page_title: Bulkhead (partition)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Bulkhead (partition) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Quanzhou Boat, preserved in a special pavilion (a branch of the Quanzhou Overseas Relations Museum) on the grounds of Kaiyuan Temple, Quanzhou 中文: 泉州湾后渚港海滩发掘出土的宋代海船。陈列在泉州开元寺东侧的陈列馆。
context_page_description: A bulkhead is an upright wall within the hull of a ship or within the fuselage of an aeroplane. Other kinds of partition elements within a ship are decks and deckheads.
context_section_description: Bulkhead partitions are considered to have been a feature of Chinese junks, a type of ship. Song Dynasty author Zhu Yu (fl. 12th century) wrote in his book of 1119 that the hulls of Chinese ships had a bulkhead build. The 5th-century book Garden of Strange Things by Liu Jingshu mentioned that a ship could allow water to enter the bottom without sinking. Archaeological evidence of bulkhead partitions has been found on a 24 m (78 ft) long Song Dynasty ship dredged from the waters off the southern coast of China in 1973, the hull of the ship divided into twelve walled compartmental sections built watertight, dated to about 1277. 
  Texts written by Western writers such as Marco Polo (1254–1324),  Niccolò Da Conti (1395–1469), and Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) describe the bulkhead partitions of East Asian shipbuilding. An account of the early fifteenth century describes Indian ships as being built in compartments so that even if one part was damaged, the rest remained intact — a forerunner of the modern day watertight compartments using bulkheads.
  Bulkhead partitions became widespread in Western shipbuilding during the early 19th century. Benjamin Franklin wrote in a 1787 letter that "as these vessels are not to be laden with goods, their holds may without inconvenience be divided into separate apartments, after the Chinese manner, and each of these apartments caulked tight so as to keep out water." A 19th century book on shipbuilding attributes the introduction of watertight bulkheads to Charles Wye Williams, known for his steamships.
caption: The remains of the Quanzhou ship, dated to the Song dynasty and discovered in 1973
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