The SS Bessemer: The Worst Idea in Nautical History?
This is a story about an inventor and his invention. It is the story of striving to create something new and innovation in problem solving. It is also, perhaps more than anything, a story of failure.
It is the story of a brilliant man trying to solve a longstanding problem. It is the story of how in solving that problem, he created others. And it is a story of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.
The man, Sir Henry Bessemer, was undoubtedly a talented inventor. Born two years before the Battle of Waterloo, and dying two years before the end of the 19th century, this Victorian gentleman is most remembered for his steel-making process which became the most significant way to manufacture steel for a hundred years.
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The process made his fortune, and his reputation, and earned him his knighthood. He also played a major role in establishing Sheffield as a major producer of steel and center for industry; without him Sheffield may never have come to be known as England’s “steel city.”
But Sir Henry was that most Victorian of oddities, a gentleman amateur, and his dabblings into multiple fields of expertise were not all so successful. It may be for his steel that he is remembered, but it is for his ideas about ships that he has become infamous.
This is not the story of his successes, his contributions to the Second Industrial Revolution which saw Britain emerge as a global leader in the 19th century. This is the story of the SS Bessemer, among the most ill-fated of ships to ever have set sail.
A Genius in His Field
To be fair to Sir Henry, he was a brilliant man. The son of a Huguenot and another inventor who was forced to flee France after the Revolution of 1789, he was born in Hertfordshire in 1813 into a moderately successful family, and had to make his name on his own merits.
Sir Henry made his first fortune designing and manufacturing steam powered machines which produced bronze dust, a key component in gold paint. The secret manufacturing process proved difficult for others to reproduce, and he became a major supplier.
His steel making process, at once good quality and cheap, addressed a pressing bottleneck in British industry. It led to iron being replaced with stronger and stiffer steel, improving at a stroke Britain’s entire industrial base.
But Sir Henry’s move to the seas and his creation of the SS Bessemer was designed to address a more personal problem. Sir Henry suffered from extreme seasickness, and it was this that led him to investigate whether a solution could be found.
His solution seems at first to be brilliant. The SS Bessemer was to be a paddle steamer which would contain a central cabin mounted on gimbals and designed to stay level no matter the outward orientation of the ship. The ship would roll with the waves, but the passengers within would always stay perfectly upright.
It was not an automatic feature, and required constant crewing to work. A member of the crew was tasked with watching a spirit level at his station, and manipulating a complex system of hydraulics to adjust the orientation of the cabin in real time.
Sir Henry built a successful test version at his home in Denmark Hill, London, and received a patent for the design in 1869, His idea was to use the SS Bessemer as a cross channel ferry, linking England and France and providing a solution to comfortable travel to continental Europe.
He attracted a significant amount of investment to the project, some £250,000 then and the equivalent of more than £25 million ($31 million) today. He set up a limited joint stock company to continue to attract investment and envisaged running a fleet of these innovative ships, opening the door to France and the world beyond.
There was however a tiny problem with the idea, and that problem was the SS Bessemer herself. Put simply, the central stable cabin radically reduced the ship’s seaworthiness and the ship herself proved to be a nightmare to operate.
By the time she arrived at Calais for her first trials she had already crashed into the shoreline at Hull, thankfully emerging without damage. However as she tried to enter Calais harbor she proved impossible to steer at slow speeds, and crashed into the pier.
The gimballed passenger cabin within did not roll with the ship, of course, and the momentum of this caused the SS Bessemer to lurch wildly from side to side in anything but a flat calm. But the mere inclusion of the cabin was enough to compromise her entire design, and even with the gimbals locked in place she displayed horrible sailing characteristics.
After the damage to the ship and the pier were repaired the SS Bessemer again tried to enter Calais harbor. She promptly crashed into the same pier and caused much more extensive damage. Part of the pier was entirely demolished by the impact.
It was clear that the idea, and the ship, were cursed, and investors lost confidence in a vessel which only seemed good for slowly dismantling the seafront at Calais. She would never sail with the gimbals operating, and after a further accident she had her seaworthiness license revoked, and the innovative cabin removed entirely.
The hull was docked in Dover where she remained, slowly degrading and rusting until she was sold for scrap in 1879. The cabin however had a very different end: claimed by the ship’s chief designer Edward James Reed, it was installed at his home, Hextable House in Swanley, where it was used as a billiards room.
The house went on to become a women’s horticultural college and the cabin became a lecture hall, until the college was bombed by the Luftwaffe in World War Two. The cabin was destroyed.
Today only three decorative panels survive from the SS Bessemer, recovered from the ruins of the cabin after the bombing. Nothing else remains of an idea which, while clever, led to the production of one of the worst seagoing vessels in history.
Header Image: The interior of the SS Bessemer with the gimballed passenger cabin. Source: J R Brown / Public Domain.
