Early beginnings
After designing several cars, including the glass roofed sports car used for many years by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, I first got the idea for a wingsail in the days when the various grades of marine fuel oil were not only cheap but seemed likely to last for ever, and the idea of global Climate Change was unknown.
My original wingsail prototype, Planesail, was conceived after a humorous (to other people anyway) incident when, as a young aircraft engineer, designing wings and flaps in the aircraft industry during the week and sailing at the weekends, I was sailing an old fashioned yacht on the Norfolk Broads (which if you don’t know them are wonderful sailing places in the eastern part of England). She had brown sails, and a lot of rather squeaky little brass sheaves in the blocks controlling the long wooden boom at the foot of the mainsail.
This meant, especially in the light winds we had on that day, that after a gybe, where the boom had swung across the stern in a more or less controlled fashion, it was usually rather reluctant to run right out again on the opposite tack because of the friction in the sheaves. So I had come to an arrangement with my husky young crew, Charlie, that as soon as the boom had banged across he would give it a good firm push to pull the main sheet briskly through the sheaves and help to get the mainsail reset. The jib had its own boom and traveller, and was therefore self tacking.
Well, as often happens in those crowded waters, a tubby little motor boat came happily pottering down the middle of the river as we were tacking up towards her. The helmsman was probably wondering why this sailing boat was zig zagging backwards and forwards across the river, and possibly assumed that we were either drunk or just playing about..
Anyway, I suddenly realised that he had no intention of getting out of our way, and yelling “Gybe Oh” at the top of my voice I pulled the tiller up towards the wind, jammed it between my knees and began furiously hauling in on the main sheet to get the long wooden boom as near to the centreline as possible before it banged across the stern.
We missed him by no more than a few inches, and I’m told that his wife waved cheerily at us from the cockpit as they puttered on their way. Charlie had by this time grabbed the boom and, as previously agreed, was powerfully heaving it forward. The sheaves squealed, the rope snaked up from the cockpit floor, all exactly as we done it so many times before. However, this time I had somehow got not one but two loops of rope round my feet, and found myself being inexorably hoisted aloft, upside down, my ankles locked in a perfect clove hitch.
Alarmed by my cries for help Charlie turned round, and instantly let go the boom, but by now the sail was full of wind, the boom went steadily on its way towards the shrouds, until my feet were jammed against the upper block.
“Grab the tiller, you fool, or we’ll be into the bank,’ I cried, but Charlie was completely incapable, prostrate on the cockpit bench, laughing until the tears ran down his face.
Finally he regained some semblance of control and helped me down, and we were just able to avoid a collision with a big wherry, whose passengers were lining the rail, laughing and taking pictures.
“I say”, said Charlie, still grinning from ear to ear, ”If I nip below and get the camera, would you mind doing that again?”
So I decided, there and then, to see what I could do to bring leisure sailing into the 20th century.
After a great deal of sketching in my notebook I came up with the idea of the self trimming wingsail, identical in principle (but rather different in its details) to the modern Walker wingsail. I was going to replace the cloth, boom, ropes, winches blocks and so on with what would be effectively half a glider, its wing set up on end, mounted on a freely rotating vertical axis bearing where the centre of gravity of the glider would have been, balanced about that point like any glider so that when the boat was not level (which is of course almost always, especially in waves of any size) the tail would not tend to fall to the low side. The whole thing would be trimmed to the wind by a tail identical in principle to the glider’s elevator (or stabilizer). I called it a wingsail.
Small wingsails could be operated by hand, because the effort involved in adjusting the angle of the tail was very small, while even much larger ones need very little power to operate (and in due course, just in time) along would come affordable photovoltaic cells. And (once computer control techniques had been developed. This was the middle sixties, remember.) my wingsails could be computer controlled, so that capsize and overpowering could at last be eliminated.
A simple hand lever, like that of a power boat, connected to the tail, would give thrust ahead, astern or neutral, and tacking and gybing, to go from sailing with the wind on one side of the boat to sailing with the wind on the other side, was going to be completely automatic. You would just steer the boat on to the new course, and your thrustwing would do the rest. Excited, I began to make models, testing them on a local pond.
One day, when I had reached the stage of needing to move on to building a full sized prototype, I was doing trials on my latest model, which was faster than I expected and literally hissed as it reached across the pond.
Then I had to run round to the other side, turn the model round and send her back again to make any adjustments necessary. I had for the first time got autotacking installed, using a cam mechanism at the base of the wingsail, and was trying to optimize the lever ratios involved.
Concentrating hard, I was surprised when a polite young voice behind me asked if I needed any assistance. A big Range Rover had silently pulled up on the road along the edge of the pond, and a young man about ten years old had climbed down and walked across the grass. His father and some younger brothers and sisters were sitting in the car, probably wondering what this rather disheveled young man was doing with his curious hissing contraption.
I explained what I was trying to do, and the boy stationed himself on the opposite side of the pond. This saved me a great deal of time and running around. We got quite good at resetting the rudder each time, trying to send the model right into each other’s hands. In fact, after a little practice, he did at least as well (if not better) than I did.
After twenty minutes or so of this, during which time I was able to get ahead really well with the cam follower optimization, his father climbed down from the Range Rover and came across to ask me what I was doing. I explained that I had this wingsail idea, which could revolutionise sailing, and perhaps even save fuel on big ships.
He asked a few penetrating questions, and then asked me about my plans. I explained that I had gone about as far as I could with models, and wanted to buy a pair of catamaran hulls to build a full sized prototype propelled by my first ever full sized wingsail.
“How much will that cost?”, he asked, and I replied that I thought I should probably have to pay around two thousand pounds.
“Well, we must be getting back for tea now, but here is enough for one of them, with my very best wishes”, he said, taking out his chequebook and writing out a cheque for a thousand pounds.
“But how shall I be able to get in touch with you?” I called, as he walked back to his car.
“Write to me care of the bank”, he said with a charming smile, and shepherding his family into the car he drove off into the Dartmoor mist. I had my first shareholder.
A few months later, other shareholders having come on board and Planesail Limited incorporated, I was able to launch the 30 ft trimaran Planesail, my first full sized prototype. I was very pleased to find that she was an absolute delight to sail although, since in her quadriplane rig I had decided not to incorporate the high thrust devices with which I was still experimenting at model scale, she was never very fast. Still, she made a lot of friends and influenced a lot of people. (Pic).
I clearly remember a middle aged couple who had made an appointment to come down to the Hamble for a test sail. The husband came on board with alacrity, but when I offered to help his wife down from the quay into Planesail she protested that she had always hated sailing, and intended to stay in the car.
I said that in that case she should definitely come along for the ride, and that in fact I would teach her to sail the boat first. Horrified, at first she flatly refused, but eventually she was persuaded to come aboard, and sat in the pilot’s seat looking very apprehensive. She cheered up a little when I explained that there were only two controls, the ordinary car sized steering wheel to control direction, and the thrust lever to control speed, and if necessary to put the air brakes on.
Five minutes later we were, painfully slowly, overtaking a typical monohull cruiser on a close reach, and her husband watched in growing disbelief as she cried out excitedly:-
“Mr Walker, Mr Walker, how can I make her go faster?”
Aboard the monohull a great deal of surreptitious sail trimming and tweaking was going on, but I suggested that, being to leeward, we were in the other boat’s dirty wind, and why didn’t she try overtaking on the other side. “Just turn the wheel as if you were driving a car,” I said “The wingsail will look after itself.”
So we made a stylish S-curve across the other boat’s wake, and once we had lined up again in cleaner air Planesail accelerated away easily.
Her husband managed (after some difficulty in persuading his wife to give up the controls) to have his own turn at the wheel, and was just as enthralled as his wife had been.
“And she sails so level, even when hard on the wind,” he marvelled. “I’ve never been aboard a multihull before. But can’t they tip right over in a strong wind and stay there, upside down?”.
I explained that we were developing an automatic governing system which would prevent overpowering and capsize for our production boats, and after a very pleasant afternoon on the water he gave me our first ever cash deposit, although he explained that he would want a larger boat than the admittedly rather minimally fitted out Planesail.
After designing several cars, including the glass roofed sports car used for many years by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, I first got the idea for a wingsail in the days when the various grades of marine fuel oil were not only cheap but seemed likely to last for ever, and the idea of global Climate Change was unknown.
My original wingsail prototype, Planesail, was conceived after a humorous (to other people anyway) incident when, as a young aircraft engineer, designing wings and flaps in the aircraft industry during the week and sailing at the weekends, I was sailing an old fashioned yacht on the Norfolk Broads (which if you don’t know them are wonderful sailing places in the eastern part of England). She had brown sails, and a lot of rather squeaky little brass sheaves in the blocks controlling the long wooden boom at the foot of the mainsail.
This meant, especially in the light winds we had on that day, that after a gybe, where the boom had swung across the stern in a more or less controlled fashion, it was usually rather reluctant to run right out again on the opposite tack because of the friction in the sheaves. So I had come to an arrangement with my husky young crew, Charlie, that as soon as the boom had banged across he would give it a good firm push to pull the main sheet briskly through the sheaves and help to get the mainsail reset. The jib had its own boom and traveller, and was therefore self tacking.
Well, as often happens in those crowded waters, a tubby little motor boat came happily pottering down the middle of the river as we were tacking up towards her. The helmsman was probably wondering why this sailing boat was zig zagging backwards and forwards across the river, and possibly assumed that we were either drunk or just playing about..
Anyway, I suddenly realised that he had no intention of getting out of our way, and yelling “Gybe Oh” at the top of my voice I pulled the tiller up towards the wind, jammed it between my knees and began furiously hauling in on the main sheet to get the long wooden boom as near to the centreline as possible before it banged across the stern.
We missed him by no more than a few inches, and I’m told that his wife waved cheerily at us from the cockpit as they puttered on their way. Charlie had by this time grabbed the boom and, as previously agreed, was powerfully heaving it forward. The sheaves squealed, the rope snaked up from the cockpit floor, all exactly as we done it so many times before. However, this time I had somehow got not one but two loops of rope round my feet, and found myself being inexorably hoisted aloft, upside down, my ankles locked in a perfect clove hitch.
Alarmed by my cries for help Charlie turned round, and instantly let go the boom, but by now the sail was full of wind, the boom went steadily on its way towards the shrouds, until my feet were jammed against the upper block.
“Grab the tiller, you fool, or we’ll be into the bank,’ I cried, but Charlie was completely incapable, prostrate on the cockpit bench, laughing until the tears ran down his face.
Finally he regained some semblance of control and helped me down, and we were just able to avoid a collision with a big wherry, whose passengers were lining the rail, laughing and taking pictures.
“I say”, said Charlie, still grinning from ear to ear, ”If I nip below and get the camera, would you mind doing that again?”
So I decided, there and then, to see what I could do to bring leisure sailing into the 20th century.
After a great deal of sketching in my notebook I came up with the idea of the self trimming wingsail, identical in principle (but rather different in its details) to the modern Walker wingsail. I was going to replace the cloth, boom, ropes, winches blocks and so on with what would be effectively half a glider, its wing set up on end, mounted on a freely rotating vertical axis bearing where the centre of gravity of the glider would have been, balanced about that point like any glider so that when the boat was not level (which is of course almost always, especially in waves of any size) the tail would not tend to fall to the low side. The whole thing would be trimmed to the wind by a tail identical in principle to the glider’s elevator (or stabilizer). I called it a wingsail.
Small wingsails could be operated by hand, because the effort involved in adjusting the angle of the tail was very small, while even much larger ones need very little power to operate (and in due course, just in time) along would come affordable photovoltaic cells. And (once computer control techniques had been developed. This was the middle sixties, remember.) my wingsails could be computer controlled, so that capsize and overpowering could at last be eliminated.
A simple hand lever, like that of a power boat, connected to the tail, would give thrust ahead, astern or neutral, and tacking and gybing, to go from sailing with the wind on one side of the boat to sailing with the wind on the other side, was going to be completely automatic. You would just steer the boat on to the new course, and your thrustwing would do the rest. Excited, I began to make models, testing them on a local pond.
One day, when I had reached the stage of needing to move on to building a full sized prototype, I was doing trials on my latest model, which was faster than I expected and literally hissed as it reached across the pond.
Then I had to run round to the other side, turn the model round and send her back again to make any adjustments necessary. I had for the first time got autotacking installed, using a cam mechanism at the base of the wingsail, and was trying to optimize the lever ratios involved.
Concentrating hard, I was surprised when a polite young voice behind me asked if I needed any assistance. A big Range Rover had silently pulled up on the road along the edge of the pond, and a young man about ten years old had climbed down and walked across the grass. His father and some younger brothers and sisters were sitting in the car, probably wondering what this rather disheveled young man was doing with his curious hissing contraption.
I explained what I was trying to do, and the boy stationed himself on the opposite side of the pond. This saved me a great deal of time and running around. We got quite good at resetting the rudder each time, trying to send the model right into each other’s hands. In fact, after a little practice, he did at least as well (if not better) than I did.
After twenty minutes or so of this, during which time I was able to get ahead really well with the cam follower optimization, his father climbed down from the Range Rover and came across to ask me what I was doing. I explained that I had this wingsail idea, which could revolutionise sailing, and perhaps even save fuel on big ships.
