Scale: 1:48. A contemporary full hull model of a paddle steamer (1840) rigged with stump masts and bowsprit, the whole of which is mounted on an original wooden baseboard. The hull is fitted with a scribed planked deck and includes skylights, companionways, deck hatches, lead-lined hawse pipes, two small catheads and a single anchor windlass. The paddle boxes on either side of the hull amidships are without the paddles and the tall funnel is mounted straight onto the deck. Both the shape of the bow, which suggests the influence of the ‘Aberdeen Bow’ and the design of the funnel, would date this model to about 1840.

In the past, this model has been catalogued (see No. 116, page 49 of the ‘Royal Naval Museum Catalogue’, 1865) as HMS ‘Emerson’, and was supposedly one of the first steam ships in the Royal Navy, but there was no such ship of that name. However, an American named John B. Emerson took out a patent for a screw propeller in 1834 and also for ‘Emerson patent blocks’ about 20 years later, so there may be a connection between him and the model. At this scale the model represents a vessel measuring 140 feet in length by 26 feet in the beam.