Motor Ship Era

The motor ship era was the twentieth-century shift from steam to diesel propulsion in merchant shipping. The Danish East Asiatic Company’s MS Selandia, completed in 1912 with two Burmeister & Wain four-stroke diesels, is generally taken as the first ocean-going diesel motor ship in regular service. Diesel propulsion cut fuel mass and stokehold crew compared with coal-fired steam, and by the interwar decades the motor ship steadily displaced the reciprocating steamer on cargo routes; the ‘MV’ or ‘MS’ prefix marks the type.