00:00In 1897, a French engineer built a ship with no hull in the water at all.
00:04It rode on six enormous rotating drums, 10 meters across, spinning like paddle wheels.
00:09On paper, it should have been twice as fast as any steamer afloat. On the water, it could barely crawl.
00:15And he was only the first of three men who tried to put wheels on the ocean.
00:19Go back to the 19th century. The sea was the only highway that mattered. No planes, no tunnels.
00:26If you wanted the other side of the world, you went by ship.
00:29In 1819 the Savannah crossed the Atlantic under steam, and every navy understood what that meant.
00:34The nation with the fastest ship owns the trade. The nation with the fastest ship is the empire.
00:40So engineers attacked from every angle. Slimmer hulls. More engines.
00:45Polished plating. Every single improvement hit the same wall.
00:49Water. A hull has to touch it, and water grabs back.
00:53The faster you go, the harder it pulls. Then somebody asked a reckless question.
00:58What if the hull never touched the water at all? The first to try was Robert Fryer,
01:03an Englishman who spent 12 years and 14,000 pounds on a prototype called the Alice.
01:07Three giant paddle wheels in a triangle, a deck on top, blades everywhere.
01:12He imagined it would run on water and then drive up onto land. But the wheels were the only propulsion.
01:17They pushed against nothing. The Alice never completed a single trial run.
01:2212 years, gone.
01:2310 years later a far more dangerous man stepped in. Ernest Bazin, born in 1826, held dozens of patents,
01:31hydraulic presses, electrical devices, even a safety lamp. Everyone made him money, and he poured all of
01:37it into one obsession. Rebuild the ship from scratch. His logic was clean. A normal hull sits deep in the
01:44water with enormous contact area, so drag is huge. Lift the hull clear of the surface and let a few
01:49giant wheels carry the weight. And not ordinary wheels. He designed lenticular drums, two steel
01:55plates clamped into a lens shape, the edge tapered like a knife blade. The sharp rim would slice into
02:00the water instead of shoving it. And because the drum was spinning, it would part the water downward
02:05instead of pushing it backward. Drag, he calculated, would collapse. Five years of model tests convinced
02:11him. A wheeled steamer with 10,000 horsepower would match a normal ship at 30,000. It could cross the
02:17Atlantic on 800 tons of coal instead of 3,000. Investors threw money at him. On the 19th of August
02:241896,
02:25his ship went into the water at Saint Denis, near Paris. He named it after himself.
02:30The Ernest Bazin. It looked like nothing anyone had seen. The hull floated 4 meters above the surface.
02:37Beneath it hung 6 hollow steel drums, 10 meters in diameter, 40 meters long overall, 288 tons.
02:43Each drum had its own 50 horsepower engine. From the shore it did not look like a ship.
02:48It looked like a 6-wheel truck hovering over the sea. In March 1897 the public trials began. 750
02:56horsepower of steam. A conventional ship of that weight topped out at 18 knots. Bazin had promised 32.
03:02The crowd on the dock was enormous. The engines lit. The drums turned. The ship moved. And then it did
03:10not.
03:11It slowed. It kept slowing. Something invisible had taken hold of it underwater and would not let go.
03:17The engines screamed. The boiler glowed. The speed gauge read 7 knots. 7. Not even half of what an
03:26ordinary ship could do. The engineers found the answer quickly, and it was the design itself.
03:31The drums were too smooth. Water did not part neatly the way Bazin had calculated. It clung. It wrapped
03:38around the drum and rotated with it. Every drum now carried the weight of the ship plus a thick sleeve
03:42of water, and the faster it spun, the more water it dragged. His drag reduction machine had become
03:48six enormous water wheels. The hull was hopelessly unstable. The drums were too narrow. Steering was
03:55impossible. Bazin had planned to cross the English Channel to prove himself. He could not even leave
04:00the harbor. He did not surrender. He locked himself in his workshop and calculated for months. Then he
04:06announced that he had found the solution, and that he would build a larger ship with eight drums,
04:10faster than anything ever designed. On the 18th of January 1898, Ernest Bazin died. Nobody ever learned
04:17what the solution was. His ship was put up for sale. No buyers. In 1899 it was towed to a
04:24yard in
04:24England and cut up for scrap. But across the Atlantic the same dream was already running in
04:29another man's head. Frederick Knapp, a lawyer from Prescott, Ontario. No engineering degree.
