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''Henry Eckford'' was a small passenger-cargo steamboat built in
New York in 1824. She was the first steam vessel in the world to be installed with a
compound engine
A compound engine is an engine that has more than one stage for recovering energy from the same working fluid, with the exhaust from the first stage passing through the second stage, and in some cases then on to another subsequent stage or even st ...
, almost fifty years before the technology would become widely adopted for marine use.
Construction
''Henry Eckford'', named in honor of
the renowned New York shipbuilder of the era, was built for Mowatt Brothers & Co. by Lawrence & Sneden of
Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
,
New York, in 1824.
[ The machinery for the vessel was subcontracted to the ]Allaire Iron Works
The Allaire Iron Works was a leading 19th-century American marine engineering company based in New York City. Founded in 1816 by engineer and philanthropist James P. Allaire, the Allaire Works was one of the world's first companies dedicated to the ...
of James P. Allaire
James Peter Allaire (July 12, 1785 – May 20, 1858) was a noted master mechanic and steam engine builder, and founder of the Allaire Iron Works (est. 1815), the first marine steam engine company in New York City, and later Howell Works (est. 1822) ...
, who installed a compound engine
A compound engine is an engine that has more than one stage for recovering energy from the same working fluid, with the exhaust from the first stage passing through the second stage, and in some cases then on to another subsequent stage or even st ...
(commonly known at the time as a "Woolf double cylinder" engine). Although the compound engine with its greater efficiency was already a well established technology, having been patented by British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
inventor Arthur Woolf
Arthur Woolf (1766, Camborne, Cornwall – 16 October 1837, Guernsey) was a Cornish engineer, most famous for inventing a high-pressure compound steam engine. As such he made an outstanding contribution to the development and perfection of th ...
almost twenty years earlier, such an engine had never before been used to power a ship.
''Henry Eckford'''s compound engine was of the vertical crosshead type.[''Marine Engineering'', p. 7.] It had two cylinders—a high-pressure cylinder
A cylinder (from ) has traditionally been a three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a prism with a circle as its base.
A cylinder may also be defined as an infin ...
12 inches in diameter and a 24 inch low-pressure cylinder—and a stroke of 4 feet.[Morrison, p. 48.] The engine operated at a pressure of about ,[ well above the common to marine steam engines of the period.
While the higher pressure was necessary for the compound engine to fully utilize its greater efficiency, it may account for the fact that this type of engine remained unpopular in marine applications long after its invention, as boiler explosions were not uncommon on early steamboats and higher pressures made for more violent explosions. After ''Henry Eckford'', Allaire would go on to install several more steamboats with compound engines,][ decades before the technology was to achieve widespread acceptance in marine applications.][
]
Service history
''Henry Eckford'' was initially employed as a passenger-and-freight steamer, running on the Hudson River
The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between N ...
between Rector St., North River, New York City and Albany, New York
Albany ( ) is the capital of the U.S. state of New York, also the seat and largest city of Albany County. Albany is on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River, and about north of New York C ...
. Advertised as a "very fast" boat, the steamer had a speed of around , and could complete a one-way trip in about 14 hours. The price of a full ticket was $3, with intermediate stops charged in proportion to distance travelled.
In 1825, the Mowatts decided to try using the boat to tow barges. Since no steamboat had previously been utilized in such a role, the proposal was widely greeted with scepticism, but in the first attempt, ''Henry Eckford'' pulled two barges from New York to Albany in 24 hours, a commercially viable time. The principle having been established, other steamboat owners quickly followed suit, and steam towboats soon became a commonplace. ''Henry Eckford'' herself would thereafter spend much of her career as a towboat. However, she also continued to carry passengers, and in 1826 the steamer's cabin was converted to passenger accommodation. By this time, the fare from New York to Albany had dropped to a dollar.
In the 1830s, ''Henry Eckford'' was placed on the route between New York and Norwich, Connecticut. Eventually superseded by newer, faster steamboats, ''Henry Eckford'' spent her later years as a towboat in New York Harbor.[Munsell, p. 39.]
Boiler explosion
On April 27, 1841, while getting up steam in dock at the foot of Cedar St., New York, to tow a canal boat, ''Henry Eckford'' suffered a boiler explosion
A boiler explosion is a catastrophic failure of a boiler. There are two types of boiler explosions. One type is a failure of the pressure parts of the steam and water sides. There can be many different causes, such as failure of the safety val ...
. The two x 30 inch (5.8 by 0.76 m) wrought-iron
Wrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon content (less than 0.08%) in contrast to that of cast iron (2.1% to 4%). It is a semi-fused mass of iron with fibrous slag inclusions (up to 2% by weight), which give it a wood-like "grain" t ...
boilers, with an aggregate weight of about 4 tons, were thrown toward the stern, wrecking the engine in their path, parts of which were thrown an additional twenty feet. The ship's engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limit ...
and firemen were hurled from the vessel by the force of the blast but escaped serious injury; however, a worker on board the canal boat, which was in the process of being secured to the steamer, was killed by a piece of flying metal.
In the subsequent inquest, no blame was attributed to any party, though a tardy government inspection was considered a possible contributing factor. The boiler had reached only about when the blast occurred, well below its normal operating pressure. Cause of the explosion was determined to be extreme internal corrosion, which in some places had reduced the boiler plates to a fraction of their original thickness. The boilers had been installed 11 years prior and had an expected lifespan of approximately 15 years.[Jones, p. 9.]
After the explosion, ''Henry Eckford'''s wrecked machinery was removed and the hull was converted into a coal barge, which was still in service as late as 1851.[ The barge was eventually broken up.
]
Footnotes
References
Bibliography
*Dwight, Theodore (1825): ''The Northern Traveller: Containing the Routes to Niagara, Quebec, and the Springs; with Descriptions of the Principal Scenes, and Useful Hints to Strangers'', Wilder and Campbell, p. 191.
*Haswell, Charles H. (1896): ''Reminiscences of New York By an Octogenarian (1816–1860)'', Harper & Brothers, New York.
*Jones, Thomas P. (ed.) (1841): ''Journal of the Franklin Institute, Third Series, Volume II'', Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.
*''Marine Engineering, Volume IV, July to December 1899'', Aldritch and Donaldson, New York.
*Morrison, John Harrison (1903): ''History Of American Steam Navigation'', W. F. Sametz & Co., New York. Reprinted in 2008 by READ BOOKS,
*Munsell, J. (1855): ''The Annals of Albany'', J. Munsell, Albany, p. 39.
*Spears, John R. (1910): ''The Story of the American Merchant Marine'', The MacMillan Company, New York, p. 166.
*Thurston, Robert H. (1883): ''A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine'', Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, pp. 282–283.
*Thurston, Robert H. (1891): ''Robert Fulton: His Life and its Results'', Dodd, Mean and Company, New York, p. 158.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Henry Eckford (1824)
1824 ships
Ships built in New York City
Steamboats of the Hudson River
Steamboats of Long Island Sound
Passenger ships of the United States
Merchant ships of the United States
Maritime boiler explosions