Sea Control - Sea Control 398 - Transnational Development of Icebreakers with Dr. Aaro Sahari and Dr. Saara Matala

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

Links1. "Of a titan, winds and power: Transnational development of the icebreaker, 1890-1954," by Aaro Sahri and Saara Matala, International Journal of Maritime History, Dec. 9, 2021.

Hey folks, it's Jared. My guests today are Drs. Aro Sahari and Sara Matala, and this episode was recorded almost a year ago. So why are we releasing it now? Well, shortly after recording the episode, we lost almost our entire audio archive while onboarding a new editor, and this was one of the episodes that we lost. Now, we thought we had reconstituted everything that we were missing, but forgot this episode. And it wasn't until I saw a post from Sara on Twitter that I started searching and realized we'd never aired this. Fortunately, it's on a historical subject, the transnational development of icebreakers, so it wasn't time sensitive, and we were able to recover it from a separate archive that we'd developed.

But I would like to recognize my guests for their extraordinary patience in this publishing journey. If there's anything that sounds dated, that's the reason. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruber. At SimSec, we believe victory in the maritime domain starts with great ideas communicate compellingly. Write, fight, win. Please help us continue to fulfill our mission by donating and making SimSec your preferred

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My guests today are Drs. Aro Sahari and Sara Matala, and we're going to be discussing their article for the International Journal of Maritime History of a Titan, Winds, and Power, Transnational Development of the Icebreaker, 1890-1954. Aaro, Saaro, welcome. Aaro, would you please start by introducing yourself to the audience? Thank you. And thanks for having us. It's really nice to talk about our new research. So I'm a maritime business and technology historian. I'm mostly interested in networks and systems in the nautical domain. My doctoral thesis was on state industry relations in the expansion of the Finnish shipbuilding industry.

But I'm also a maritime heritage professional, so I work for the Finnish Maritime Museum and the Finnish Coast Guard Museum, among others. Currently, I'm at the University of Helsinki Museum. Thank you. And Sara, could you tell us a little bit about your background, please? Yes. Thank you for the invitation. I'm a historian of technology and business. I'm especially interested in the interaction between technology, economy and politics. politics. I wrote my doctoral thesis about the Finnish shipbuilding industry during the Cold War, from the 1950s to 1990s. And now I'm a postdoc at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in Sweden, studying, among the other things, the history of Arctic maritime technology.

Well, thank you both again for joining us today. As a reminder to the audience, all opinions are around and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So you started the article by stating that icebreakers have traditionally been seen as symbols of technological nationalism. Why is that the case? Yes, I think we first need to speak about technological nationalism. Every nation, big and small, wants to be proud of something own like high mountains or beautiful landscape or famous composers. One way to build this kind of national identity and pride is to have special kind of technological products that answer to the question who we are and what we do in which kind of things we are better than than the others and

especially in the late 19th century they appeared we are focusing on in our article these kind of processes of nation building and technological modernization got in the revolving countries that wanted to be considered as modern needed to have some kind of impressive technological projects and products to show to tell other other nations that we have something that not everyone has and icebergs are very appropriate for this kind of use they are powerful they are very big they are expensive they are able to break through natural barriers icebergs have also name and flag and they're very easy to recognize so these kind of things these kind of big impressive vessels that are very appropriate to be used as national symbol yeah if we think of peripheral smaller

countries like Finland and Sweden that were dependent on foreign trade to Europe but also globally more increasingly our ports freeze over in the winter up to this day and icebreakers were a concrete way to overcome nature. So that even increases their sort of disability and national importance. In bigger countries like the USA, icebreakers are probably not that important because you have open water ports all over the country. And also how icebreakers are needed, it's different.

If we compare the US to Canada, for example, They're more important in Canada because of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the such. But obviously, the U.S. Coast Guard has had ice going cutters and other ships that have had a significant importance, especially to the U.S. Coast Guard, to Arctic operations. When you do something extraordinary, you go to the polar waters, you can get really good stories about that. It's a heroic mission. So those kinds of things then feed back into this sort of technological nationalism as well. But it's different in different countries, obviously. Why were icebreakers slower to develop than open water vessels?

Well, first we have to remember that people have sailed in open water thousands of years. Sea ice was dangerous for these kind of traditional wooden hulls. And even if the hull was strong enough, these traditional sailing ships couldn't navigate through the ice. So building ice-going vessels became possible only in the 19th century, thanks to the steel hulls and steam power. Instead of this very long tradition and expertise in building sea-going vessels, we only have expertise in ice-going vessels less than 200 years. Yeah, and then you have to get into the technicalities of ship science, of ship construction. For the oceans, this has been developing over many centuries, so it doesn't emerge from out of nowhere.

