Matthew Turner was a ship’s captain, ship designer, gold miner, shipping magnate, and ship builder -in that order- during the California Gold Rush. A hundred years later, Alan Olson is building a wooden sailing ship named the Matthew Turner, an educational ship that combines Turner’s skill at shipbuilding with modern technologies to power it.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
The most cutting edge of the Matthew Turner’s 21st-century technologies is its regenerative electric propulsion system, which stores the energy generated by the natural rotation of the ship’s propellers as they move through the water in a bank of batteries, enabling the Matthew Turner to stay on course even if it finds itself in the doldrums.
Ironically, if Matthew Turner had wanted to be as cutting edge back in the 19th century as Alan Olson is in 21st, he would have focused his energies on coal-fired steamships, which were the vessels of choice for shipbuilders on the Great Lakes, along the Eastern Seaboard, and throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, Turner Shipyards built scores of wind-powered sailing ships, all those aforementioned schooners, sloops, and brigs. That’s because coal-fired steamships weren’t conducive to covering the enormous distances between ports on the Pacific—you might be able to carry enough coal to get yourself from San Francisco to Hawaii, but not enough to get back. Besides, unlike his counterparts to the east, Turner and his customers in California were far from steady supplies of cheap coal, so coal-fired steam technology was then an expensive alternative to free wind.
How expensive? Well, by 1870, as Turner Shipyards was beginning to ramp up production, the handful of small coal mines that had tried to make a go of it just east of San Francisco had already gone out of business, managing to produce only a few thousand tons of sub-bituminous coal, the type of the mineral most suitable for generating steam. Steadier supplies of coal could be shipped from the Pacific Northwest, where it sold for $11 a ton, but by the time that coal reached San Francisco, the price almost tripled to $28 a ton.
Turner’s customers weren’t anxious to pay premiums like that, so instead of pushing coal-fired steam technology, Turner pushed wind, narrowing the bows of his schooners so they’d slice through ocean waves, but also rigging the square and gaff sails on his brigantines so that a captain could respond quickly to a sudden gale or make the most of a dying breeze. By pushing wind, Turner not only helped the new oceangoing sugar and cargo industries that sailed his ships achieve profitability, he set a high standard for sailing vessels at a time when they were actually going out of style.
While the Matthew Turner project is pretty cool, both ship builders have pretty interesting life stories. Read about them, as well as the new ship, at Collectors Weekly.
Source: neatorama