History of propellers and steam navigation, with biographical sketches of the early inventors

by Robert Macfarlane

Dr. Papin, a Frenchman, Captain Savery, and the Marquis of Worcester, preposed to propel vessels by steam power ap~ plied in some way to paddles, but the testimony which is left to posterity of their contrivances for that purpose, is so um satisfactory and vague that little can be made out of it. In 1726, a Dr. John Allen published a work in London in which he preposed to propel a vessel by having a horizon tal pipe Open at the stern, into which air or water was to be forced, to propel the boat forward by its reaction. The Doctor tried his scheme on a boat upon a canal, and he states that if steam was used as a power, he had no doubt but it could be moved at the rate of three miles per hour.

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About the author

Robert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.

Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.