“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.

“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.