That’s what ideas have. There are stars. There are also those with stars. At the end of the 19th century, Ernest Bazin, an otherwise brilliant French inventor, had an idea for the latter, thanks to his technical contributions to underwater research or patents such as a motor, electric plow or vegetable cutter. : those with congenital stars. Or, given the situation, he’s miserably doomed to shipwreck.

for 1890sBacked by an old man with extensive experience at sea and holding key privileges such as the French Legion of Honor or the Portuguese Order of Jesus, Bazin decided to embark on a challenge worthy of his talent: rethinking boats. Its aim was to “rethink” its traditional design in search of greater efficiency.

With such a purpose in mind, he decided to implement a seemingly insane suggestion: design wheeled ships with large discs arranged in pairs on either side of the hull, as if they were a water carriage. It may sound crazy, but what Bazin was looking for was a more efficient way of moving and a way to give the ships more speed.

“Minimize Friction”

“The principle on which the ship is based is to substitute the rotation of the large wheels for the usual sliding motion of the hull through the water. minimize friction“, collects an article that Nature Dedicated to the invention of the French engineer in 1897. The British magazine reported that, thanks to its design, Bazin’s ship is expected to move twice as fast as a conventional ship of equivalent power.

“Bazin’s purpose was to increase speed by suppressing the friction of the water against the ship when forced forward,” says another article published in 1896. kingston collector and Maritime Heritage. To do this, the ordinary hull of a ship was replaced by a kind of platform supported on the water by lenticular-shaped swivel wheels”.

Bazin couldn’t get enough of doing locked accounts in his office, so he applied for a patent in 1892 and soon moved his ideas from paper to shipyards. The result was a ship named Enerst Bazin, built in Saint-Denis with the support of Naviere-express-rouler-Bazin, a limited company founded in 1893. finally released in 1986.

Soon after, the ship was moved from the waters of the Seine to Rouen so that its creators could add the engines and the rest of the machinery needed for their next challenge: an experimental voyage across the English Channel.

published in history Nature It allows us to know exactly how the boat is: 280 tons of displacement, 39 meters long and 11.5 meters wide. “The frame and body are supported by six 32-foot, 10-inch hollow spoke wheels. [unos 10 m] diameter, about a third will be submerged”, the article abundantly detailing that the engines, cargo and cabins are placed on a frame and the axles of the wheels.

“The machines were built to develop 750 horsepower, of which 550 horsepower would be used for the propeller and 200 horsepower would be used to drive three pairs of wheels. With this power, an ordinary steamship of similar tonnage would not exceed 18 or 19 knots.” Bazin expected double reach this speed

The ship even conducted a test at Le Havre, but what had such good results and promised so much on paper did not work out in practice.

This whimsical design by Ernest Bazin had gained notoriety inside and outside of France, but neither the design nor the wheels turned out to be what he expected. Its creator died soon after, in January 1898, and there was no margin left to see plans developed for a four-twin-disc ocean liner translated into practice, and he is said to have been working on it until shortly before his death.

His experiment may not bear fruit, but for the next few decades the concept of the “rolling boat” would continue to inspire other inventors. Frederick Knapp, a Canadian lawyer who designed a strange cylindrical ship. The result was not much different from the exposure of the Bazin ship and his, but his story is already material for another article.

On Xataka: The story of the deadly Spanish warship Pelayo that terrified the United States in the 19th century

Images: Wikipedia one And 2 And Jorge Franganillo (Flickr)