1776 - Steamboat Le Palmipède

Looking for a solution of river navigation substituting for the horse-drawn barges, a French gentleman, Claude de Jouffroy d’Abbans, 25 years old, trials a steamboat moving to and fro in a loop of the Doubs river at Baume-les-Dames in the Northeast of Besançon, his family’s home town.

By all accounts, the machine works. It means that it copiously smokes and moves a bit. There are 2,000 eye witnesses around, including the high-society nuns and novices of the venerable abbey nearby, maybe groupies of the young nobleman and inventor, for the hero of the day is good-looking...

The small boat, 40-foot long and 6-foot wide, is a model at about 1:3 scale of the self-propelled barge which would be business-effective for the transport of people and of goods. It is propelled by two oars driven by a vertical single-acting 6-inch one-cylinder atmospheric engine of British make, of course. It is a reciprocating engine of the Newcomen type, unchanged, as it was invented and implemented sixty years ago1 by Thomas Newcomen (†1729).

¤ The boiler supplies steam at a pressure just above the atmosphere. The piston, balanced by a counterpoise, is pushed up by hot steam until it reaches the end of its stroke, which triggers injection of cold water into the cylinder so as to make the temperature fall and steam condensate, which draws the piston down. A clack valve flushes air, unavoidably brought in by injected water, as soon as steam fills in the cylinder for a new stroke.

The strokes actuate a lever which make 8-foot long oars rotate over a limited arc. Each thrust makes the oars scroll three feet along. The oar blades turn when moving back to the start point to minimize their drag. This means that the engine must run some 20 back-and-forth cycles a minute to assure one knot… which seems a rather high rate if a poor performance in terms of speed. A horse could meet the challenge... We may assess the thrust at some 160 pounds and the arc at some 24 degrees from the features.

We may imagine the delicate tuning required by the elements of the drive chain. This apparatus may wobble somehow. Jouffroy is fortunately supported by an excellent mechanic, Mr Pourchot, who has achieved this tour de force.  

The inventor may be inspired by the easy swim of waterfowl, hence the ship’s name referring to the shape of webbed feet he gave to its oar blades. On these tracks, he may have followed a Swiss minister, Mr J. A. Genevois, who exposed a similar project in a book published in 1759 in Geneva, insisting on imitating the ducks by unfolding their feet to push astern and folding them to pull them ahead.

¤ Poor Genevois was so convinced of the worth of his fruition that he travelled to London the following year to explain his idea to the Commissioners of the Royal Navy, from whom he expected an acknowledgement and a remuneration. Indeed he happened to be considered as whacky, to say the least. Deeply offended, he published his book in London to seek public’s attention, in vain of course.

At first glance, imitating Nature seems a rather good idea but this case raises objections, with all our apologies to Mr Genevois. Swimming is just good for waterfowl while wading around the rushes ; speeding would require more legs, or larger legs, or bigger feet, or something special to increase impact.

Oars form a cumbersome apparatus for the power delivered. To tell the truth, Jouffroy first dreamt of fitting the hulk with a paddle wheel but he did not see how to manage it. Enthusiast though, he is a layman in mechanics. He discovered the steam engine by reading when in jail, where a duel had led him then, and once liberated in 1774, through a mind-opening meeting with Claude d’Auxiron, then 43, a highly knowledgeable polymath, former officer too, of the same home town of Besançon. That year, Auxiron tried to navigate the Seine river in Paris, as we already know, but his boat sunk owing to the fall in the hold of a piece of machinery – likely the counterpoise.  

Jouffroy’s short navigation on the Doubs is likely a world premiere. Very likely but not completely ascertained.

¤ It depends on what William Henry, citizen of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, really achieved on his own in 1763. Henry, talented gunsmith, and good businessman too, 32-year old then, spent few months in England in 1761 with the purpose of becoming acquainted with steam engines. It has been lately told by his friends that he met James Watt… famous by now but almost unknown fifteen years ago and moreover still a layman about steam machinery then. On his own Henry has never claimed that. It is curious how often genuinely interesting stories become tales due to admirers’ embellishment.

However, Henry came back with enough stuff to build a Newcomen engine, set it into a boat and put it on the Conestoga river nearby… where it sunk. No more is known. Had the boat steamed before sinking, which is quite unlikely, Jouffroy would come second.

