Well, that's a bummer. That said, this does seem the way of the future. We just need to either figure out maintenance robots and/or find a way to keep human crew happy on long, slow voyages across the Pacific.
The few people I know who pursued jobs on boats did so because they liked being out at sea, away from land.
Combine that with the modern availability of high speed internet via Starlink and entertainment is not a problem.
Maybe it wasn't just the land they were getting away from.
I lived by the sea my whole life so sea on its own was not much special for me but being on the ship anchored in the middle of water with no land in sight was just different.
If you get the chance, the Pommern is a beautifully preserved ship from that era in Mariehamn's excellent maritime museum.
Makes me think of Rory Sutherland's ideas for getting passengers to be ok with a long ride duration on the Eurostar https://www.instagram.com/reel/C98_wbssLjG/
The stronger argument is that wind is not consistent or reliable enough for logistics. At least, not without doing a lot of extra math.
So I agree that sail propulsion alone won't happen at large, but it's an interesting question of how far in that direction commercial shipping can go with modern technology.
Back when engines first replaced sailing fuel was nearly free, and sailboats were incredibly slow, dangerous, unreliable, and didn’t sail upwind well, and all that has changed- time to take another look.
Plenty of customers don't care about latency, just cost. No fuel = no fuel cost.
Customers care about total cost, not just fuel. There is also crew wages, maintenance, insurance, capital depreciation, etc. Sailing vessels that carry useful amounts of cargo are much slower than equivalent motor vessels so all other costs go up. Fuel is cheap.
Surprisingly, no, it wasn't. I'll slightly fudge the numbers and talk in terms of proportion of world trade that was carried by ocean-going vessels (because if you double the population then it's reasonable to talk about doubling the number of ships).
The world economy was very globalised in 1913. That level of globalisation in trade wasn't matched again until the 1990s.
We're only a little more global now than we were in the age of sail.
The British navy and merchant fleet was a wonder of its era.
At the end of commercial merchant sailing, the largest steel hulled merchant sailing vessels were about 1/10th the cargo capacity of a modern container ship, but actually pretty comparable in speed, which is limited more by the physics of displacement hulls in the water than the propulsion method.
Historically, sailing ships risked becalming, but that is no longer a risk, with improved weather routing and backup engines that allow them continue at full speed if the wind dies.
Considering that the cost of modern shipping is 50-60% fuel cost alone, and that in principle with modern tech sailing vessels won't require large crews, it is not clear to me that it can't be economically viable nowadays even at the scales already possible a century ago, nor that it would be impossible to develop tech to scale merchant sailing up to modern container ship sizes.
Even with old sail tech it was already closer than you might expect to modern container ships. Look up the Preussen, launched 1901. It could do over 20 knots and carry 8,000 tons of cargo. Although small by modern standards, there are economical viable smaller container ships operating today in that speed and cargo capacity range.
Even if you still had an old low tech boat like the Preussen nowadays, modern sail technology and hardware, plus better weather routing data would make it substantially faster, and require a tiny fraction of the crew that was initially required.
The even better news is that the technology is becoming available to the general population and also commercially viable for projects like this.
> The power required would be the same as that provided by the bunker fuel engines in common use
And that is a lot of power! Emma Mærsk has an engine output around 80-90MW.
The largest off shore wind turbine today is 26MW with a rotor diameter north of 300m/1000ft(!!). Common (modern) offshore wind turbines today are about 10-15MW with rotor diameters of ~220m/720ft.
I will not conclude it is impossible at this end of the scale, but you need a huge foil area to match such engine output.
IIUC, the physics work against us as we scale up in size, because of the square/cube-law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law (weight of the foil/sail + mast is cubed when the area is squared).
You do realize that none of those ships could get into any port, right? We've made modifications to accommodate that.
I tend to agree with you that putting a fixed sail on top of a container vessel won't fly.
Maybe ships would need to be smaller. I think the size of ships was mostly increased because it makes it more efficient. But if fuel is free, you could have smaller ships take direct routes instead of the layovers we do now. That might compensate for time lost as well due to lower speed.
This is a PoC not a finished product
Of course it won't, it's not an airplane.
> You do realize that none of those ships could get into any port, right?
Container ships sail under bridges all the time. Check YouTube for videos of this or just Google it if you want proof.
For ocean-going ships, isn't 99.x% of the trip in the open ocean? If so, what limit is there on sail dimensions? It's a genuine question; if coastal infrastructure isn't the limit, what is the next limitation.
They could lower sails, and use a motor and/or smaller sails, around coastal infrastructure.