And also, you have thousands upon thousands of ships being built all the time. So there's a lot of test cases, a lot of ships to gain knowledge from. Does this work? Does that work? Even though shipbuilding has been fairly conservative, you don't do anything radical up until computers and very modern period. Meanwhile, I mean, icebreakers, there aren't that many of them. since the 1870s maybe some 200 full icebreakers have been built and it took until the 1940s 1950s until first ice field tanks and laboratories were developed places to test icebreaker hull designs first in the soviet union and then in other countries so there just isn't that much scientific knowledge or even in-use know-how on icebreakers to go by. So that's sort of the main

thing there. How did ice-capable ships initially develop and what technological development precipitated their evolution? Yeah, we find that very fascinating, obviously. We've been doing research on this for some years now. But before we have steel hull steamships, ice was almost insurmountable barrier in inland waterways and coastal regions alike. So winter would just stop maritime traffic on the Baltic, in the Great Lakes, in North America. So we start seeing first vessels that could be called icebreakers in the main U.S. harbors on the East Coast. So Philadelphia, New York, in the 1830s even, they built these paddle steamers that had

reinforced bows so they could break some ice. But it takes until steel becomes the main construction material for ships in a lot of places in the middle of the 19th century that icebreakers actually become viable. In German Baltic ports and in Russia, in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century, that they have issues with ice, but they already start having steel hull steamships. So then you can really start developing that technology but at the same time actually uh in the u.s great lakes there's at least one detroit shipbuilder who starts tackling the same issue for uh transports ships going across the machina sound so so so there's like two nexus uh nexuses of of sort of icebreaker development in

late 19th century in the Great Lakes in the US and then on the Baltic and these start talking to one another in the 1890s and that's actually where the Finns come into the picture. Yes and if I may continue if we speak about developing a special purpose sea going icebreaker this kind of ice breakers we are talking about today we needed three special kind of innovations first we needed ice-strengthened hull. This kind of polar expedition ships like Nonsense from had been strong wooden vessels, but in principle the naval architects needed steel to be able to design vessels that were strong enough to take the pressure of the ice. Second, the icebreakers need a special kind of icebreaking bow that is designed to break the ice under the weight of the ship by

bending it down and sideways. And to design this kind of bow is a very different kind of task than designing a bow for open waters. So you needed some expertise, you needed some kind of technical ideas to develop this kind of bow. And third, an icebreaker needs to be strong enough to be able to push it through the ice. So it is not possible to build an icebreaker that only has sails. So in order to build an efficient icebreaker the naval architects needed steam engines that they're so developed that they were efficient enough and not too heavy to be placed on board you had spoken about some special tanks that were designed basically to do research on icebreakers and like operations and polar type waters and you mentioned specifically in the soviet union can you

describe a little bit more of what they had developed for their to implement their testing about how that was used? Yes, so model scale experiments in ship building are very practical. It's very expensive to try to innovate a new kind of ship that possibly wouldn't work. So these kind of model scale experiments were developed in 18th century already so that you can test some kind of technical innovations in model scale in a cheaper way to test these kind of ideas. And then if it works, you can build a full-scale ship. But in shipbuilding, the problem is that model-scale water is still water, but model-scale ice is not ice. But you need to be able to scale the features and properties of the ice as well. So building model-scale tanks for

icebreaker design was much more difficult than building this kind of open-water design tanks. First, ice model scale laboratories were developed in the Soviet Union, where they used a special kind of technology to scale down the properties of ice. And this technology was transferred to Finland, and in Finland was built a new kind of ice modeling laboratory that was used to test some American ice-going thunkers and later on icebreakers. Yeah, and I mean, but this is all fairly late. From 1950s. Yeah, but they're still going strong. We've visited one of these facilities. It's actually a commercial research and development laboratory here in Helsinki,

where they develop these ice fields that you can then photograph graph or even take video out of the model going through the ice so you can see and you know how the ice is developed so then you can calculate relatively how that would operate in full scale. But of course these kind of model scale experiments need to be combined with full scale experiments so that you know how this model scale tests how they correspond to the full scale. It takes a lot of time to actually go let's say into polar regions and measure an actual icebreaker operating in those conditions and then understanding taking measurements of the ice fields where they're testing the real ships as well so it just takes a lot of time and there

aren't that many operators in the world that actually focus on this because there's not that much need for icebreakers in comparison to open waters but still today icebreaker design is it's about the art and craft of engineering it's about the interaction between science and engineering it's about expertise in practice and also having very theoretical abstract knowledge and combining all these different sides of technological development together to build and design new kind of icebreakers icebreakers and ice capable ships have a classification system today when did that system start and how did it develop? Well, I mean, ice classes

