sisu: Go fly a kite

September 16, 2005

Go fly a kite

It isn't "all about oil" anymore, thanks to economic man's relentless drive to get a leg up. Oil too costly? Harness the wind. The Donald McKay (see Clipper ship entry below) of our day, Germany's SkySails leads the fleet with a system that combines a "towing kite filled with compressed air, an autopilot and wind-optimised route management. Almost every merchant and passenger vessel can be equipped or retrofitted with the SkySails system," says the company's website.

"The high price of oil and stricter pollution regulations are working to turn back the clock in the evolution of seafaring technology, the Economist [subscription only] reports, prompting a comeback for wind propulsion in cargo shipping in a new form: kites, not sails," emails the Wall Street Journal's "The Morning Brief":

Next year, SkySails, a German firm based in Hamburg, will begin outfitting cargo ships with massive kites designed to tug vessels and reduce their diesel consumption. The firm estimates that these kites will reduce fuel consumption by about one-third, a big savings, given that fuel accounts for about 60% of shipping costs. The idea of reintroducing sails to modern ships is not new, but several previous attempts in the 1970s and 1990s were scuttled by the drawbacks of having a mast: lots of drag in unfavorable winds, the loss of valuable container space on the deck and a hindrance for the cranes used to load and unload ships. The SkySails approach does away with masts and is much cheaper, the Economist says. The firm says it can outfit a ship with a kite system for between about $488,000 and $3.1 million, depending on the vessel's size.

Can an international Olympic sailing event be far behind?

"In 1851, Eleanor Creesy, in a position almost unheard of for a woman in the mid-nineteenth century, served as the navigator on the maiden voyage of the clipper ship "Flying Cloud" -- traveling from New York to San Francisco in only eighty-nine days. This swift passage set a world record that went unbroken for more than a century," according to Publisher's Weekly, quoted on the dustjacket of David W. Shaw's The Flying Cloud.

Then as now, economics drove innovation. From The Oxford Companion to Ships & The Sea (1976), which notes "the term itself is said to have been coined because these very fast ships could clip the time taken on passage by the regular packet ships, themselves very fast in their day":

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 and in Australia in 1850, raising a demand for the fastest passages to both, and the repeal of the British Navigation Acts in 1849, opening the tea trade from China to London to foreign ships, gave a tremendous fillip to the production of American clippers, in which the shipbuilder Donald McKay, of Boston, took the lead.

How thrilling to know that McKay's shipyard was across the Chelsea Creek on Border Street in East Boston, a ten-minute walk from where we blog. While masts are a liability now, back then they were cutting edge. Speaking of which, From Era of the Clipper Ships:

With his line of credit now established, Donald McKay purchased a tidewater tract of land that fronted on 406 Border Street, where he immediately set up his yard. He erected a steam sawmill to custom-cut all his frame timber. He devised and developed a saw that could be adjusted for all angles of cut. The saw could be tilted while sawing through all desired twists and turns of the cuts needed for shaping out ship's knees and ornaments, in much less time than sawing the timbers by hand. The saw was hung in a mechanical device so that the bevel of the cut could be controlled. Thousands of man-sawing hours were eliminated and the time saved put to other tasks.

Tilted while sawing? Tuck is skeptical. This would require more research for verification, but the point is made. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Posted by Sissy Willis on September 16, 2005 at 09:49 AM in Great works, To market, to market | Permalink