Out of the Box | A Jet Boat in a Stamp

...in which objects and their stories are aired and told.

By Frances Walsh | February 2024

Bill (Charles William Feilden) Hamilton revolutionised the world of jet boating from his high-country station Irishman Creek, in Te Waipounamu the South Island of New Zealand, where rivers are shallow, rocky, fast-flowing, and brutal on propellers.

In the 1950s, Hamilton and his small team pioneered the world’s first commercial waterjet. Among other things, they came up with the idea of expelling a jetstream through a steerable nozzle at a boat’s stern, above the waterline. No propeller or rudder required. Hamilton conducted trials on the braided rivers around his farm in the Mackenzie Country, and after a few modifications and eurekas was able to plane upstream in water less than 10 cm deep, while dodging willow trees and shingle bars and frightening the fauna.

By the 1960s the Ōtautahi-based C.W.F. Hamilton & Co. engineering plant was exporting jet units the world over, and had expanded into boatbuilding. Legend has it that the business’s founder was an effective missionary. When demonstrating his products to prospective buyers out on the water Hamilton would steer straight ahead at break-neck speed, and then execute a 360-degree turn; the lose-your-lunch manoeuvre became known as ‘the Hamilton spin’.

Decades later, the New Zealand postal service celebrated the South Island farmer-cum-engineer who cracked waterjet propulsion. It issued two stamps—one in 1999, another in 2007. The gummed miniatures flew across oceans and around Aotearoa and the world, in envelopes and on planes powered by a different kind of jet propulsion.

New Zealand Post’s 1999 ‘Leading the Way’ collection of six stamps was dedicated to New Zealanders who attained ‘the pinnacle of human endeavour’. Hamilton was in wowee company, alongside: suffragists whose actions led to New Zealand becoming the first country in the world to enshrine in law women’s right to vote in 1893 (Fig. 3); Richard Pearse—another big-brained farmer—who lifted into the air over Canterbury in a monoplane of his own design around 1903 (Fig. 4); Ernest Rutherford who split the atom in 1919 (Fig. 5); Edmund Hillary who summitted Mount Everest in 1953 (Fig. 6); and those who agitated for the passing of 1987 legislation which bans nuclear-armed and powered warships from New Zealand waters (Fig. 7).

Bill Hamilton’s shout-out (Fig. 1) features a photograph of early-adopting jet boaters on the Tasman River, with Aoraki as backdrop. It dates to 1955 (NZ Post erroneously recorded the year 1953 on the stamp). Inside the mahogany and kauri 4.8 metre hull Hamilton and his crew had installed a Mark I Zephyr car engine. And a ‘Quinnat’—a jet unit they named after a fish that bolts and leaps up rivers in North America. It was designed by George Davison, after Hamilton had hired the young engineer in 1954, with a brief to come up with a production version of a waterjet unit that Hamilton and his son Jon had previously hammered out in the farm workshop, after reading about the American Hanley hydrojet in an issue of the New York-magazine Popular Mechanics. Major and minor Hamilton’s effort comprised a steel unit with a gear-driven centrigual pump, which they installed into a boat they named Saucy Jane. Davison’s Quinnat had alumininum castings instead of steel fabrications, as well as bevel gears.

Then, in 2007, the Hamilton revolutionary waterjet propulsion system appeared in NZ Post’s five-strong stamp set ‘Clever Kiwis’ (Fig. 2). This time George Davison was given his due; the stamp carries his doodle of the ‘Chinook’, the jet unit which he developed from the Quinnat in 1957 and which was to be the building block for Hamilton waterjet development for the next 20 years. With the Chinook, Davison swapped out the centrifugal pump of the Quinnat for a 2-stage axial pump (and in a following version a 3-stage axial pump), fixing vanes in between the impellers to direct the water’s rotational flow and improve efficiency. The sketch was pinned to the wall of the isolated Irishman Creek Station workshop where Davison worked for the first six years of his 37-year career with Bill Hamilton and his jets. Davison was an admirable recycler, making the prototype Chinook from off-cuts of steel he retreived from the scrapheap in the farm workshop.

The four other smart New Zealanders memorialised by NZ Post in the Clever Kiwis collection were: Colin Murdoch (invented the tranquilliser gun, 1950s, Fig. 8); Bill Gallagher (invented the electric fence, 1969, Fig.9); Allan Croad (invented the Mountain Buggy, 1992, Fig. 10); and David Illingworth and Robert Norris (perfected spreadable butter on behalf of the New Zealand Dairy Institute, 1980s, Fig.11).

If NZ Post hadn’t been so blokey they could also have memorialised, for example, Elizabeth Barton of Ōtepoti, who in 1885 became the first New Zealand woman to file a patent—for the “Barton compound single bedstead”. The Auckland Star reported that the bedframe ‘can be altered from one that can accommodate single blessedness to one for matrimonial requirements’, while the Thames Advertiser noted that: ‘Some day we may have one of the dear sex applying for a patent for a new process of keeping secrets, and won’t that be a mighty indication of the march of progress?’ All of which indicates how tough going it must have been for suffragists in nineteenth-century New Zealand, kind of like a very early Bill Hamilton jet boat trying to push upstream.

References:

Auckland Star, 31 January 1885, 6

Grey River Argus, 12 January 1885, 2

New Zealand Herald, 7 January 1885, 6

Thames Advertiser, 23 January 1885, 2

Images:

Fig. 1: NZ Post Stamp, $1.20, 1999. “Leading the Way: Jet Boat 1953”. Designed by Deidre Cassell, Siren Communications, Wellington. Photograph by Guy Mannering, circa 1955. NZMM 2023.88.4

Fig. 2: NZ Post Stamp, $2.00, 2007. “Clever Kiwis: Hamilton Jet Boat”. Designed by Tim Garman, Silver-i Design, Whanganui. Sketch by George Davison, 1956. NZMM 2023.89.4

Fig 3: NZ Post Stamp, 40c, 1999. “Leading the Way: Women’s Suffrage 1893”. NZMM 2023.88.1

Fig 4: NZ Post Stamp, 80c, 1999. “Leading the Way: Powered  Flight c1903”. NZMM 2023.88.2

Fig 5: NZ Post Stamp, $1.10, 1999. “Leading the Way: Splitting the Atom 1919”. NZMM 2023.88.3

Fig. 6. NZ Post Stamp, $1.50, 1999. “Leading the Way: Mt Everest 1953”. NZMM 2023.88.5

Fig. 7. NZ Post Stamp, $1.80, 1999. “Leading the Way: Nuclear Free 1987”. NZMM 2023.88.6

Fig. 8. NZ Post Stamp, $2.50, 2007. “Clever Kiwis: Murdoch Tranquilliser Gun”. NZMM 2023.89.5

Fig. 9. NZ Post Stamp, 50c, 2007. “Clever Kiwis: Gallagher Electric Fence”. NZMM 2023.89.1

Fig.10. NZ Post Stamp, $1.50, 2007. “Clever Kiwis: Mountain Buggy”. NZMM 2023.89.3

Fig. 11. NZ Post Stamp, $1.00, 2007. “Clever Kiwis: Norris & Illingworth Spreadable Butter”. NZMM 2023.89.2