04:35No shipbuilding experience. Just one fixed idea. Queen Victoria got violently seasick.
04:42She almost never traveled. Knapp reasoned that if he could build a ship that produced no motion at all,
04:47the Queen would come to North America in person, and he would be the man who brought her.
04:51Possibly even knighted. He staked everything on it. And his design made Bazin's look conservative.
04:57Bazin lifted a ship onto wheels. Knapp made the ship itself a wheel. Two concentric cylinders.
05:04The outer one, 6.7 meters across and 33 and a half meters long, would roll along the surface.
05:10Inside it, a smaller cylinder suspended on jimbals would stay perfectly level no matter how the outer
05:15shell tumbled. Passengers sat inside the inner cylinder. In theory they would feel nothing at all.
05:21On the 2nd of October 1897, at the Poulsen Iron Works in Toronto, the ship went into the water.
05:27Thirty thousand dollars. Thousands of people lined the harbor. Reporters had their cameras ready.
05:33The whistle blew. The engines roared. The outer cylinder turned. And the machine rolled.
05:39It really did roll, slowly, across the harbor. The crowd cheered. The cheering did not last.
05:46The cylinder turned hard, but the ship barely moved forward. Five miles an hour at best.
05:52Steering was impossible. A bit of wind and it drifted like a log.
05:56Knapp had promised 52 knots. He never reached one. He refused to stop.
06:02He added conical caps to both ends, turning the whole thing into a giant spindle.
06:06He swapped in stronger engines. He dragged it back to Toronto and kept testing.
06:11He even drew a blueprint for a 243 meter version that could cross the Atlantic in 24 hours.
06:17Nobody took it seriously. Eventually the money ran out.
06:20The First World War turned metal into a strategic resource. His roller ship was broken up for scrap,
06:26and the hull was left at the dock, rusting into the mud. Then in 1927 Toronto began a massive harbor
06:32expansion. Crews dumped new fill straight onto the old dock. Knapp's ship, and every wild idea
06:38attached to it, was buried alive beneath the new shoreline. Decades later, researchers went through
06:43the archives, the old survey maps, satellite imagery, and triangulated the position. It sits
06:48under what is now the Gardiner Expressway, perpendicular to Fleet Street. Given how crude the
06:53fill was and how little disturbance the construction caused above, the cylinder is probably still intact
06:57down there. Tens of thousands of cars pass over it every day. Not one driver knows there is a
07:03hundred-year-old maritime obsession under the wheels. Others followed. A man named Halsk proposed an
07:08air-driven ocean locomotive, two giant wheels on one shaft. Millions were sunk into it. None of them
07:14worked. And the reason is not complicated. Every one of them made the same fatal error. They underestimated
07:21water. Water is not air. It is 800 times denser. Any object rotating in water drags a boundary layer
07:28with it, and that layer is continuously accelerated. The bigger the drum, the larger the wet its surface.
07:34The faster it spins, the worse the loss. You try to eliminate drag by spinning, and the spinning
07:40manufactures new drag. It is a physical paradox with no exit. Bazin was a brilliant engineer.
07:46Knapp was a dreamer with no sense of absurdity. Neither of them lost to money. Neither lost to
07:52luck. They lost to physics itself. But their failure was not worthless. Bazin's drum concept fed directly
07:59into later hydrofoil research, lifting a hull clear of the water to cut drag. That principle is still in
08:04use today. Knapp's gimbal-mounted inner cylinder became an important reference for modern ship stabilization.
08:10Sometimes failure is worth more than success. Even the wildest ideas, when they shatter,
08:15leave fragments that point toward the future. And the roller ship under a Toronto highway sits
08:19there like a time capsule. Silent in the dark for nearly a hundred years. Waiting for the day
08:25somebody digs it up and tells the world, we really did try to make the ocean roll.
08:58One, please take a moment for maybe one of us at times pures finishes.
08:58Alright, I guess you loved theBR two of us
