ship

ship Vessel for conveying passengers and freight by sea. The earliest sea-going ships were probably Egyptian, making voyages to the e coast of Africa in c.1500 bc. In China, extensive sea voyages were being made by ships that carried more than one mast and featured a rudder by c.ad 200, some 1200 years before such ships appeared in Europe. In the Mediterranean region, the galleys of the Greek, Phoenician and Roman navies combined rows of oars with a single square sail, as did the Viking longboats, which were capable of withstanding violent seas. By the 14th and 15th centuries, carracks and galleons were being developed to fulfil the exploration of the New World. Fighting ships of the 17th and 18th centuries included frigates of various designs. Sailing freighters culminated in the great clippers of the late 19th century, some of which had iron hulls. A century or so earlier, the first steamships had been built. They were powered by wood or coal-burning steam engines that drove large paddle wheels, hence the term paddlesteamer. In 1819, the first Atlantic crossing was made by ‘steam-assisted sail’, and this crossing soon became a regular service. By the mid-19th century, steamships, such as Brunel's Great Britain (1844), were driven by propellers or screws. Marine steam turbines developed at the turn of the 19th century, and gradually replaced reciprocating (back-and-forth cranking) steam engines for large vessels, early examples being the ocean liners of the 1900s. Oil, rather than coal, soon became the favoured fuel for large marine engines. Diesel engines developed in the early 1900s, but were considered unreliable and, although less expensive to run, they did not replace steam turbines until the 1970s. Some of the newest military ships and icebreakers are fitted with nuclear engines in which heat from a nuclear reactor raises steam in boilers to drive steam turbines. See also aircraft carrier; boat; submarine