The cigar ships were designed and built by the Winans family, successful railway engineers from Baltimore, Maryland who moved into marine engineering with enthusiasm and great expenditures of their family wealth, but less success. Their radical marine design concept included an ultra-streamlined spindle-shaped hull with minimum superstructure.
The Winans constructed at least four ships between 1858 and 1866. Two of these attracted considerable public attention as well as skepticism and outright criticism from the technical establishment. Ross Winans and his sons were, first and foremost, engineers experimenting with innovative concepts. The innovative technology would certainly have attracted Jules Verne's attention. He may well have seen one of the boats sailing or berthed in England. Some of their innovations were adopted for surface ships in the twentieth century, and many of the pioneer submarines built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century resembled them. Later in the twentieth century, aerodynamicists rediscovered the benefits of the spindle.
The Winans launched their final effort in 1866 in London. The Ross Winans was 256 feet long with the same 16-foot diameter as their first boat and displaced about 400 tons. It did have a nearly conventional superstructure atop the hull amidships, 130 feet long and ten feet wide, tapering to a point at each end. Inverting the first design, it was driven by a 22-foot diameter propeller at each end. These nine-bladed props were powered by an engine room amidships. The Ross Winans underwent trials in the Solent channel but made no more than one or two coastal voyages, never going to sea in earnest.
The Ross Winans remained moored near Southampton until the end of the 19th century when it was sold for scrap1. In 1897 the New York Times reported both vessels for sale after William L. Winans' death earlier in the year. The very short piece says the yachts had been "moored in Southampton waters for twenty-five years", that "enormous sums of money have been spent in experiments upon them, and in their maintenance, but very few people have ever seen them under way."
Regards
Eddy
