers differently at different parts of the cycle when they flap their wings.
Mississippi riverboats found that using a single large rear paddle the width of the ship increased coupling efficiency due to the additional blade surface area in contact with the water. However, this configuration wasn't so good for seagoing vessels.
SS Bessemer (the "Bessemer Saloon") experimented with a similar improvement using more then one pair of wheels.
What doesn't seem to have been tried is that paddlewheel equivalent of caterpillar tracks.

Some side-wheel paddle steamers had a separate engine for each wheel, allowing the wheels to turn at different speeds or even in opposite directions for extreme maneuverability. However, this was at the expense of stability, and even in ships that had this feature, the two axles could often be locked to turn the ship into a more conventional paddlesteamer.