Not many people are well versed in the complicated history of steam ships – what a lot of people don’t know is the  change from sail to steam powered vessels, there was no sudden shift to complete steamships. Steam ships were invented in 1800s, with known ships as quaint S.S. Great Western to the 1912 behemoth R.M.S Titanic.

Until around the early 20th century, most ships had a full complement of sails because the traveling public did not fully trust steam technology yet, but steam would soon prove to be reliable and the sails were used less and less. So for now sailing steamships are a thing of the past, but soon these hybrid ships may be the future of commercial maritime. 

A rising problem facing the entire world is the carbon footprint and climate change. Many people suggest a quick change over to more green energy sources, but the chances of this happening overnight are very slim; it would need to be over many years. The average large cargo ship emits as much pollution as 50 million cars and for cruise ships it’s about 1 million cars worth per day of operation. This isn’t even including the solid waste, but that’s another story all on its own. 

Ships now are miles ahead of ships in terms of efficiency but the pollution is almost the same. So we could always put more effort into designing new less dirty energy sources for ships, but this will take time, in the meantime there are still many great solutions to cut back dramatically on pollution. One of which has been around almost as long as humans have been traversing waterways, and that’s the simple sail. And with modern materials we can now make sails much more efficient at catching the wind than a cloth sail ever could. With that extra propulsion from the wind ships wouldn’t have to run their engines nearly as hard, thus creating less pollution. 

How plausible is it that every shipping company on the planet scraps their million-billion dollar ships for pennies on the dollar, and then orders new billion dollar ships that could take years to build? It’s not, that won’t happen, they could obviously phase the ships out over time and slowly replace them with newer ships, but that could take many many years. With the pandemic much of the world’s older merchant vessel fleet is being scrapped. 

Something to think about is if it would be possible to convert existing vessels to sailing ships, which could extend their life and also cut emissions, they might have to sacrifice some cargo space for now but eventually there can be purpose built ships that don’t need to sacrifice cargo space.