Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Welcome to Stuff You Should Know A production of iHeartRadio

0:15Toot toot and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too For the present moment And this is Stuff You Should Know That's right, another listener request These are just kind of pouring in now or rather we're leaning on them more than we have before, I guess, because they're great ideas. But this one came also from the live show in Atlanta. Yeah. And do you remember this guy? Do you remember his name? Yes, I do. It was Thomas because this episode is Tugboats for Thomas. Tugboats for Thomas. And Thomas, I believe, works on tugboats, suggested it. And this has turned out to be just a bread and butter, stuff you should know episode.

0:54Yeah, I remember when he was at the mic asking the question making the suggestion he kept moving around because he still had his sea legs. He's bumping into people. They're like, dude. So, yeah, hopefully we'll do Thomas Proud because we know a little bit about tugboats now after researching them for a little while. Big shout out to our friend Dave Ruse for helping us with this. You could do worse than going to check out Ruse's podcast Bible Time Machine. And that has nothing to do with tugboats, but let's talk about that. That's right, because we're going to sing the unsung like we like to do on the show because no one ever thinks about tugboats.

1:32You see them all the time. If you live near harbor or vacation or visit cities that have harbors, you see those tugboats and those big ships and barges get all the all the sexy headlines. But those tugboats are doing the yeoman's work. That's why they call them nautical laborers early in their, I guess, mission when they first started coming online on sea. Yeah. So we'll get to that in a minute about the history of tugboats because it actually goes back way further than you would think or not as far as you'd think, depending on what you're thinking. Yeah. But. 1320? Nope, not that far. Oh, 2020.

2:12But one of the things that tugboats are that makes them like the workhorses of the sea, as you could put it, is that they have really impressive power to tonnage ratios. Yeah. So the size of the tugboat, the actual weight the tugboat weighs, compared to the amount of power output its engines can create, usually in horsepower, is really lopsided. So that these fairly comparatively light boats, compared to like the horsepower they create, can pull, pull, pull. and they can push, push, push, and they can do all sorts of amazing stuff, which is why they can move these enormous, huge oil tankers and shipping container ships with just the mighty might of their little hearts.

3:05You'd think I would have practiced something like that because it would have been way better. Yeah, I mean, not to undersell tugboats. They are dealing with things that are floating in water, which helps. But these are big, massive things floating in water. Like you could get in a lake, my friend, and you could pull a rope attached to a pontoon boat. What? And you could pull that thing around a little bit. You could swim that thing around a little bit because it's floating in water. What universe do you live in? That may be where you max out. You are the tugboat of the lake, Josh, if you can do that to a pontoon boat.

3:44Because these tugboats are little compared to those huge barges that are floating around. Is that making any sense at all? It's making too much sense. I've never considered myself the tugboat of the lake. Can I be doing this with my teeth? Can I be holding the rope with my teeth? Because that'd be much cooler. That's up to you. Okay. That'd be better swimming with two arms. We'll go do some third leg trials for it and figure out the one right way to pull a pontoon in a lake. We should tell them what bollard pull is, too, because that's the other big sort of measurement when it comes to tugging and pushing.

4:19A bollard, first of all, is that big sort of chunky thing on a dock that you'll tie a boat to, the big daddies. And bollard pull is the total amount of towing force generated by a tugboat. And they measure that in kilonewtons. They do. And I've seen that often converted to tons. and it's the same thing. The more kilonewtons you have or the more tons you have, the more pulling power, towing power, pushing power that tugboat has. So there's this one boat that Dave found called the Island Victory. At least one article called the most powerful boat in the world. I saw other articles that named some other shipping container vessel, but this tugboat, say it's probably the most powerful tugboat around.

5:09The Island Victory has a bollard pull of 4 ,680 kilonewtons, which converts to 477 tons. A typical harbor tug, which is nothing to sneeze at, has a bollard pull between 500 and 600 kilonewtons. 600 kilonewtons converts to 61 tons. So this is an enormously powerful boat. And that's the whole point. They're not fast. They aren't pretty. They're cute in a really weird way. But they can generate so much power that they can push a shipping container vessel around. More importantly, if you have a really high bollard pull, the reason that this rating is even there is to find out which tug you can connect to which vessel.

