Sir Charles Parsons and the Turbinia

Last week, I took opportunity to go visit the Discovery Museum across the river, in Newcastle. It was an excellent choice because:
1. It is free.
2. I had to stay in the area so as to be able to pick up Rebecca and Emily who were working at the local Green Fair (all eco-friendly and Fair Trade stuff) just a few blocks up the road.

There, I got to finally see one of the ships that changed history because of its revolutionary technology, the Turbinia! The Turbinia, built by Sir Charles Parsons in Newcastle, was the very first vessel to be powered by steam turbines. The impact that Sir Charles Parsons had upon the world with his work on steam turbines has yet to be fairly evaluated, I think.



Sir Charles came from a wealthy and titled family, and as such, he was able to take advantage of much of the very best education offered in England at that time. After he graduated with a first-class honors degree in Mathematics, Sir Charles moved to Newcastle to join the W. G. Armstrong engineering firm, noted for their excellence in hydraulics, bridge and ship building. He gained experience there and at three other engineering companies before starting his own business, C. A. Parsons and Company in 1889. But it was while he was working for one of his former employers that he developed the axial steam turbine in 1884 which he immediately used to drive an electrical generator he had just invented. His new company started developing steam turbine driven electric generators to his designs and improvements. By 1894, Sir Charles was able to regain certain patents from his former employer, Clarke, Chapman & Co. Subsequently, he set up the Parsons Marine Steam Company in Newcastle.

The design he came up with is quite simple; instead of using steam to push pistons as was the norm in that day, he used high pressure steam to pass through hundreds of turbine blades mounted on a shaft, which turned at high speed driving whatever device which was attached to the output shaft. Today, we find the principle and technology quite simple and it has become ubiquitous in many areas of technology today. Almost all electrical generating plants throughout the world use steam turbines to turn generators! The exceptions would be those utilizing renewable resources such as hydroelectric dams or wind mill generators.

Apparently, for years, Sir Charles had been experimenting with hull designs that would create the least amount of hydraulic drag, thus increasing speed and efficiency of the vessel. When Parsons set up his Marine Steam Co., he had very much in mind of melding together his ideas of hull design with his new power system which had matured a great deal in the ten years since he first invented it. The Turbinia, the result of all this, was built the same year, 1894. As you can see, it has a very slender hull, only 9 feet wide at its widest point, and was 103 feet 9 inches overall. And because Parsons used thinner hull plating than was usual for a ship of this size, and other weight saving designs, she drew only 3 feet of water. To this date, very few sea vessels have used such a hull design. The only ones of any note were the Iowa class battleships which were very long and slender for their displacement (water displacement means weight). But they still did not approach the Turbinia. I find this quite strange because the hull design and shape was one of the main reasons for the fantastic speed and efficiency of the Turbinia. In some ways, Parsons was as meticulous and ahead of his time in his designs as the Wright Brothers were just a few years later. He even invented something similar to a wind tunnel to measure the efficiency of the propellers on the Turbinia. This is called the Cavitation Tunnel, a device still used today for the same purpose. Ultimately, based upon data from this, Sir Charles decided to go with a three-stage axial flow turbine driving 3 propeller shafts [instead of the normal 1 shaft], each with 3 radically new designed propellers per shaft. All this enabled the Turbinia to achieve a top speed of over 34 knots - close to 40 miles per hour! And this was at a time when a ship was considered to be extremely fast if it could approach 20 knots!

Three years later, on June 26th of 1897, during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Review at Spithead, the Royal Navy planned on putting on quite a display of all it's might by parading many of it's ships, ranging from it's most powerful battleships of the day to the newly developed destroyer class of ships and it's speedy torpedo boats. The display was to impress upon the world (and the thousands of local and foreign visitors) the invincible might of the Royal Navy. What they hadn't planned on was for someone to turn up unannounced and show up everybody. As an audacious publicity stunt the Turbinia, which was much faster than all other ships of the time, raced between the two lines of large ships and steamed up and down in front of the crowd and princes with impunity, while easily evading a Navy picket boat that tried to stop it, indeed almost swamping it with its wake.

Indeed, the Admiralty took notice of the potential of the technological demonstration, invited or not, and 8 years later, launched the HMS Dreadnought! The Dreadnought was revolutionary in two ways; first, she was the first battleship to use a main battery of big guns of the same size and caliber (something never done before), and second, she used Parsons steam turbines to make it the fastest battleship in the world. Both of these advances so revolutionized battleship technology that it immediately made all other battleships of the world obsolete. All battleships built using the same principles there after are known as dreadnoughts!

Today, most of your big ships are run using steam turbines similar to the designs of Sir Charles Parsons, using either oil or nuclear power to run the boilers. In my estimation, the Turbinia is just as important and revolutionary as the very first successful steam ship (different people claim to have built it), the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered sea vessel and the USS Albacore - the first submarine to utilize the now famous cigar-shaped hulls of all modern day submarines.

Another important offshoot of Parson's steam turbine was to be used some 40 years later when it was adapted for aviation as the Jet Engine. Whereas the steam turbine utilizes steam generated in a separate boiler, the jet engine generates it's own energy with combustion between the front and back sets of turbines. When you think of what a revolution the jet engine provided for aviation and air travel, it boggles the mind! On any day where there is blue sky, just look up and see how many contrails you can see or high flying airliners there are up there. Now let's come full circle. Take a wild guess at what many of the navies of the major nations are utilizing to power many of their surface ships . . . that's right, the jet engine! The first ship to use jet engines as her main power source was the USS Spruance, an anti-submarine destroyer launched in 1972. She had 4 General Electric LM2500 gas turbine engines generating 80,000 shaft horse power that could push her 8000 tons or so to slightly over 32 knots, almost as fast as the Turbinia.