EB11/"Hydraulics" briefly mentions lift, bucket and plunger, diaphragm, chain-and-bucket, and scoop wheel pumps, but focuses on centrifugal pumps (see below).
A more cogent classification system appears in the modern Encyclopedia Britannica (2002 DVD, essentially corresponding to the 1999 print edition). Water pumps are classified as to whether they work by volumetric displacement or by adding kinetic energy. The displacement pumps are classified as being reciprocating (piston, plunger, diaphragm, etc.) or rotary (gear, lobe, screw, vane, or cam). Reciprocating pumps can be single- or double-acting, the latter pumping on both strokes. Kinetic pumps are classified as centrifugal (radial, axial, mixed flow) or regenerative.
In the 1630s, there were three basic types of shipboard pumps: burr, common (suction), and chain pumps.
Burr Pump. Described by Agricola in 1556, it had a vertical pole that moved up and down inside the pump tube. On the lower end, the pole was thickened (the burr) and to this was attached a leather cone ("shoe"). Strips of leather ran from the base of the cone to an anchor point above the base. On the downstroke, the cone closed and water entered the pump tube. On the upstroke, the cone opened and water was carried upward. (Agricola, De re Metallica (Hoover transl., 1912) 176; Ewbank, A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and Other Machines for Raising Water (1876) 214; Oertling 24ff).
The burr pump was also equipped with a foot valve at the bottom of the pump tube. Oertling doesn't say much about it, but a foot-valve is a one-way valve used to keep the pump primed (i.e., filled with liquid).
By the seventeenth century, the burr pump generally was "no longer in use on English ships, but could be found on Dutch and Flemish ships." However, it was occasionally seen, in modified form, as late as 1860 (Oertling 29).
Oertling says that it was difficult to service; the entire pump tube had to be lifted off its base. On the other hand, according to Boteler (1634) and Manwayring (1644), it drew up "far more water and was less labor intensive than the common pump at that time" (Oertling 30).
Common (suction) pump. First described in 1433, and used in mines and on ships in the sixteenth century, if not earlier. It features a fixed lower valve, an air-tight piston that moves up and down in the box, and an upper valve inside the piston. On the upstroke, a vacuum is created between the piston and the lower valve, drawing water up through the latter. On the downstroke, the drawn water is forced up through the upper valve and ultimately to a spout.
The theoretical limit for raising water by suction is about thirty feet (assuming barometric pressure of air is 30 inches mercury). Because of friction, the practical limit is 28 feet, and this is measured from the surface of the water to the closing member of the upper valve. The pump was typically placed near the center of the pump tube to reduce the critical distance.
The lower valve was a lift check valve, that is it had a central hole closed by a vertically movable leather claque held down by a valve weight. Water pressure could lift the claque and weight, opening the valve, but a guide maintained its alignment. It was equipped with a staple so that it could be fished up with a hook at one end of a long pole, for repair.
The upper valve-cum-piston had a wood body, with a slot to receive a wooden shaft ("spear") at the upper end and a check valve covered with a leather gasket at the piston end. This could be a lift check valve, but one recovered from the Machault (1757) had a hinged claque instead. Both lower and upper valves were usually made of elm or ash.
The spear was pivotably connected at its upper end, above the top of the pump tube, to one end of a lever ("brake"), whose fulcrum was provided by a "cheek" that curved away from the top of the pump tube.
Common pumps could be connected in parallel (two piston cylinders connected by a T to a pump tube communicating with the bilge, as in Dodgeson's 1799 pump) or in series (two pistons in a single cylinder, as in Taylor's 1780 pump).
On the Taylor pump, the shaft of the lower piston ran through the upper piston and was connected above it by a jog section to one side of a cog wheel, and the upper piston was connected at its periphery to a shaft that in turn was connected to the other side of the same cog wheel. Thus, when one piston went down, the other came up. the cog wheel was connected to a double action pump brake or drum. It would thus produce twice as much water as a single action common pump of the same bore and piston stroke (Oertling 64ff, Ewbank 226).
