Monday--It's madness I tell you.

Re: Monday--It's madness I tell you.

Polo? Bentham? One can only imagine what kind of junk ideas these two were trying to float.

You call that junk?

Sorry folks, I'm having severe internet problems but Bill is right so far. I'm in China. I'm talking junk. So what am I looking for? What of a junk could save lives? This practice dates from the 2nd century AD it was not adopted in the west until the late 19th century. There is arguably a record of a application in England in 1712. That use however is different than my question. The application didn't seem to make the leap from one to the other for about a hundred years.

Re: Monday--It's madness I tell you.

No clue. The best I could find indicates that it has something to do with boats, but other than that, I have no idea.

Re: Monday--It's madness I tell you.

Would the 'natural item' in question be the subject of a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes?

Answer

What the above men noted was that the junk had superbly fitted joints that framed transverse watertight bulkheads that compartmentalized (16 of them) various portions of the junk. One section could be closed off in the event of a ramming or puncture. Another Chinese invention the cog chain with buckets (later adopted by the British) allowed adjacent compartments to bail with enough speed and capacity to provide the option of continuing action, abandonment, or grounding. Watertight compartments also apparently allowed a junk to purposely ride higher or lower in the water by free flowing water into select compartments and evacuating it later by chain bucket lift..

The idea supposedly came from the compartments of bamboo that are divided by transverse septa. The west did not have bamboo so perhaps they get a pass on the idea.

Note: in the early 1700’s some English fishermen built live catch wells –“well smack”--for their catch of the day. It kept the fish alive and fresh, but the water filled hold within a hull didn’t seem to catch on as a life saving bulkhead for fighting vessels.

For those interested in this line of trivia, next week I have another venture into junking.

Re: Monday--It's madness I tell you.

Couldn't figure out what a judge had to do with a junk. Had to check it was not the son but the father and it had nada to do with ironsides. Good guess though.

Re: Answer

We just watched a show on anchient Rome and they found some boat remains in a lake that show they also had bucket removal systems to empty the water out of the hull. Used bronze chains. They also had bearings making a lazy susan, presumably to turn a statue. This was several hundred years before any other trace of a bearing.

Brian