6:02Because if a vessel is starting to go in the wrong direction and it's about to crash into, say, a bridge, the tugboat has to be able to go from zero not moving at all in the water to pulling that boat in the opposite direction away from that bridge in a moment's notice and it has to have that much power and they do they do uh i think they're very attractive boats you can tell a tugboat because it has you know they're built to tug and push so they have a very wide beam which is the widest point of the boat. They sit very low in the water which is called a deep draft and they're little short, stubby, wide guys that sit really low.

6:47I think they're adorable and cool looking. They're very, very stable. They're not tippy at all. They're bumping against other things. They're pushing other things. And so they have to be just super stable and also love that they have beards. that front bumper or a bow fender, they call it a beard in that lingo, and I think that's pretty great. Yeah, it's just what they use, like you said, when they purposely or accidentally bump up against a larger ship. You can't just have the tugboat, like, crack up. So you have a fender. They're built to bump. They are built to bump, and some tugboats aren't necessarily built with a beard.

7:28they'll have tires strung along the side to use as a bumper as well. Yeah, I think those are additional. I think the front always has a built-in beard. Okay, fine. So one other thing that you're going to find about tugboats that we'll talk about more in depth later is that they're extremely nimble. They're agile. They can move in a different direction very quickly. And that is a really important thing too because one of the big jobs that the tugboat plays in, say, like a shipping lane at like a port is to help ships avoid other ships coming in or out. So they have to be able to move, not just pull a ship very easily, but they have to be able to move quickly and move that ship out of the way of, say, like another ship.

8:17Yeah, exactly. And I say we take an earlier break. Oh, my gosh. Because we're at a great spot to break here before we talk about the history of these things. You want to do that? Let's break it Alright, let's break On three

8:57Just stay on the surface. All right. I promised talk of history, and here we go, because if you wanted to invent a tugboat, the 18th and 19th centuries was a pretty good time to do it because we were using sailing ships at the time for transporting people and goods and all kinds of things. And those things are gorgeous, beautiful in the water. They sailed great out on the high seas, But they did not do well, especially because they were just sailing ships when they got around land and small, tight spaces. Right. So they would, you know, you've seen it in movies. They would dock or not dock, but they would anchor, you know, a couple of hundred feet from shore and then start shuttling people and stuff in little tiny boats because that's about as close as they could safely get.

9:44And that's not efficient. Taylor would be rolling over in his grave. That's right. There's another problem, too, even for a ship that could, that was nimble enough to kind of navigate its way into port, say, like the mouth of a river in a harbor or something, right? Once it got in there, it had to wait for the wind to whip up again to set sail once more. And this was not something that happened every hour on the hour, even twice a day like the tide. Sometimes you would have to wait for days or weeks for the right wind to come up that you could catch and ship back out to sea again. also not at all efficient.

10:20So there was like a real need for tugboats to be invented. But what's nuts is tugboats were invented and then ignored for decades. And then finally, the guy who invented them, who was just totally made fun of, as we'll see, for inventing tugboats, was vindicated. But I think he was dead already. Yeah, I think he was. He was from England, 18th century inventor. His name, no lie, was Jonathan Hulls. That's nuts. It is pretty nuts. And he thought it was like a helper vessel is what he called it. It was powered by a steam engine. But what we were talking about was tugboats. It could tow a sailboat in and out of port.

11:01This was in 1737 when he filed for a patent. It was called a description and draft of a new invented machine for carrying vessels or ships out of or into any harbor port or river against the wind in tide. or in a comb. And it was totally genius. 30 years before James Watt's steam engine hit the scene. And everyone was like, what a dumb idea. Yeah. Not only that, the people in his hometown of Gloucester, they wrote a song about him. They wrote a song. They wrote, like, they thought this guy was so terrible and just such a lousy inventor that there was a song. I'm guessing people would sing in pubs about him specifically his name's in the song it went Jonathan Holes with his patent skulls invented a machine to go against wind and stream but he being an ass couldn't bring it to pass and so was a shame to be seen imagine sitting there nursing like you're mead while everybody around you is singing that song about you you're not going to try?

