Except for recent developments in battery-electric power, pleasure boating has relied upon the internal combustion engine (ICE) as the source of power. There are many interesting iterations of the ICE and we will ignore some of them such as the gas turbine engine and rocket engines as their contribution to the sport, although most fascinating indeed, has been minimal.
The development of the ICE came bit by bit starting in the late 1700s. French engineers are credited with installing a prototype of their ICE in a boat around 1800-1810. There is little information available about that boat, the engine, or its inventors. Aside from an American patent for a turpentine- fuelled ICE in 1826 which never went into production, it seems there was little other reported progress during the balance of that century.
Then in 1886, German inventors Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach installed their one-cylinder, petroleum-derivative powered ICE into an open double-ender skiff- type boat on a lake near Stuttgart. This roughly half-litre displacement engine weighed almost 60 kilograms (roughly 133 lbs) and developed a little over one horsepower at around 700 RPM.
The boat, named Rems, had been commissioned from the German
shipyard of Friedrich Lürssen, a yard that would eventually become today’s Lürssen Yachts. Rems would be remembered and credited as the first motorboat, even if indeed it had not exactly been the first.
It seems that the first sizeable production of motorboats was by Priestman Brothers of England which tested its first ICE-powered boat in 1888. Priestman IC engines utilized kerosene and a high- voltage spark-type ignition system patented by Karl Benz in 1888. Many of Priestman’s boats were used commercially to move goods on England’s canal system.
Frederick Lanchester of England had by 1897 developed a new ICE design with an innovative wick-fed carburettor utilizing benzene in a boat with a reversible propeller. This engine received much praise as being “high-revving” while attaining the unimaginable peak of 800 RPM. Many Lanchester boats were used as ferries on the Thames River and elsewhere.
Both pleasure and commercial motorboating was growing exponentially into the turn of the 20th century, both in Europe and America. And of course, where there are motors, there are those wanting to race and claim victory. In 1903, the Marine Motor Association was started
in England, followed months later in the United States by the American Power Boat Association (APBA), both with the objective to create rules for boat racing by delineating classes of boats and engines.
Also in 1903, Mr. Alfred Harmsworth donated the Harmsworth Cup for international powerboat competition. There were few rules, but the boat and engine had to be designed and built in the country being represented. The first race for the Harmsworth Cup was won by the 40- foot Napier I, designed and built as a race boat by Napier and Company of England and driven by Dorothy Levitt. The hull was steel and the four- cylinder Napier engine developed 66 horsepower -- providing a top speed of 21 mph, thus setting the world’s first speed record.
One year later, in 1904, APBA created The Challenge Cup which has been known since as the Gold Cup. The first race, on the Hudson River in New York, was won by the nearly 60-foot-long Standard having an average speed of less than 25 mph from its 110-horsepower Standard engine. Boat racing was forever changed in 1911 when the Gold Cup was won by a hydroplane design, which of course was a planing hull as opposed to the displacement hull designs up until that time.
The 1886 Lürssen Yachts ‘Rems’ THE REPORT | MAR 2024 | ISSUE 107 | 121
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