Queen Maria (ship, 1837)

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Queen Mary
Queen Maria on a GDR postage stamp from 1977
The Queen Mary on a DDR stamp from 1977
Ship data
flag SaxonySaxony Saxony
Ship type Paddle steamer
home port Dresden
Owner Royally privileged Saxon Steamship Company
Launch 1837
Commissioning 1837
Whereabouts cancellation
Ship dimensions and crew
length
32.85 m ( Lüa )
width 3.68 m
over wheel arches: 7.84 m
Draft Max. (empty) 0.48 m
Machine system
machine 3-flame tube suitcase boiler
2-cylinder twin machine
Machine
performance
96 hp (71 kW)
propeller 2 side wheels
Transport capacities
Permitted number of passengers 450

The paddle steamer Queen Maria , built in 1837, was one of the first steamships built in Germany on the Upper Elbe . The ship was named after Queen Maria Anna of Saxony .

Introduction (1815–1835)

Dresden merchants tried since 1815 to introduce steam navigation on the Upper Elbe . However, the Saxon King and the City Council of Dresden rejected the requests. Heinrich Wilhelm Calberla , owner of the Calberlaschen Zuckersiederei , had a steam tug with a rear wheel built in Krippen on the Upper Elbe in 1833, which was equipped with an English 75 HP steam engine in Hamburg . In doing so, he set up freight traffic between Hamburg and Dresden. In 1837 the ship was decommissioned due to unprofitability.

Queen Maria (1836/1837)

The Dresden merchants Benjamin Schwenke and Friedrich Lange founded the Elbe Steamship Company on March 6, 1836 . On July 8, 1836, the stock corporation, which now consisted of fourteen people, received the royal privilege to operate steam shipping on the Elbe in Saxony . You had previously commissioned Johann Andreas Schubert , Professor of Mathematics and Mechanics at the Technical College in Dresden , to build two steamships. He was the designer of the steamers Queen Maria and Prince Albert . He got ideas from a three-month study visit financed by the Elbdampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft in France, where he studied steam navigation on the Seine .

From 1836, Schubert was director of the newly founded "Dresdner Actien-Maschinenbau-Verein". The iron ships were built under his direction and with the assistance of engineers Tauberth and Möhring on Dresden's Vogelwiese between Ziegelstrasse and Rietschelstrasse on the banks of the Johannstadt Elbe. Construction began in September 1836. In order to be able to continue construction in winter, a shipbuilding hall was built on the site. After the ship's hulls were completed in April 1837, they were towed to the Übigau mechanical engineering company . The steam engines were supplied by the Berlin factory owner Franz Anton Egells , who set up his machine factory in front of the Oranienburger Tor in Chausseestrasse in 1825 . The boiler and machine were installed in Übigau . In 1837, which took place launching the Queen Mary . It had a length of 32.85 meters, a width of 3.68 meters and a width of 7.84 meters across the wheel arches. The ship offered space for 450 passengers with a draft of 0.75 meters.

The period from 1837 to 1846

“Queen Maria” on the move, contemporary lithography

The test drive on July 6, 1837 took place between Übigau and Briesnitz . Then the final expansion of the ship took place. On July 30, 1837, the first official trip from the Packhof at the Marienbrücke to Meißen took place and on August 6, the first official trip to Rathen . On August 23, King Friedrich August II of Saxony used the ship for a trip with the entire family from Pirna to Pillnitz . Two days later, on August 25, 1837, scheduled traffic began. Since the steam engine could not be reversed, the docking maneuvers had to work on the first attempt. However, the tubular boiler supplied by Übigau did not prove itself. It was replaced in November by a suitcase boiler from the Egells company. The test drive in December 1837 was satisfactory. The Queen Mary reached a speed of 3.5 knots upstream and 8 knots downstream. On June 14, 1838, the ship reached Tetschen for the first time . However, at that time it was not possible to cross the rapids near Königstein with this ship without outside help. The flow speed of the water was 1.7 m / s here. That only changed with the river expansion from 1840 onwards. On August 19, 1838, the ship sank due to a leak after touching ground on the way back from Pillnitz in the area of Hosterwitz . The following day the leak was sealed and the ship was brought to Dresden for repairs. As a result, the ship was rebuilt again. The curved ship's bottom, which repeatedly led to ground contact, was replaced by a flat ship's bottom. It was not used again until March 1839. In the same year the boiler was swapped for a new combined flame tube and tubular boiler from Übigau. To replace the steam engine, which was unsuitable for the shipping conditions, the ship sailed to Hamburg on April 7, 1841. Here it was equipped with the new boiler and a new machine, both from the company John Penn and Sons . On June 25, 1841, the ship arrived back in Dresden from Hamburg. After a spring flood in 1845 caused the Augustus Bridge to collapse, the ship was used as a ferry between the old town and the new town from April 24 to May 5, 1845.

The ship was decommissioned in the fall of 1846. The Dresden iron dealer Thormeyer received the hull. The steam engine was installed in the successor ship Koenigin Maria II .

The steam engine

Schubert wanted to install a high-pressure steam engine from the Dresden Actien-Maschinenbau-Verein's own plant in Übigau , but failed because of the regulations of the government offices. A two-cylinder, low-pressure side balancing steam engine from Franz Anton J. Egells Berlin was then installed. The power of the machine was 120 hp. Due to the three times higher weight of this machine, the draft of the ship was 0.74 m instead of 0.43 m. This led to basic hits on the first trips. In 1841, a lighter oscillating low-pressure two-cylinder twin steam engine from the English mechanical engineering company John Penn and Sons was installed in Hamburg . The machine had an output of 96 hp.

literature

  • Peter Blath: Saxony's White Fleet - Steamboat Rides on the Elbe . Sutton, Erfurt 2006, ISBN 3-89702-949-9 .
  • Frank Müller, Wolfgang Quinger: With steam and paddle wheel on the Upper Elbe . Transpress Verlag VEB Verlag für Transportwesen, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-344-00286-4 .
  • General organ for trade and commerce. Fourth year, Cologne March 1, 1838
  • Frankfurter Ober-Postamts-Zeitung, July 12, 1838 p. 344
  • Bayreuther Zeitung, April 3, 1839, p. 321

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The day before yesterday, the steamship "Königin Maria" suffered an accident , Wiener Zeitung of August 29, 1838, accessed on May 6, 2016
  2. Hans Rindt: The "Weisse Flotte" Dresden. From the history of the Upper Elbe passenger shipping . In: Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 3 (=  writings of the German Maritime Museum . Volume 12 ). Oceanum-Verlag, Wiefelstede 1980, ISBN 3-7979-1523-3 , p. 69–114, especially p. 75 ( online at the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum [PDF; 5.3 MB ]).
  3. Klaus Mauersberger: It went better with a light Penn machine . In: Dresden University Journal . No. 10 , 2008, p. 9 ( online [PDF; 1.6 MB ]).