Henry has not attempted to repeat the experiment. Neither has he delivered any record on it, which gives us a clue on the fate of his attempt inasmuch as he has always been abundant in memos for his scholarly society. Too honest for claiming a feat which did not happen, he may arguably have suffered the same misadventure as Auxiron – sinking before steaming – for the same possible reason : the hull scantling of a boat is light and no match for the engine which is exceedingly heavy and which moreover terribly vibrates when running.

Le Palmipède is about 10 foot in beam. Thus, keeping the proportions, the full scale boat might be 17 foot while most of locks are typically 15-foot wide, and therefore spoils any expectation of river navigation unless the ratio of length to beam would be extended from seven to twelve or so, which would raise new structural issues for the hull.

Moreover, the engine efficiency does not compare favourably with the horse one. For the same amount of work during six hours, the machinery engulfs 300 pounds of coal against some 30 or 40 pounds of oat or of barley for the animal. The Newcomen engine is no match for the challenge. His only advantage is the possibility of running night and day.

Thus Jouffroy’s boat is not a prototype, not even a model but, sadly, just a toy. Marketing-wise, it looks like a dead end. And it is felt so. 

Money has been mainly provided by wealthy families of nuns of the abbey of Baume-les-Dames where Claude’s elder sister is a canoness. No dispute has to be feared but there will be no second turn of fund-raising from the same purses. As for the Monnin & Auxiron’s company purpose, and funds, there might be the matter of a dispute but Jouffroy keeps their trust.

Beyond his unfortunate reckoning on ponderous Newcomen engine, Jouffroy has been heavily mistaken in betting on the oars. To meet the requirements, they are sentenced to be large or numerous owing to the low speed of the single-acting engine. Moreover, they do not provide a continuous thrust. As said, he had been tempted by the paddle wheel, which would have been much more efficient, but the truth is that this imaginative but misinformed man has missed the crankshaft and the scotch yoke mechanisms, so obvious to any British mechanic’s eyes, which has led him to an inadequate solution.

In the thick of his deception with the oars, but not down, he is now thinking about another mechanism to transform reciprocate motion into rotation.

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IN RETROSPECT FROM TODAY

NOTE A - About Jouffroy’s primitive idea.

It has been told that Jouffroy has been inspired by the galleys he could watch passing by through the bars of his jail on the Sainte-Marguerite island in the Mediterranean Sea, where an invitation to a duel for the eyes of a lovely person sent him in 1772 – he was lieutnant at the Bourbon regiment then, and soon dismissed from the arms career.

Actually the galleys were extinct in France at that time but one relic unfit to put to sea which decayed in the harbour of Marseilles, hundred miles far from Sainte-Marguerite. Moreover, Le Palmipède does not row as a galley but as a canoe. Some fog blurs Jouffroy’s adventures, sources, designs and builds inasmuch as he has not depicted his work by himself. It liberates imagination of some admirers and tale-makers…

NOTE B - About suitability of a Newcomen engine.

It had already been told in 1753 by Daniel Bernoulli (†1782), the famous mathematician, aged 53 then, answering a query from the Académie des Sciences, that the venerable engine was unfit to the purpose. He had worked out that the largest steam engine on duty at that time could propel a ship of the line of 74 guns at two knots only so he proposed, as a more efficient solution, to move the ship against wind, to harness horses to a capstan driving a paddle wheel. No significant change has intervened between this acknowledgement and Jouffroy’s attempt.

What is strange enough is this frenzy amongst the French amateurs and engineers to implement solutions based on a famous but unfit machinery. This is certainly a counter-productive effect of Government’s intervention.

Nobody in France has heard yet of James Watt’s last invention, patented in 1769, which separates the chamber of condensation from the cylinder for a dramatic improvement of efficiency. It makes Newcomen machine obsolete. Even so, reaching economic relevance will not be obvious before the 1820s or 30s.

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SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. A. Genevois - Some New inquiries tending to the improvement of Navigation - London, 1760 - available on the internet but copy difficult to read

Seventeen contributors under Maurice Daumas’ direction – L’Expansion du Machinisme, volume III of the Histoire Générale des Techniques – Paris, 1968

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CREDIT

Unknown Painter - Claude de Jouffroy d'Abbans - no credit found on the Internet