12:08whip up a melody oh oh So, Jonathan Holes with his patent skulls invented a machine to go against the wind and stream. You should finish. Okay. But he being an ass couldn't bring it to pass and so was ashamed to be seen. Wow. You went with the Gilbert and Sullivan version. I guess so. All I know is we're getting kicked out of this pub any second now. For sure. They're like, get out of Gloucester. Yeah. I've got to stop it. We're going to get so much for that. So, yeah, Holes was definitely ahead of his time, but it would be 60 years before the first steam-powered tugboats. His invention were actually put into good use, and they were deployed in Scotland.

12:58Oh, yeah. Yeah. And as we'll see, actually, Scotland was where the tugboat got its name. At the time, I'm not sure what they called them. Maybe still helper vessels. I don't know. But one of the first things they did was to start pulling cargo along canals. Because at the time, if you wanted to move cargo easily over land, you did it over water that was cut into land. And you would do it with a donkey pulling your cargo along the shore. The donkey was walking on the shore with a line going from the donkey to a little barge that was being pulled down a water-filled canal. That was the state of the art at the time.

13:34Yeah. Have you ever walked along an old riverway that has those built-up banks for that purpose? Yeah. Toledo has something called the Canal Experience or Historic Canal Experience. There's some canals running through part of the town from the early 19th century that you can walk along. And you're like, wow, this is an old donkey path, huh? Yeah. I had my experience doing that in Akron. So that may be an Ohio thing. I believe the waterway through Sand Run is where that was. And it was the same deal. And Emily or her mom or somebody, you know, because you're up higher and, you know, it's an obvious path.

14:11And they're like, yeah, this is where the donkeys and pack horses would pull these things. Yeah. Oh, it's a donkey. Okay. There was a paddle steamer named Charlotte Dundas that was the first tugboat in operation, towing for the very first trip, I think, two fully loaded sloops, 18 miles along the 4th and Clyde Canal at Glasgow at scorching two miles per hour. Yeah, but still, like, it was working. That was the key. That's all that mattered. Yeah, they had all the time in the world. Right. And you can bet that every donkey in Scotland was like, whew, thank God they invented these things, right?

14:50Yeah, probably. So there was also, as we talked about, one of the big problems with sailboats as shipping vessels was that they had trouble getting in and out of harbors. They had trouble navigating. They had to wait for the wind. And so very quickly, it seemed kind of obvious that you could, if you could get one of these boats into port, into harbor, which you could use a tugboat for, you could also pull it up river. It wouldn't have to navigate any longer because you could just pull it by a helper vessel into some of the cities that were not located on the coast, but they were located on a river.

15:28One example I can think of is London and the Thames. That's right. 40 miles inland. So that was a huge boon for London at the time. There was a steamship called the Majestic that worked with the East India Company, towing things back and forth up the Thames. And Liverpool had one as well. So they were getting in on the game there in the UK. They were. So, like I said, it was in Scotland that tugboats got their name back in 1817 in Dumberton. I think I'm saying that right. Okay. Oh, well, how would you say it? I would say Dumbarton, but I don't know. I'm just guessing. No, it's got to be Dumberton.

16:09Okay. Okay, well, we'll go with one of those two. How about that? Sure. Somebody built a steamship, a tugboat. They named Tug. They weren't called tugboats until this time. And I guess that name stuck because it also makes sense practically. You're tugging a boat behind you. So that from henceforth on, they were known as tugboats. Yeah. And, you know, earlier I was saying that they said, oh, this idea is so dumb. I don't know if it was that it was so dumb, but steam power and stuff that came along a little bit later, like they didn't have steam engines at the time, so they wouldn't have even known it was dangerous.

16:45But when they did come online, why do I keep saying that? I don't think it fits, right? It's a little anachronistic. I think so. But online doesn't mean just on the Internet. Online just means like it's beginning to function, right, as a thing. Yeah. Remember that Simpsons where Lenny goes, little kid Lenny's like, oh, I just logged on to my internet because he pooped his pants out of, he pooped his bathing suit with the little internetting. So he said he logged on to his internet. Oh, that's so good.

