SS Archimedes SS Archimedes SS "Archimedes" was a steamship built in Britain in 1839. She is notable for being the world's first steamship to be driven by a screw propeller. "Archimedes" had considerable influence on ship development, encouraging the adoption of screw propulsion by the Royal Navy, in addition to her influence on commercial vessels. She also had a direct influence on the design of another innovative vessel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's , then the world's largest ship and the first screw-propelled steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The principle of moving water with a screw has been known since the invention of
Screw pump bronze some 350 years earlier. This is consistent with classical author Strabo, who describes the Hanging Gardens as watered by screws. Screw pump A screw pump is a positive-displacement (PD) pump that use one or several screws to move fluids or solids along the screw(s) axis. In its simplest form (the Archimedes' screw pump), a single screw rotates in a cylindrical cavity, thereby moving the material along the screw's spindle. This ancient construction is still used in many low-tech applications, such as irrigation systems and in agricultural machinery for transporting grain and other solids. Development of the screw pump has