Chain pump. Chain pumps have a curious history; while known in Roman Europe, the concept was lost, and was reintroduced via contact with the Tartars of eastern Europe in the fifteenth century. It was then used to drain mines, whether as a result of technology transfer from the European mining industry, or from the Chinese in the sixteenth century. Raleigh reports the introduction of the chain pump in the late sixteenth century to the British navy (Oertling 75) and it is also described by Manwayring (1644) and Boteler (1634). Dampier, in the late seventeenth century, had both a chain pump and a common hand pump; in the mid-nineteenth century, British warships carried four chain pumps and three common pumps (Ewbank 154).
The chain pump features an endless chain bearing circular discs ("burrs") through a vertical tube, open at the top and bottom, the latter being immersed. The chain runs around two sprocketed wheels, a drive wheel on top and a guide wheel on bottom. It enters the water, passes around a submerged guide wheel, and moves upward, the discs entrapping water when they enter the bottom of the tube. The water is carried by the discs up to the top of the tube, where it passes into a discharge channel, and the chain passes around the drive wheel and descends back to the bilge. Originally, the drive wheel was a solid wooden wheel with iron sprockets to engage the chain, and a crank attached to the shaft. The links were cast iron, and round or S-shaped. The disks were wooden.
The chain pump was able to move more water and was easier to work than the common pump, but it required a large crew, and the disks wore out quickly. It was used mostly on large warships (Oertling 80).
One problem with the old chain pump was that the weight of the water pressing down on the discs would tend to cause the chain to slide back on the sprocket wheel. The links were not well united and often broke. In addition, there was a lot of friction between the chain and the wheel, which, I imagine, increased the effort necessary to lift a given quantity of water. (Edinburgh Encyclopedia/Pump 202).
In 1764-68, Cole and Bentinck tested a new chain pump design. It wasn't officially adopted until 1774, after further modifications were made (Oertling 78).
Cole, in British Patent 911, issued December 16, 1768, just mentions the ease of repair and not how it was achieved. Apparently, "every other link was formed of two plates of iron, whose ends lapped over those of a single one, and secured by a bolt at each end" (Ewbank 155). The chain links were cast to the same size, and were therefore interchangeable, as were the link pins that connected the links (Oertling 93).
The links were designed so that they could be undone and a worn link replaced easily. Ewbank's description of this is a bit difficult to follow, but Oertling (Fig. 25) has described the chain assembly from the HMS Charon's (sunk 1781) chain pump. In essence, the link pin has a slot near one end, and an L-shaped cotter key is inserted into the slot. Thus, to unlink, just pull out the cotter key and then the link pin. In one experiment, the chain was deliberately broken and dropped in the well; it took just two-and-a-half minutes to retrieve it, repair it, and resume pumping (Nicholson, The Operative Mechanic (1825) 268).
The burr ("saucer") was positioned every fourth single link and it was composed of two plates of cast iron with leather in-between. The leather plate was of the same diameter as the bore of the pump tube, and the flanking metal plates were slightly smaller to minimize friction (Cole and Bentinck, British Patent 982, issued Jan. 17, 1771). Ewbank says that even the leather doesn't actually have to touch the wall of the tube.
The drive wheel, instead of being a simple sprocket wheel, took the form of two metal (brass?) discs eight inches apart on a common axle, further united by per
ipheral (iron?) bolts parallel to the wheel axis—essentially a cage gear. (The 982 patent likened it to the "skeleton of a drum.") The links of the chain had hooks that engaged these bolts (teeth) (Edinburgh Encyclopedia; Nicholson 268) .
With four men at the crank, the Cole-Bentinck chain pump discharged one ton of water in 43.5 seconds, versus 83 (Oertling 78; Ewbank 155 says 55) seconds for the old design. This pump is probably not described in Grantville literature, but could be invented independently.
The cast iron links were replaced with brass ones in the early nineteenth century (Oertling), and still later the lower wheel was replaced with a curved metal tube, to reduce friction (Edinburgh Encyclopedia).
Wood (70) says that the lower pipe end of a chain pump is "usually flared to facilitate entry of the discs into the pipe" but I haven't seen reference to this feature on ship pumps.
In a 1956 study, four men operating a chain pump with a four-inch pipe were able to achieve 40 cubic feet/hour discharge over a twenty-foot lift, 72 cfh over a ten-foot lift, and 110 cfh over a five-foot lift (72).
