...; transferred from the Ministerie van Marine (Department of the Navy), The Hague, to the museum, 1883

Object number: NG-MC-564-1

Wooden model of the well of a lifting screw between sternpost and rudder post, with part of the keel and the aftermost frames.

In the well, a propeller is hung in a frame, which can be lifted by means of a rope running over a sheave in the frame and one at the top of the screw well. The screw is a four-blade propeller composed of two twin-blade screws which can be set in a parallel position for lifting. This is done in the following way: the screw shaft of the after screw runs through the shaft of the fore screw and has a slot at the back, which has to be set in a vertical position for the screws to be lifted: the slot then fits over the rail controlling the ascent and locking the after screw in a vertical position. The fore screw is then in a horizontal position. Its shaft has two perpendicular slots at the front, running over a similar rail, which is interrupted halfway between the lines marked ‘A’ and ‘B’: here the screw can be turned to align with the after screw. The vertical rails against sternpost and rudder post controlling the ascent have teeth for the ratchets of the screw frame, which prevent the frame from falling back; by pulling two other ropes the ratchets can be released, thus lowering the screw.

Petrus van der Loo’s (1806-1864) design¹¹J.M. Obreen, Catalogus der verzameling modellen van het Departement van Marine, The Hague 1858, no. 564. was inspired by an example in Pâris’s work on propellers²²E. Pâris, Traité de l’hélice propulsive, s.l. 1855, pl. IX, figs. 3, 14. and a drawing of the screw of the French frigate l’Impétueuse, which the Dutch Foreign Office procured for the Dutch Navy in 1857. The object of such designs was to enable the screw to be lifted.

Scale (derived) 1:10.

H. Huijgens, ‘De schroef-stoomschepen’, Verhandelingen en berigten betrekkelijk het zeewezen (1855), no. 2, pp. 249-83 and pl., p. 257; E. Pâris, Traité de l’hélice propulsive, s.l. 1855, pl. IX, figs. 3, 14; J.M. Obreen, Catalogus der verzameling modellen van het Departement van Marine, The Hague 1858, no. 564; J.M. Dirkzwager, ‘Some Aspects of the Development of Screw-Propulsion in the 19th and Early 20th Century’, 4th Lips Propeller Symposium, Drunen 1979, pp. 185-98, p. 194, fig. 27; J.M. Dirkzwager, ‘Problemen bij de introductie van de scheepsschroef’, Spiegel Historiael 27 (1992), no. 3, pp. 132-33; J.M. Dirkzwager, ‘Problemen en oplossingen bij de ontwikkeling van de stoomvaart in Nederland’, Erfgoed van Industrie en Techniek 3 (1992), pp. 74-90, p. 86; A.A. Lemmers, Techniek op schaal. Modellen en het technologiebeleid van de Marine 1725-1885, Amsterdam 1996, p. 260; A.J. Hoving, ‘Screw Propulsion’, Model Shipwright 80 (1992), pp. 58-62; A.J. Hoving, Message in a Model: Stories from the Navy Model Room of the Rijksmuseum, Florence, OR 2013, pp. 196-99; J. Holtrop et al., ‘Schroefvoortstuwing. Een 19e eeuwse technische uitdaging’, Scheepshistorie 17 (2014), pp. 48-71

J. van der Vliet, 2016, 'Petrus van der Loo, Model of a Lifting Screw, Netherlands, 1857', in J. van der Vliet and A. Lemmers (eds.), Navy Models in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20053815