Roller ship

[2] The first and only operational roller ship, the 280-ton Ernest-Bazin, was designed by the French inventor Ernest Bazin after five years of model-based tests and launched at Saint-Denis on August 19, 1896.

This compared very favourably with contemporary steamships; the fast ocean liners of the day could manage slightly over twenty knots, whilst high-powered military Torpedo boat destroyers could break thirty.

[8][9] Bazin died on January 21, 1898, a few weeks after announcing he had overcome these problems, and revealing plans for an ocean-going liner, with four pairs of discs, which would be able to cross from Le Havre to New York in sixty hours.

[8] The idea briefly resurfaced in the 1930s, with proposed designs for a large "tricycle" liner appearing in Modern Mechanix in 1934,[10] and a much smaller four-wheeled boat in Popular Science in 1935.

[11] In 1897, Frederick Knapp, a lawyer in Prescott, Ontario, designed another type of vessel which he termed a "roller boat"; this was essentially a single long cylinder which sat in the water.

However, it suffered much the same flaws as Bazin's design; the hypothetical "mile a minute" was, in practice, no more than five knots, and the vessel proved difficult to control.