He asked a few penetrating questions, and then asked me about my plans. I explained that I had gone about as far as I could with models, and wanted to buy a pair of catamaran hulls to build a full sized prototype propelled by my first ever full sized wingsail.
“How much will that cost?”, he asked, and I replied that I thought I should probably have to pay around two thousand pounds.
“Well, we must be getting back for tea now, but here is enough for one of them, with my very best wishes”, he said, taking out his chequebook and writing out a cheque for a thousand pounds.
“But how shall I be able to get in touch with you?” I called, as he walked back to his car.
“Write to me care of the bank”, he said with a charming smile, and shepherding his family into the car he drove off into the Dartmoor mist. I had my first shareholder.
A few months later, other shareholders having come on board and Planesail Limited incorporated, I was able to launch the 30 ft trimaran Planesail, my first full sized prototype. I was very pleased to find that she was an absolute delight to sail although, since in her quadriplane rig I had decided not to incorporate the high thrust devices with which I was still experimenting at model scale, she was never very fast. Still, she made a lot of friends and influenced a lot of people. (Pic).
I clearly remember a middle aged couple who had made an appointment to come down to the Hamble for a test sail. The husband came on board with alacrity, but when I offered to help his wife down from the quay into Planesail she protested that she had always hated sailing, and intended to stay in the car.
I said that in that case she should definitely come along for the ride, and that in fact I would teach her to sail the boat first. Horrified, at first she flatly refused, but eventually she was persuaded to come aboard, and sat in the pilot’s seat looking very apprehensive. She cheered up a little when I explained that there were only two controls, the ordinary car sized steering wheel to control direction, and the thrust lever to control speed, and if necessary to put the air brakes on.
Five minutes later we were, painfully slowly, overtaking a typical monohull cruiser on a close reach, and her husband watched in growing disbelief as she cried out excitedly:-
“Mr Walker, Mr Walker, how can I make her go faster?”
Aboard the monohull a great deal of surreptitious sail trimming and tweaking was going on, but I suggested that, being to leeward, we were in the other boat’s dirty wind, and why didn’t she try overtaking on the other side. “Just turn the wheel as if you were driving a car,” I said “The wingsail will look after itself.”
So we made a stylish S-curve across the other boat’s wake, and once we had lined up again in cleaner air Planesail accelerated away easily.
Her husband managed (after some difficulty in persuading his wife to give up the controls) to have his own turn at the wheel, and was just as enthralled as his wife had been.
“And she sails so level, even when hard on the wind,” he marvelled. “I’ve never been aboard a multihull before. But can’t they tip right over in a strong wind and stay there, upside down?”.
I explained that we were developing an automatic governing system which would prevent overpowering and capsize for our production boats, and after a very pleasant afternoon on the water he gave me our first ever cash deposit, although he explained that he would want a larger boat than the admittedly rather minimally fitted out Planesail.
Anton Flettner
The publicity that Planesail achieved led me to the Amateur Yacht Research Society, then as now the premier think tank for innovative boats, where I was slightly acerbically informed that I hadn’t been the first to invent the wingsail, as I could see from AYRS booklet 14. There I found some details of Fin Utne’s work during the second world war in Norway, and on carrying out further research I discovered that the first inventor of the concept was a German called Anton Flettner in 1923.
A successful and prolific inventor, he must have been a great salesman too, because after making a modest fortune from the Flettner rudder for ships, he persuaded the board of Krupps to re-rig an elderly barquentine, the Buckau, with a revolutionary set of metal vertical wings. These would be freely pivoted to the vessel so as to be able to align themselves with the wind, just like my own invention, angled to the wind for control purposes, as in Planesail, by a downwind tail.
Work had already started in the giant Krupps yard in Hamburg when Flettner, on holiday on a Baltic island, was taught how to swerve a tennis ball by applying side spin. Later that afternoon, relaxing on the beach, he was idly pouring sand grains down the slope of the dune while twisting a tennis ball in the flow, when suddenly he realised that by spinning a tall vertical column in the breeze a propulsive force more or less at right angles to the wind would be generated.
Excited by this new concept (which he later found out was called the Magnus effect after its Swedish inventor) he rushed back to Berlin, and told the astonished board of Krupps that he no longer wanted his aluminium wings, he wanted tall spinning rotors.
As I said, he must have been a super salesman, because Krupps agreed to scrap all work on the metal wings, and to replace them with tall metal rotors. The Buckau became the world’s first, and almost the last, rotorship.
