Jonathan Hulls

Jonathan Hulls or Hull (baptised 1699 – 1758) was an English inventor, a pioneer of steam navigation. Traditionally, he was recognised as the first person to make practical experiments with steam to propel a vessel; but evidence to substantiate the claim that he did more than propose a steam vessel on paper is lacking.

Life Hulls was born at Hanging Aston, Gloucestershire. It has been suggested that the background to the efforts of Hulls was the 1734 publication in the abridged Philosophical Transactions of a paper by the French engineer Monsieur Duquet on ships and mechanical propulsion. He died in the middle of 1758 in Broad Campden, where he had lived almost all his adult life.

A Newcomen engine was to be set up on a tow-boat in front of another vessel, connected by a tow-rope. Six paddles in the stern of the tow-boat were to be fastened to a cross axis connected by ropes to another axis which was turned by the engine. Hulls showed how to convert the rectilineal motion of a piston-rod into a rotatory motion.

Johnathan Hull With his paper skull, Tried hard to make a machine That should go against wind and tide: But he, like and ass, Couldn't bring it to pass, So at last was ashamed to be seen.

In 1754 Hulls published The Art of Measuring made Easy by the help of a new Sliding Scale; he also wrote the Maltmakers' Instructor.

Influence Augustus De Morgan says that Hulls's work very likely gave suggestions to William Symington; and that Erasmus Darwin was thinking of Hulls when he prophesied that steam would soon "drag the slow barge".