A ship-vehicle equipped with three or four pairs of large empty "wheels" that not only keep the craft afloat, but also work to move it … Robert Freire was the first to try to put this into practice in 1880. A fairly primitive model was built, equipped with triangular wheels and oars as a propeller. Of course, she was doomed: 12 years of development and testing Freir wasted.
But the idea proved to be tenacious. And in 1896, engineer Ernest Bazin from France made a statement in the press - on August 19, 1896 in Saint-Denis, after five years of research and tests on models, a two hundred and eighty-ton "Ernest Bazin", capable of moving on water, was launched. The engineer stated that his ship is capable of speeds of 18-20 knots.
The vehicle ship was basically a platform. It had 3 pairs of lenticular wheels, ten meters in diameter. The wheels were uneven in thickness - in the central part they reached three and a half meters, narrowing towards the edges to almost 10 cm. When loaded, the wheels were immersed in water by a third.
The platform was thus about four meters above the water surface. By the way, its dimensions were quite decent - forty by twelve meters. In theory, the wheels, having a minimal area of contact with the smooth surface of the water, when driving should have reduced the force of friction with water extremely strongly. The wheels were driven into rotation by fifty-horsepower engines placed on the platform. There were several engines in total - the power of two hundred l / s was spent on rotating the wheels, and another five hundred and fifty - the propeller.
The principle, according to which the machine-ship "Ernest Bazin" was to outperform conventional ships, was that the wheels, like floats, raised the hull above the water, reducing the water resistance. Much later, the same principle was implemented in ships with "hydrofoils" …
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But not everything was as smooth as the calculations in theory. During test sailing, it turned out that the frictional force of the water affected the wheels much stronger than in theory - the wheels simply could not turn from the applied design power and required much more. Accordingly, fuel consumption increased and there was no longer any talk about economy and speed.
Bazin began to refine his project, taking into account the results obtained, and even managed to make a new statement to the press - he developed an improved design of an ocean liner with four pairs of discs that can cross the Atlantic in just sixty hours. But just a few weeks after that, on January 21, 1898, the inventor died. A year later, his main creation - the incredible Ernest Bazin - was auctioned for recycling.
