“Dr. Hale’s Ventilators shall be placed on board every Ship”

In 1741, the same year that Samuel Sutton convinced the Royal Navy to test his system for ventilating warships, the Rev. Stephen Hales (shown here) started to promote his own method, using bellows.

Two years later, as naval officials sent Sutton on his way, Hales published A Description of the Ventilators: Whereby Great Quantities of Fresh Air May with Ease Be Conveyed into Mines, Gaols, Hospitals, Work-Houses and Ships, in Exchange for Their Noxious Air. He cultivated acquaintances like Frederick, Prince of Wales, and navy captain Edward Boscawen.

Like Sutton, Hales managed to demonstrate his system for Sir Jacob Acworth, Surveyor of the Royal Navy. Acworth appears to have been more polite to Hales, a respectable clergyman, than to coffeehouse-owner Sutton. But in the end the Surveyor’s decision was the same: he opposed both inventions.

Acworth, born around 1687, had been a leading ship-builder for the navy before joining the Admiralty. He apparently believed he knew everything about designing warships. For ventilation he trusted the “wind-sail,” a cloth rigged over a hatchway to divert moving air downward into the ship.

Sutton and Hales both pointed out that method worked only if air was already moving briskly across the ship. Their systems, they insisted, could ventilate belowdecks even when there was no wind.

Those men were not the first to make that argument to Acworth. Back in 1734 the engineer John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683-1744) said the same as he demonstrated his system for ventilation using fans, like those he had installed in the houses of Parliament. But Acworth had insisted on running a test during a windy day in 1740 and then pointed out how the wind-sails had worked better.

The Royal Navy went through the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) without ventilated warships. In two months of the 1741 siege of Cartagena, the military lost thousands of men to diseases, many of them blamed (in some cases even accurately) on unhealthy air. But the Admiralty refused to adopt new technology.

Finally, Britain’s naval inventors had a breakthrough. In 1749 Sir Jacob Acworth died. Sutton died the same year, so he couldn’t take advantage of new opportunities. Desaguliers was already dead. But Hales was still pushing his ideas.

In 1754 war broke out again in North America. The following year Boscawen, now a vice admiral and member of Parliament, led a squadron of warships against the French, capturing two ships off Newfoundland. Since one of those ships was carrying £80,000 in pay, that was a good day for Adm. Boscawen. But soon his fleet was crippled by an epidemic, and he had to put into Halifax.

In 1756 Adm. Boscawen took command of H.M.S. Royal George, the largest warship in the world. He lobbied to have Hales’s ventilators installed on board to keep the crew healthy. Though that system required men to pump the bellows, labor was plentiful aboard a large warship.

Dr. Joseph J. Krulder quoted the results of this experiment from the 20 Aug 1756 Daily Advertiser:

We hear that Admiral Boscawen having wrote to the Lords of the Admiralty, to acquaint them of great Healthiness of the Crew of the Royal George, owing to Dr. Hale’s [ventilators] on board that Ship, and the different Condition of those on board every other Ship in his Fleet, which have had from forty to a hundred and twenty sick at a Time, their Lordships have been pleased to order that Dr. Hale’s Ventilators shall be placed on board every Ship in his Majesty’s Navy.

Meanwhile, private ships had been adopting one or another of the ventilation systems then on offer. Owners of slave ships were particularly ready to make the investment in order to be able to pack as much human cargo into their crowded holds as possible.

Another relatively early adopter was the French navy. The Encyclopédie of 1765 stated: “Le célébre M. Hales, un des grands physiciens de ce siècle et un des mieux intentionnés pour le bien public, a inventé un ventilateur d’un usage presque universel.” The famous Mr. Hales, one of the great physicists of the century and one of the most motivated for the public good, invented a ventilator in almost universal use.

In fact, Hales’s system wasn’t as efficient or novel as Sutton’s. So this story shows the importance of connections in forcing technical change. And of outlasting the people who insist on standing in the way.