Chain bucket pump. I am not aware of any shipboard use, but this device (also called a Persian wheel) replaces the disks moving through an enclosed tube with individual buckets. They empty at the top of the movement into a discharge trough. The drive wheel is a portgarland, that is, it has projections on the rim, parallel to the shaft, to catch the buckets. The 1956 study (75) showed it to be superior to the simple chain pump, with discharge of 395 cfh over a twenty-foot lift, 580 cfh over ten-foot lift, and 760 cfh over a five-foot lift.
My guess is that the reason that this was not used on shipboard is that it is traditionally a large structure, with a wheel that is man-height or larger, and driven by animal power via a right angle drive (Yannopoulos, Evolution of Water Lifting Devices (Pumps) over the Centuries Worldwide, Water, 7:5031-5060 (2015)).
Centrifugal Pumps. These weren't used as of the Ring of Fire, but are probably the most important modern bilge pump type. These have a wheel with curved vanes ("impeller") enclosed in a chamber. Water enters at the center of the chamber and spirals out under the influence of the rotating impeller.
Euler discussed its theory in 1754, and some sources say it was invented by Jordan (1680) or Papin (1689). There was a successful centrifugal pump design introduced in 1818 ("Massachusetts pump") but it had straight vanes, and curved vanes proved much more efficient. (Greene, Pumping Machinery (1911) 43ff). The 1851 "Appold" centrifugal pump, with curved vanes, "raised continuously a volume of water equal to 1400 times its own capacity per minute." A further innovation was the "whirlpool" zone suggested by Professor Thomson, a free vortex space surrounding the wheel (EB11/Hydraulics).
They are not self-priming, and thus must be sitting in water in order to pump it. In theory the impeller could be rotated manually by a crank, drum, or capstan. However, when they were introduced, steam power was already available.
The USS Monitor (whose freeboard was only eighteen inches (Tucker, American Civil War: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection (2013) 1312) had a steam-powered centrifugal pump capable of moving 23,000 gallons per minute, but it wasn't enough to save it from sinking in 1862; its coal was wet which reduced effective steam power (Wikipedia).
Initially, they were driven by gearing from the main engine, but later these pumps were driven by auxiliary engines. If there was a long vertical shaft from the engine to the impeller below, they could be worked even if part of the hold was flooded. On the Inflexible, the pump engine was high enough so the pump could be worked even with twelve feet of water in the engine room (Smith, A Short History of Naval and Marine Engineering (2013) 208).
In 1961, Charmonman improvised an axial flow pump by encasing the propeller of a Thai-style outboard motor in a cylinder (Wood 112).
Diaphragm Pumps. These weren't used on ships as of the Ring of Fire, but are sometimes used nowadays as backup bilge pumps. They have the advantage of being self-priming. Like a piston pump, they vary the volume inside the pump chamber. However, they accomplish this by moving a flexible diaphragm in the side of the chamber, rather than by moving a piston.
Pumps: Motive Power. Generally speaking, seventeenth-century shipboard pumps were human-powered, with sailors pulling down a lever, turning a crank, or pulling on a rope wrapped around a drum. It should be noted that "during short time periods (10-15 minutes), the legs can develop about 0.25 hp while the arms can only provide about 0.10 hp. Over a sustained period (say five hours), a grown man is capable of 0.06-.08 hp (Wood 122).
That said, in the Netherlands and Great Britain, windmills were used to operate pumps used to drain land for agricultural use. (At least in China, seawater was also pumped onto land for salt extraction.)
In the nineteenth century, Norwegian and Swedish ships were routinely equipped with wind pumps (Leslie, A Sea-Painter's Log (1886) 52). However, they were less common in other merchants marine (even Dutch!). Wind pumps were used on ice barges in upstate New York, and one was rigged up on the Henry Woolley in 1871 after it sprang a leak ("A Useful Invention on Ship-Board," West Coast Times, Issue 1633, p. 2 (Dec. 9, 1871)).
An 1876 British writer estimated that the cost of the wind pump for a vessel of 800 tons would be about 40 pounds. He assumed that it would have sails six feet long, fixed to a revolving head mounted on a bipod mast (Wade, "Windmill Pumps" (Letter), Nautical Magazine 45: 1027 (1876) 1028). The wind pump frees the crew from pumping duties, but it doesn't work in a calm and also takes up deck space.