classification, it's obviously been developed for economic considerations. Ships need to be insured and most ice classes reflect the needs of insurers and public officials in managing risks related to winter navigation. If your ships sink in the ice, that's a problem. Now, currently a lot of these classification

specifications have been harmonized globally. And a lot of this work is based on the Finnish-Swedish ice class that came into effect in the Baltic Sea in the 1970s, in 1971 to be precise. So this bleeds into the IACS polar class, for example, which is the one used in polar regions. Now, Now, there's a long history for the Finnish-Swedish ice classification system. The country started to collaborate in scientific research of ice conditions and thinking about classification and risks involved in the 1920s. So immediately after Finland became an independent country. But this intensified after the Second World War, when the Swedish public officials, maritime officials, really wanted to take advantage of this sort of shared situation. These countries have the same sea between them, so they needed to collaborate.

And this led to the creation of the 70s system and then from there on onwards. I mean, this is still lived history. It's been developed up until this today. But Finnish classifications, they have a prehistory going back to the 1890s. At that time, Finland was part of the Russian Empire. So Finnish engineers who were involved in this were also part of committees in St. Petersburg talking with Russian engineers. Because St. Petersburg, obviously, it's on the Baltic. So there's this sort of regional development where people are actually talking to one another in different countries. And that then bleeds into this sort of independent classification associations.

Finland doesn't have its own classifications association like the American Bureau of Ships or Norwegians or the German system. So Finland actually used various different systems, mostly Lloyds, in the late 19th, early 20th century. So then they exchanged information with specialists from these classification associations. And this is how these sort of Finnish and Swedish ideas then get disseminated and added into other systems in Europe and then globally. How did Sweden in particular decide to develop icebreakers as a result of the First World War? This is, again, a long story, so I'll try to be brief. But Swedish industrialization starts, same as most countries in Europe, mid to late 19th century. It starts picking steam.

But in the early years of the 20th century, now Sweden didn't actually take part in the First World War. It was a neutral country. They had a situation where they needed to use more resources from the north of the country called Norla. The problem is that that part of the country, because of the mountains and Norway, all the ports are on the Baltic. So if you want to bring iron, copper, wood, pulp, all these industrial materials, you need to really take them by ship from ports on the Baltic. And the Gulf of Bothnia, which is the northernmost part of the Baltic Sea, is notorious for its bad ice conditions. Not unlike the Great Lakes, actually. So you get a lot of drift ice, pack ice, these kinds of things that really make it difficult. And Sweden hadn't really developed icebreakers that much.

They had a few, but not that many by the 1920s. So then they decided that, OK, we need to take care of the situation. The state is the actor that can actually build a big icebreaker and keep all the ports open year long. And at the same time, the Swedish electrical technology company ASEA, they had an interest in this as well because they were developing national electrical technology and they wanted to develop diesel electric propulsion. So using diesel engines and ships, but then transforming that into electricity and using electrical motors to run the propellers, which was a novel idea at the time. And ASEA really influenced these icebreaker designers in the late 20s, early 30s to develop the first seagoing diesel electric icebreaker called the Yme. And this is one of our case ships in our journal article, which actually anyone listening in, if you're interested by this, it's free to download on the International Journal of Maritime History website. So have at it.

So the Swedes developed the ship and that then bleeds into other ship design because there were diesel ships by this time. But icebreakers with diesel electric propulsion, this is a pretty new idea. The Germans are obviously building their pocket battleships. There are submarines, stuff like that. But as an icebreaker, so when the US starts building their wind class during the Second World War, and when the Finns start building their new icebreakers in the late 40s or 50s, They all look at the Ymär and they get technical specifications and in-use data from the Swedes how to do this. But the Swedish icebreaker, actually, the propulsion system is quite new when they build it. But the hull dimensions, the shape of the bow, that they got from Finnish icebreakers from the 20s. So they were exchanging information on that as well. So this sort of shows the technology transfer and also how conservative these people are.

So if there's a ship that works, we're just going to use those dimensions and change these things. We're not going to change everything because then we wouldn't know how that's going to work. That's a great transition to the next question. Why the U.S. decided to get in the icebreaker business and then how did the U.S. build on work that was being done in Scandinavia? The icebreaker organizations are very different in the Nordic countries, Finland and Sweden, and in the U.S. In Finland and Sweden, the icebreakers were owned and operated by the maritime authorities, and their main purpose was to assist commercial shipping. In the US, the icebreakers were either private operated train parries or owned by the Coast Guard or the Navy that had very different kind of things to do, like surveillance, like law enforcement or supplying remote areas. So it would be a very difficult idea in the US to have the most expensive ship of the nation to be used only five months in a month, like the icebreakers in Finland and Sweden.