A successful and prolific inventor, he must have been a great salesman too, because after making a modest fortune from the Flettner rudder for ships, he persuaded the board of Krupps to re-rig an elderly barquentine, the Buckau, with a revolutionary set of metal vertical wings. These would be freely pivoted to the vessel so as to be able to align themselves with the wind, just like my own invention, angled to the wind for control purposes, as in Planesail, by a downwind tail.
Work had already started in the giant Krupps yard in Hamburg when Flettner, on holiday on a Baltic island, was taught how to swerve a tennis ball by applying side spin. Later that afternoon, relaxing on the beach, he was idly pouring sand grains down the slope of the dune while twisting a tennis ball in the flow, when suddenly he realised that by spinning a tall vertical column in the breeze a propulsive force more or less at right angles to the wind would be generated.
Excited by this new concept (which he later found out was called the Magnus effect after its Swedish inventor) he rushed back to Berlin, and told the astonished board of Krupps that he no longer wanted his aluminium wings, he wanted tall spinning rotors.
As I said, he must have been a super salesman, because Krupps agreed to scrap all work on the metal wings, and to replace them with tall metal rotors. The Buckau became the world’s first, and almost the last, rotorship.
The Buckau
Flettner had in fact, in my opinion, made a serious mistake. His rotors, spun round by a steam donkey engine at around 400 rpm, could certainly give plenty of thrust, but their aerodynamic efficiency, the ratio of thrust across the wind to air drag downwind, was not much better than the original cloth sail rig of the barquentine. So the Buckau could broad reach beautifully, but was pretty terrible at going at any reasonable angle towards the wind.
And to make matters worse, there was no way to reduce the aerodynamic forces in strong winds. The poor Buckau could become “embayed” on a lee shore, desperately reaching backwards and forwards, unable to sail upwind and out of trouble without the maximum possible help from her steam main propulsion engine.
And finally, of course, if the steam donkey engine broke down or ran out of steam, there was no drive at all, just (far too much) downwind drag.
The rotorship project fizzled out after one more ship, the Barbara, was built. I strongly believe that Flettner should have stuck to his original idea, because modern wingsails can survive hurricane strength wind, exert virtually no force on the vessel when put into neutral, and are highly efficient, so that wingships can sail very close to the wind.
After Flettner an occasional specialised wing was used on racing or experimental craft, and then in Norway during the second world war Fin Utne, with whom many years later I got in touch, built a dear little boat called “Flaunder” which worked just as Flettner’s aluminium wings might have done twenty years before. Sadly, Norway was then occupied by the Axis powers, and “Flaunder” was destroyed by the Gestapo as a potential weapon of war.
And to make matters worse, there was no way to reduce the aerodynamic forces in strong winds. The poor Buckau could become “embayed” on a lee shore, desperately reaching backwards and forwards, unable to sail upwind and out of trouble without the maximum possible help from her steam main propulsion engine.
And finally, of course, if the steam donkey engine broke down or ran out of steam, there was no drive at all, just (far too much) downwind drag.
The rotorship project fizzled out after one more ship, the Barbara, was built. I strongly believe that Flettner should have stuck to his original idea, because modern wingsails can survive hurricane strength wind, exert virtually no force on the vessel when put into neutral, and are highly efficient, so that wingships can sail very close to the wind.
After Flettner an occasional specialised wing was used on racing or experimental craft, and then in Norway during the second world war Fin Utne, with whom many years later I got in touch, built a dear little boat called “Flaunder” which worked just as Flettner’s aluminium wings might have done twenty years before. Sadly, Norway was then occupied by the Axis powers, and “Flaunder” was destroyed by the Gestapo as a potential weapon of war.
Planesail P1b in Chichester Harbour.
Having also had the same idea I built Planesail, which became Planesail 1b. She sailed beautifully and made many friends.
When I contacted Fin he told me that he too had been disappointed to discover that Flettner had got there first, but that in his long experience he had found it not uncommon for a good idea to be invented completely independently by two or more people.
“The important thing,” he said, “is not to give up. Flettner did not persevere, and neither did I. So don’t give up. Persevere! Never give up!” Well, I’m still remembering his words, many years later.
When I contacted Fin he told me that he too had been disappointed to discover that Flettner had got there first, but that in his long experience he had found it not uncommon for a good idea to be invented completely independently by two or more people.
“The important thing,” he said, “is not to give up. Flettner did not persevere, and neither did I. So don’t give up. Persevere! Never give up!” Well, I’m still remembering his words, many years later.
 Triplex GTS, designed by John |