17:22That's a good line. Oh boy, Lenny. Anyway, I just logged on to my internet. Where was that? Oh, yeah. Steam engines were dangerous. They would blow up a lot. There was, you know, when tugboats first started using, you know, coming online using that steam, they were like, I don't know. I mean, is it better to have this thing that might blow up a port? right and then the owners were like well we don't go on these boats we just own them so sure i mean that's fine they can blow up but yes they were viewed skeptically i think right like it was it was not just a done deal that these things were like gonna save the industry or shipping yeah but there was um a proving ground what ended up being a proving ground on the tyne river that connected Newcastle to the North Sea, they were facing a problem, right?

18:17They had these barges that were, they were called colliers, and they were sailboats, but they were coal movers because Newcastle was a huge coal producer. And these colliers could do a lot of damage because they were hard to navigate. They had all the same problems that any sailing vessel had. So there was a guy named Joseph Price who in 1818 was like, I think I've got a solution to this. I'm going to buy some of these steamships that they're now being called tugboats. And I'm going to have them pull these colliers, these coal ships up and down the Tyne. And I think it's going to revolutionize shipping.

18:54And Joseph Price was right on the money. The price was right. Oh, man, you almost had it right out of the gate. So now you could get 400-ton ships because, you know, I don't know if we mentioned they were loading, like, railroad cars onto these things for the first time. So it was very, very heavy stuff. They could go to Newcastle for the first time. All of a sudden, people in more distant places could get coal. Coal. So it wasn't just like, hey, it made, you know, make things cheaper and more efficient. It, like, was literally changing, like, lives all over the world. Right. And these new towns that were getting coal for the first time were able to give up having to burn dried donkey poop that they scraped up off the donkey trails along the canals.

19:39It was huge for them. So, yeah, Joseph Price proved to the world, like, no, these things are extraordinarily valuable, so much so that they're going to completely change shipping from this point on. And they definitely have. And they're still just as useful as ever. and they made a name for themselves so much that when the Royal Navy purchased their first steamships of any kind, they were tugboats. Yeah. The Comet and the Monkey. Comet and Monkey. And I can't decide whether it's a band name or a cartoon name. Comet and Monkey. That'd be a fun cartoon. I'd watch that. Or Drug. I'd also take that.

20:22Comet and Monkey. Just kidding. So, yeah, they definitely proved their worth pretty early on. I mean, this is 1818, and the first ones were used shortly before that, right? Yeah, and these were paddle boats, by the way. Up until the late 19th century, if you're picturing, like, your little friendly tugboat in your mind as we talk about all these stories, erase that. And now picture a tugboat with two paddles on both sides. It wasn't like the big paddle in the back, like the sort of fun things you ride around on at Stone Mountain Park here in Georgia. Sure. That's where they're most famous. They were paddle wheels on both sides, which seems a little wider and more cumbersome, but that really, really, really made them much more maneuverable and able to steer in tighter places.

21:11Yeah. And to steer in two different directions. Right. I got one of those zero-turn lawnmowers. You put those things in two different directions, and you're spinning like a top. It's the exact same thing because those two paddle wheels were able to be moved independent of one another. And once you can do that, yes, you just start doing donuts to show off in the harbor, you know? Yeah. So the 19th century came and went, and those paddle wheel tugs were replaced with screw propellers, which is another term for a propeller like you see on a ship. Like that's just called a screw propeller. So like any ship, they were propelled by propellers.

21:50And then diesel engines came along, and that's when everything really kind of changed. Because when you have a diesel engine, you can get some amazing horsepower out of it, way more than steam. It's also less dangerous. I think we talked about all this in our Rudolph Diesel episode. And that's when the tugboats started to become the tugboats that we think of today. That's right. Shall we take our second break? You bet. All right. We took an early one, so we're going to take this one. We're going to come back and talk a little bit about, well, tugboats right after this.