So these kind of things shaped priorities and resources available in the Coast Guard to develop this kind of special purpose, single purpose icebreakers. In Finland and Sweden it really makes sense to build this kind of very expensive ship that only were optimized for one reason and only used during the winter. But the US Coast Guard wanted to have more multipurpose ships. So when you asked when did the US enter into icebreaker business, first thing we need to understand is that the icebreaker business in the US and in Europe were very different things and that reflected also what kind of ships were built. One important starting point in the US development was in 1936 when President Roosevelt gave an executive order

to the US Coast Guard to assist FinTech navigation. This increased the importance of icebreaker or icebreaking but did not come with extra resources to the Coast Guard. So it was of US Coast Guard's interest to design and build the best possible icebreakers as economically as possible. So we need the best possible ships but they shouldn't cost anything. That's the normal problem in shipbuilding. So a natural thing to do in this kind of situations is to benchmark international examples, what the others have done and what has worked and what has not worked. An important person in this kind of transatlantic technology transfer was US Coast Guard officer Edvard Thiele, who was married with a Danish woman who happened to be in Denmark visiting

his wife's family at the time when this icebreaker design issue became actual in the US Coast Guard. So he was ordered to interrupt his holiday and instead having holiday with his wife's family to visit the major Scandinavian shipyards and the best Scandinavian icebreakers and learn about the dimensions they are using, the bow structures, the engines and other things. And he did. And then he traveled back to the U.S. and used that understanding to develop the next generation of the American ice-coating coast guard fathers and icebreakers during the war and also after the war.

Then final question. You've hinted at some of the answers to this before as you spoke about the Finnish and Swedish collaboration, but why did states start collaborating on icebreaker development? Well, as we already did notice, there weren't that many ships nor that many specialists with this kind of knowledge on icebreaker construction or their use. And as they are quite expensive ships, the risks in building a sub-bar vessel have always been significant, whatever the country. The U.S. wanted to use as little money as possible. It's not that different here in Finland now, actually. These issues and these sort of mitigating these risks led state actors in Finland, Sweden, especially, but in other countries as well, and in the US in the 30s, to seek best possible knowledge. So this is really, okay, has anybody done this? How did they do it? What can we learn from it? And this also sort of shows, as we state in the article, that these ships are fairly similar for a long time because you're not going to change the length to breadth ratio, power to size ratio that dramatically when you don't actually have enough information to go on and design a new ship.

And also the users of icebreakers, especially in the Baltic countries, weren't commercial actors. So they didn't have any need to withhold this knowledge. Most of them were actually naval officers. So if a Swedish naval officer talks to a U.S. Coast Guard officer, they will have a shared language to some degree. And they can sort of then exchange ideas. And this also happens between, I mean, Finland and Sweden are very close countries in many ways. So it's very natural for these two countries to develop joint information gathering and exchange of information. But the Swedes also traveled a lot.

So you use these networks to find people you can talk to. And actually, in the 40s, the Swedish icebreaker director, the person in charge of office, Stellan Hermelin, He went to the US, he talked to the Coast Guard, visited the wind class ships, he went to Canada, talked to all the specialists there, and then he came back and fed all that information to Finland. It's really, for the governments, this is mitigating risk, getting best bang for the buck. How can we do this? How do we not fail? Those kinds of ideas are in the back of their minds, really. Yes, so I think that the main point in our article is that icebreaker design before the Second World War, the theory we are focusing on, was more about international cooperation than national competition.

Thank you both very much. That's all the time that we have for today. I want to thank my guests, Dr. Sara Matala and Aro Sahari. Sara, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? I think that the easiest way is to use the Google Scholar and my name. there's only one me, so it's pretty easy to find all the articles I have ever written. My next project will be about the transnational development of ice research, especially focusing on the public sea. We wanted to understand how the ice research shapes winter navigation and also our understanding about the sea environment in winter. I look forward to reading that. Aro,

where can we find you and what's your next project? Same as with Sara, as far as I know, there's no other person with this name, so I'm fairly easy to find online. I'm on Twitter if someone does that, so it's literally my name, but right now I'm actually doing history of sciences and higher education because I'm working at the Helsinki University Museum, But, you know, I'm collaborating with my good colleagues on various topics related to maritime history. So we'll see. Some underwater archaeology and stuff like that has been on my desk lately because we do have a lot of shipwrecks here on the Baltic. So interesting stuff. Well, thank you both again for joining us.

the article is of a titan winds and power transnational development of the icebreaker 1890 to 1954 you can find it online in the international journal of maritime history there will be a link in the show notes too for anybody who wants to go read that i highly recommend it though there's only so much that we can cover here but they go in more depth on some of these topics in the article but to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 No, put it on the show now. So help me, Bob, I'm putting me out of here.

I'm putting me out of here. Help me, Bob, I'm putting me out of here. Put it on the show now.