The first car ferry crossed the Bosphorus carrying horse carriages
In 1871 an iron paddle steamer called Suhulet, meaning ease or convenience, started carrying vehicles across the Bosphorus in Istanbul. There were no motor cars yet, so its cargo was horse carriages, which could roll aboard at one end and off at the other. Modern ferries still work the same Üsküdar to Kabataş route.
Suhulet was the idea of Giritli Hüseyin Haki Bey, general manager of the Bosporus Steam Navigation Company, and was built at the Maudslay, Sons and Field yard in Greenwich. It was 47 metres long, weighed 157 tons and could make 6 knots, its side paddle wheel driven by a 450-horsepower steam engine. Symmetrical ramps at both ends and a double set of hatchways let carriages load quickly.
Scotland had already shown the value of driving cargo straight on. From 1850 the Leviathan shuttled freight wagons across the Firth of Forth between Granton, near Edinburgh, and Burntisland in Fife. Moving large loads with very little labour, it turned roll-on roll-off shipping from an oddity into a central part of moving goods and people.
Even earlier, animals did the work. A 4th-century Roman text speculated about a ship whose water wheel was turned by a pair of oxen. Later designs had horses walking a treadmill or turning a capstan, and these team boats, such as the Experiment on Lake Champlain in 19th-century America, paved the way for steam-driven paddle wheels. The ferryman's job is old enough to appear in Greek myth, where Charon rows souls over the River Styx.
In Bangladesh, rivers make ferries everyday transport. Around 200 passenger launches ran on 107 routes in 2022, and more than 800,000 small wooden boats, many fitted with motors, haul over 1.2 million tonnes of freight a year. Malaysia's oldest service, crossing the Penang Strait, was founded by the brothers of the Quah family, led by Quah Beng Kee, in 1894. The Dover to Calais crossing on the English Channel, the world's busiest seaway, is France's most popular ferry link.
Source: Ferry
