The Steamboat Inventors: The First Generation

>>Perhaps surprisingly, no one attempted to push a sailing ship with an artificial wind from steam-driven bellows.

This is a fun little exploration, albeit light (for my taste) on specific facts. I can only hope the author meant the above statement as a joke about how "all over the map" some of these original exploratory concepts were - rather than suggesting this was a good idea that inventors missed. Blowing air into sails from a source on the ship will not give you any appreciable locomotive force (the only force generated will be a small lift force over the sail area... Enough to counter the reactive force of the expelled air? Highly doubtful - you'd be better off pointing your air jet aft towards the waterline to push the ship forward. Very energy inefficient, particularly when you consider the cost of compressing air in the first place due to low quality heat lost in compression)

As a 20yr veteran of the naval engineering and ship design domain, while I agree that a deep understanding of hyrdodynamics was nascent at the time, none of the exploratory propulsion concepts (paddle wheels of various forms and placement, flippers, and in particular a spring-based fish tail - under exploration for the past several decades as an ultra efficient propulsor option) are extremely "bad". Some of these were just ahead of their time.

I would strong recommend the author seek out domain experts to review content prior to publishing.

Very interesting. And the passages about different Steamboat inventors failing to learn from each other as they iteratively moved through different designs definitely made me think of the modern programmer, and about how just going ahead and coding is often valued over extensive research. I wonder if someday today's "first generation programmers" will be looked at in the same way as these early pioneers.