22:51So you mentioned tugboat strike, right? I didn't. Oh, well, there's a tugboat strike we have to talk about that really kind of demonstrates how important tugboats made themselves over the years. in New York Harbor in 1946. Every single tugboat operator, there were 300 of them in the harbor at the time, they all went on strike. And this was, very quickly, it became evident how essential tugboats were for everything in New York because there was coal coming from Lake Erie through the Erie Canal to the Hudson down to the harbor. and it would be spread all throughout Manhattan and all throughout New York.

23:35Food shipments came in by barge. Garbage went out by barge. Oh, yeah. New York operated on barges, and if you're using barges, you need a tugboat to tow or push those barges. So when the tugboat stopped working, New York stopped working. And within 12 days, the tugboat operators got their demands fulfilled, which turns out to have just been nicer hats. From what I read. Yeah, they rationed food. They literally shut the lights down on Broadway. It was their backup plan of just, you know, using smaller boats to ferry stuff in and out. They were just like, Manhattan is far too big for this already.

24:15Right. And the tugboat operators, I guess, I mean, what a moment to sit back and just sort of like say, yeah. Now, yeah, gloat a little bit. Now, who is important? the tugboat driver, Thomas, one day will be in Atlanta so we could get the word out about tugboats. And New York Harbor was a great place to sort of make that point because, you know, if you didn't have tugboats, then those containers with all those goods and services are essentially useless. Right. I said float, by the way, but gloat works even better. Oh, you said float? Yeah. They were gloating while they were floating. Oh, okay.

24:57So there were some things that changed. Stuff you would not at all connect to why tugboats became less vital over the years. Still incredibly important. And you can make a case that world shipping would essentially just stop if tugboats stopped. So they're really important, but just not in exactly the same ways as they were before, because we started getting our energy over things like pipelines. We started using things that weren't coal. Trucking and shipping containers became a much bigger thing than, say, barges over the years. So with each of those things, the tugboat became less and less able to do what it did in 1946.

25:41And yet it's still so vital that you just can't do anything without them. Yeah, for sure. You know, they've got electric tugs now. I saw that there's one called the E-Wolf, right? Yeah, it's a good looking tug. I mean, it's interesting. I never really thought about electric boats, but that's becoming more and more of a thing, which is kind of awesome. It is awesome. And let's talk about why. Here's why, Chuck. Remember we said that these things generate crazy amounts of horsepower? Yes. Some harbor tugs or ocean-going tugs generate 27 ,000-plus horsepower. Yeah. It's like having 27 ,000 horses just running at the back of this thing, like kicking their legs all at once, right?

26:27Yeah. And to do that, you use a lot of fuel, a ton of diesel fuel. some of these boats can carry way more than they need in a day like 30 ,000 gallons of diesel but I saw that the average harbor tug which is working almost constantly will use about 3 ,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day and that is a lot of fuel to use right so it's using this non-renewable resource it's also putting out crazy amounts of diesel emissions yeah and that's just one tug boat using 3 ,000 gallons of diesel a day. Yeah. The reason also, I was like, why do they carry so much more than they need? Because doesn't that make the tugboat heavier and therefore you have to use more fuel to get more horsepower out of it?

27:17And the reason that I came up with that I found was that time is of such value in a harbor at a port that it's more costly to stop what you're doing and go refuel than it is to carry around all that extra fuel they have those capacities so that they have they take way longer in between refuelings that's the point that's how that makes sense crazy important time is in ports yeah uh i get it you know especially in a place like new york harbor um very busy very busy so So you've talked about that's the motto of the entrance down to the dock. It says that. What also you need to be as maneuverable because it's very busy, very busy.

28:05And you mentioned that a little bit earlier on that they need to be able to move really in any direction very accurately and as quickly as possible. and the asthma thruster was a big change in that because that is a, imagine a propeller inside a housing sort of like a, you know, sort of like an E-fan or something like that. And it can just turn, that's exactly what it looks like. Yeah, it does. I never thought that. But it can turn 360 degrees. So it's not a fixed propeller and a rudder for steering And it's not even a non-fixed propeller that can move left and right. It's a propeller that can spin in any direction, which means you've got one of those little joystick controllers as a tugboat pilot.