What Colonial Americans Could Read about Ventilators

The last two days’ fascinating discussion of ship ventilators was based on papers and nineteenth-century books that relied mostly on the pamphlets published by the inventors themselves or their supporters.

Naturally, those inventors came across as intelligent and progressive, hampered by irrational opponents, and ultimately vindicated through their own insight and perseverance.

I decided to check newspapers in colonial America to see if they’d said anything about ventilating ships in the same years. How far did word of those inventions travel?

The London news in the 27 Nov 1746 Pennsylvania Journal included this item:

Sept. 23. There are Letters from Capt. Thompson, and the Commanding Officer, on board the Success Frigate, now in Plymouth Sound, with the Recruits bound for Georgia, in which they write, that all the Persons on board, who are near 300, are healthy, and have not had the Sickness with which the other Vessels have been afflicted; which they chiefly attribute to the Ventilators which are fixed in that ship by the Order of General [James] Oglethorpe, which they say entirely prevents the hot sickly Smell which is generally found when great Numbers are on board.

They also say, that the Men are so sensible of the usefulness of them, that they require no driving to work that Instrument, from which they receive so much Benefit.

The fact that men needed to work those ventilators suggests they were the Rev. Dr. Stephen Hales’s design.

Oglethorpe’s reputation was under attack that year because he’d failed to trap a Jacobite force in December 1745. So any piece of good news helped.

The 14 Sept 1749 Boston News-Letter carried this London article dated 27 June:

The Ventilators invented by the Rev. Dr. Hales being daily more and more experienced to be of great advantage…; the good Dr, by desire of the secretary of war, was this day at the Savoy prison to direct a proper place for erecting a large ventilator. One of these useful machines is also fixing in each of the transport ships, which are to carry 500 Germans to the British plantations, so that ’tis not questioned but this invention will be brought into general use in the navy——

For though a ship may not be crowded with slaves and passengers, or laden with corn, in which case the ventilators have been chiefly recommended preferably to all other methods; yet being worked but half an hour in each day, into the hold, they will be of very considerable benefit, by introducing fresh, and send out the foul damp air, which rots the timber.

It took a few more years before the Royal Navy did make ventilators standard equipment.

Meanwhile, Hales had added another technological innovation, according to a report reprinted in Benjamin Franklin’s 15 Oct 1751 Pennsylvania Gazette:

We hear, that two Pair of large Ventilators, under the Direction of Dr. Hales, are now placing, on each other, on the lower Deck of the Sheerness, at Deptford; which being work’d by small Windmills fixed on the upper Deck, blow at the Rate of 7000 Tons of Air in an Hour into the closed Hold; whence it is conveyed thro’ the Seams of the Ceiling or Lining of the Hold, up to the Top of the Gunwell; with Intent to keep the Ship wholesome, and preserve the Timbers and Planks from decaying.

This seems to refer to H.M.S. Sheerness, launched in 1743. If Hales couldn’t convince the navy to install ventilators for the benefit of the men, he could tout the benefits to the ships themselves.

(The picture above shows the windmill installed in 1752 to power Hales’s ventilators in Newgate Prison.)