There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Eighty Five
Ole Johansen Winstrup (1782 – 1867)
It must have been chastening as a 25-year-old to see your capital city set on fire by the Brits and what remained of your navy towed away. The aftermath of the Battle of Copenhagen in 1807 caused the latest inductee into our Hall of Fame, Danish-born Ole Johansen Winstrup to exercise his grey cells to come up with an ingenious method of strengthening Copenhagen’s sea defences.
In 1808 the guardsman worked long and hard in his workshop to develop a model of what he called Hvalfisken, the Whale. And a pretty Heath-Robinsonish affair it was too. The idea behind the vessel was that the best way of surprising an enemy’s fleet was to creep up on it from below. In essence, The Whale was what we would now know as a submarine.
According to Winstrup’s patent application, in preparation for an attack a diver would drill numerous holes into the submarine’s hull and seal them with corks. When the vessel was in the requisite position, the diver would simply remove the corks, causing it to sink, forming a barrier against naval attack. Presumably, once the diver had removed all the corks, he would swim to safety. Quite how many would have to be removed before the vessel became unstable was not made clear.
Of course, there was the risk that the vessel would be detected and boarded by the curious enemy. Naturally, Winstrup had thought of that. “Should it happen that they send a ship’s carpenter to examine the ship,” he wrote, “then the harpoon shown in the model should be used.”
Clearly satisfied that he had come up with a workable model and what would have been a game changer in the field of naval combat, Winstrup submitted his patent application to the Danish authorities. He even invited the Danish Crown Prince, later Frederik VI, to take a ride on the boat but the palace declined the kind offer. It may have been this act of hubris on Winstrup’s part that proved his undoing as the patent was refused “because of technical shortcomings” and the Whale was consigned to the scrap heap of history.
Bonkers as the idea of removing corks from holes to make a vessel sink may have been, careful inspection of Winstrup’s plans would reveal one revolutionary idea – the vessel used propellers. Experimentation into the way mechanical power, principally steam, was underway in various parts of the world in the early 19th century but Winstrup was ahead of the curve. It was not until 1815 that Richard Trevithick had designed a steam-powered propeller and the late 1830s that John Ericsson came up with the two-screw propeller system for use on naval vessels. The Danes had cavalierly thrown away a technological edge.
Although Winstrup gave up on the Whale, he did continue to blaze a technological trail. In 1826 he built a two-horse steam engine, which was adopted by a Copenhagen brewery owned by Hans Bagger Momme. It was the first steam engine to be used in Denmark, built by a Dane. Winstrup built a few more steam engines and in 1827 he set up an iron foundry. He even operated a wind turbine.
But by coming up with the use of a propeller to drive a boat and not being able to convince the authorities to adopt the idea, Ole Johansen Winstrup, you are a worthy inductee into our illustrious Hall of Fame.
If you enjoyed, why not try Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone
http://www.martinfone.com/other-works/
