It is almost 200 years ago exactly since Scotsman Henry Bell's 'Comet' made history as Europe's first steam ship -coal-powered of course.The speed and innovation of ship design in the following three decades was astounding. Isambard Kingdom Brunei's giant 'Great Britain', for instance, in 1843 was the largest ship ever built and the first propeller-driven vessel, again fuelled by coal.Brunei, in his short but spectacular career, not only proved the sceptics wrong but did it in a superb way. A steamship, they said, would never be able to carry enough coal to leave space for cargo. In thinking small for small vessels, they were correct, but Brunei was way ahead of them, thinking big enough to change the available cargo deadweight as an appreciable percentage of the vessel's lightship displacement.
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