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The paddle wheel is a device for converting between rotary motion of a shaft and linear motion of a fluid. In the linear-to-rotary direction, it is placed in a fluid stream to convert the linear motion of the fluid into rotation of the wheel. Such a rotation can be used as a source of power, or as an indication of the speed of flow.
A typical river paddle steamer from the 1850s. Fall Line's steamer Providence, launched 1866 Finlandia Queen, a paddle-wheel ship from 1990s in Tampere, Finland [1]. A paddle steamer is a steamship or steamboat powered by a steam engine driving paddle wheels to propel the craft through the water.
The paddle wheel is a large wheel, generally built of a steel framework, upon the outer edge of which are fitted numerous paddle blades (called floats or buckets). The bottom quarter or so of the wheel travels underwater. Rotation of the paddle wheel produces thrust, forward or backward as required.
The trips by paddle wheel steamship to Panama and Nicaragua from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, via New Orleans and Havana were about 2,600 miles (4,200 km) long and took about two weeks. Trips across the Isthmus of Panama or Nicaragua typically took about one week by native canoe and mule back.
A few paddle steamers serve niche tourism needs as cruise boats on lakes [a] and others, such as Delta Queen, still operate on the Mississippi River. In Oregon , several replica paddle steamers , which are non-steam-powered sternwheelers built in the 1980s and later, are operated for tourism purposes on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers .
The British side-wheel paddle steamer SS Great Western was the first steamship purpose-built for regularly scheduled trans-Atlantic crossings, starting in 1838. In 1836 Isambard Kingdom Brunel and a group of Bristol investors formed the Great Western Steamship Company to build a line of steamships for the Bristol-New York route. [ 14 ]
Ox-powered Roman paddle wheel boat from a 15th-century copy of De Rebus Bellicis. Apart from its use in milling and water-raising, ancient engineers applied the paddled waterwheel for automatons and in navigation. Vitruvius (X 9.5–7) describes multi-geared paddle wheels working as a ship odometer, the earliest of its kind.
In 1802, American lawyer and inventor John Stevens built a 25-foot (7.6 m) boat with a rotary steam engine coupled to a four-bladed propeller. The craft achieved a speed of 4 mph (6.4 km/h), but Stevens abandoned propellers due to the inherent danger in using the high-pressure steam engines. His subsequent vessels were paddle-wheeled boats. [15]