History of Propellers and Steam Navigation: With Biographical Sketches of the Early Inventors

About this book

Dr. Papin, a Frenchman, Captain Savery, and the Marquis of Worcester, preposed to propel vessels by steam power ap~ plied in some way to paddles, but the testimony which is left to posterity of their contrivances for that purpose, is so um satisfactory and vague that little can be made out of it. In 1726, a Dr. John Allen published a work in London in which he preposed to propel a vessel by having a horizon tal pipe Open at the stern, into which air or water was to be forced, to propel the boat forward by its reaction. The Doctor tried his scheme on a boat upon a canal, and he states that if steam was used as a power, he had no doubt but it could be moved at the rate of three miles per hour.