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
Archimedes of circles. The earliest known copy of the text is in Arabic. The scholars T.L. Heath and Marshall Clagett argued that it cannot have been written by Archimedes in its current form, since it quotes Archimedes, suggesting modification by another author. The "Lemmas" may be based on an earlier work by Archimedes that is now lost. It has also been claimed that Heron's formula for calculating the area of a triangle from the length of its sides was known to Archimedes. However, the first reliable reference to the formula is given by Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD.