Charles W.
speaker
131 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Charles W. ’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
All right, I promised talk of history, and here we go, because if you wanted to invent a tugboat, the 18th and 19th centuries was a pretty good time to do it because we were using sailing ships at the time for transporting people and goods and all kinds of things. And those things are gorgeous, beautiful on the water.
They sailed great out on the high seas, but they did not do well, especially because they were just sailing ships when they got around land in small, tight spaces.
So they would, you know, you've seen it in movies, they would dock, or not dock, but they would anchor, you know, a couple of hundred feet from shore and then start shuttling people and stuff in little tiny boats because that's about as close as they could safely get. And that's not efficient. Taylor would be rolling over in his grave.
Yeah, I think he was. He was from England, 18th century inventor. His name, no lie, was Jonathan Hulls. That's nuts. It is pretty nuts. And he thought it was like a helper vessel is what he called it. It was powered by a steam engine. But what he was talking about was tugboats. It could tow a sailboat in and out of port. This was in 1737 when he filed for a patent.
It was called a description and draft of a new invented machine for carrying vessels or ships out of or into any harbor port or river against the wind in tide or in a calm. And it was totally genius. 30 years before James Watt's steam engine hit the scene. Yeah. And everyone was like, what a dumb idea.
I guess so. All I know is we're getting kicked out of this pub any second now.
Yeah.
Yeah. Have you ever walked along an old riverway that has those built-up banks for that purpose?
Yeah, I had my experience doing that in Akron. So that may be an Ohio thing. I believe the waterway through Sand Run is where that was. And it was the same deal. And Emily or her mom or somebody, you know, because you're up higher and, you know, it's an obvious path. And they're like, yeah, this is where the donkeys and pack horses would pull these things.
There was a paddle steamer named Charlotte Dundas that was the first tugboat in operation towing for the very first trip, I think, two fully loaded sloops, 18 miles along the Fourth and Clyde Canal at Glasgow at a scorching two miles per hour.
That's all that mattered. Yeah, they had all the time in the world.
That's right. 40 miles inland. So that was a huge boon for London at the time. There was a steamship called the Majestic that worked with the East India Company towing things back and forth up the Thames. And Liverpool had one as well. So they were they were getting in on the game there in the UK. They were.
Okay.
I would say Dumbarton, but I don't know. I'm just guessing.
Okay.
Yeah. And, you know, earlier I was saying that they said, oh, this idea is so dumb. I don't know if it was that it was so dumb, but steam power and stuff that came along a little bit later, like they didn't have steam engines at the time, so they wouldn't have even known it was dangerous. But when they did come online, why do I keep saying that? I don't think it fits. Right.
I think so. But online doesn't mean just on the Internet. Online just means like it's beginning to function right as a thing.
That's a good line. Oh, boy, Lenny. It's locked onto my internet. Where was that? Oh, yeah. Steam engines were dangerous. They would blow up a lot. There was, you know, when tugboats first started using, you know, coming online, using that steam, they were like, I don't know. I mean, is it better to have this thing that might blow up a port?
Yeah.
Oh, man, you almost had it right out of the gate. So now you could get 400 ton ships because, you know, I don't know if we mentioned they were loading like railroad cars onto these things for the first time. So it was very, very heavy stuff. They could go to Newcastle for the first time. All of a sudden people in more distant places could get coal.
Showing 21–40 of 131 · page 2 of 7
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