“A New Method for Extracting the Foul Air out of Ships”

As the Royal Navy expanded in the early eighteenth century, its leaders became more concerned about shipboard illnesses.

Warships carried big crews, not only all the men needed to sail those large ships but extra men to fight other ships and to take them over as prize vessels. All those people living in close proximity belowdecks, taking turns in the bunks and hammocks, were easy prey for diseases.

According to the latest medical thinking, the biggest threat was bad air. Doctors declared that was the cause of typhus (actually a bacterial disease), scurvy (actually a dietary deficiency), and more. And given how badly some ships smelled, that seemed like an obvious theory.

As Arnold Zuckerman related in a 1976 article in Eighteenth-Century Studies, in 1741 two Englishmen came forward with plans for shipboard ventilators, which would ostensibly remove the bad air from below decks and produce a healthier environment. Those men were:

• Rev. Stephen Hales (1677-1761), which envisioned a system of bellows worked by pumps.
• Samuel Sutton (d. 1749), a brewer and coffeehouse owner who had a good technical mind; his system used tubes full of warm air expanding naturally from the oven in the galley.

(A third inventor, the Swedish military architect Martin Triewald, produced his own system the same year. It used bellows, like Hale’s.)

Sutton described his idea to naval officers in his coffeehouse, only to hear one of them talk about him “as being really mad, and out of my senses.” He finally got an appointment with the Surveyor of the Navy, Sir Jacob Acworth, who kept him waiting for long periods and then declared, “no experiment should be made, if he could hinder it.”

The inventor sought help from Dr. Richard Mead (1673-1754, shown above), a royal physician. Mead was impressed. He introduced Sutton to the president of the Royal Society, read a paper about the brewer’s invention to that society, and later helped Sutton publish a pamphlet on his system. Mead used his connections to appeal to the Admiralty.

In September 1741, Sutton demonstrated his ventilation system to naval officials on a hulk at Deptford. That went well enough that in November the Royal Navy authorized him to install the tubes on H.M.S. Norwich, about to sail to Africa and the Caribbean. The tropical region was, of course, known to be ridden with disease.

For the next year, Sutton kept hoping to receive good news, and a payment, from the Admiralty. But he heard nothing. Not until the end of 1743 did the agency reply to his inquiries. And then it turned out the captain of the Norwich had reported two things. First, he’d had trouble getting all the ventilator tubes to work right. Second:

I was not able to judge of their use, having been so healthy as to bury only two men all the time I was on the coast.

The Royal Navy wouldn’t support a system designed to keep sailors from getting sick because too many sailors had stayed well.

TOMORROW: Vindication for ventilation.