It is conceivable that a paddle wheel (undershot) or propeller could be used to power a pump on a sailing ship. The ship would be impelled forward by the wind, causing water to pass the paddle wheel or propeller and turn it. I would suspect that this would be less efficient than a wind pump, and would increase drag, but the deck space would be unaffected.
The other major nineteenth-century source of motive power for a pump was the steam engine. Strictly speaking, devices which used steam or heated air to displace water were developed by Heron of Alexandria (1st century AD), Giovanni Battista della Porta (1601), Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1606), and Salomon de Caus (1615). However, here we speak of the use of steam as motive power (engine) for a drive wheel that drives a piston or chain pump. The steam pump, like the wind pump, was a labor-saving device, but unlike it, was not dependent on the wind. Of course it needed fuel to operate, and steam engines were finicky enough so that the bilge would also be equipped with a hand pump.
Note that mechanical linkages can convert reciprocal motion to rotary motion, or vice versa.
One interesting emergency expedient I found reference to was to use wave action to operate the pump. Captain Leslie of the George and Susan reported fixing a spar aloft, with one end over the spear of the pump and the other projecting over the stern. At each end he mounted a pulley, and ran a rope over the pulleys from the spear of the pump to a counterweight (a 110-gallon cask holding 60-70 gallons water, i.e., half-full) at the stern end of the rope. Supposedly, when a wave rose the butt-end of the cask, the spear was depressed, and when the wave retired, the spear was raised (Nicholson 269). It seems to me that for this to work, there would have to be a downstroke bias on the pump, that is, without an upward pull on the spear, gravity would be stronger than friction and the spear would descend. If so, the cask could be weighted to just balance the spear when the water was at a neutral height. When the wave lifted the weight, the rope would slacken and the forces on the spear would no longer be in balance, it would fall. When the wave dropped, the counterweight would drop, thanks to gravity, and through the rope exert a tensile force on the spear, pulling it back up.
I have also found US patents (ex. Delaney, USP 3120212) dealing with wave-operated pumps—generally speaking, a float is connected to one end of a rocker arm, and the spear of a piston pump to the other—but I don't know whether any of these have been put into practice.
Salomon (Solomon) de Caus (Caux) (1576-1626) used solar heat to expand air that in turn po
wered a water pump. The modern Rao solar-thermal pump uses the heat of sunlight to vaporize a working fluid like pentane at 35-40oC. The water to be pumped enters a water chamber through a non-return valve. The vapor enters the water chamber and displaces it, forcing it up a discharge pipe. At night, the vapor condenses and flows back to the flash tank. With a solar collector area of 250 square feet, and a thirty-foot lift, Rao reported a discharge of 880 cubic feet/day (Wood 97ff). Since it may take several hours of daylight to bring the working fluid to vaporization temperature, and the pumping only occurs during daylight (say 10 AM to 4 PM), this intellectually interesting system isn't likely to work on shipboard. But that doesn't mean someone won't try to build something similar!
Pump tubes. While on ships, the bore of the pump tube was open on the bottom rather than plugged, the heel of the tube was seated in a hole cut in the mast step (the structure in which a mast is seated) or in the floor timbers. That would block the bore, so channels were cut through the wall of the tube at its heel to let water in. Bilge water being unpleasant from a sensory standpoint, a conduit ("dale") was used to guide it from the top of the pump tube to a scupper at the side of the ship, rather than just spilling it out on deck (Oertling 41).
Debris from the bilge could be sucked up the bore and gum up a valve. The debris could be garbage, cargo, or ship stores that became wet and migrated into the bilge. The pumps of the Sea Venture (whose 1609 voyage inspired The Tempest) were clogged by biscuit fragments, and the HMS Centaur (1782) was lost when rising water caused its load of coal to infiltrate the pumps (46). To prevent this, lead, copper, or tin sieves were installed at the lower end of the tube (43). Of course, the sieves would need to be cleaned from time to time.
Materials. In the 1630s, the tube was usually made of wood, most often elm but sometimes larch, beech, or alder. A tree with a straight, knot- and branch-free trunk was found and cut. The center was then bored out with a hand auger. Alternatively, a tube could be constructed from the hollowed halves of a log, or with strapped and caulked planks (somewhat like making barrel from staves).
Grantville Gazette, Volume 65 Page 16