How have ships changed since the 18th century

Written By: Jet Jones & Alec Jackson

Ships have always been changing and evolving, but perhaps the most dramatic change in ship aritecture occured in the 19th century. This was the shift from wood hulled sail ships, to combustion engine steel ships. There were some hybrid ships around this time, some combusion engine wood hulls, but those were more of an excpetion, mostly the changes were occured together, and occured quite repidly.

The above graphic is a list of most major categories of ships. Each tally shows a year in which a ship of that type was recorded as wrecked. This graphic is a good place to start when looking that the evolution of ship technology. We can assume that there is more traffic of that type of vessel when the wrecks are clustered closer together. This graphic neatly shows the evolution of major vessel types and when they began coming into service. One of those most interesting things we can see here is that as the 19th century drags on and wrecks begin to increase we have a few years near the start of the increase where most of the wrecks are wooden hulls, but before the end of the surge most of the wrecks are steel hulled vessels.

This second graphic takes the major types of vessels we see wrecking during the second half of the 19th century and plots they wrecks over time independantly. This shows when each type of ship saw the maximum number of wrecks in a single year. We can see from this graph that most types of ships saw a peak in wrecks around 1880, but then sailing ships rapidly dispeared to be replaced with steamships. This highlights the major types of ships and confirms the information we were seeing above. The quantity of wrecks have begun to increase around the same time, but there is about 20 years between the peak amount of wrecks in wooden hulled ships and the peak wrecks of steel hulled ships.

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