AHC: Auxiliary sails on steamships remain commonplace into the 1900s

Your challenge is to see that sails are still added to engine equipped ships until the 1910s to 1920s.

As I understand it the use of sails to add auxiliary propulsion to steamships became decreasingly commonplace as the year 1900 approached until they where not added to new ships at all.

I'm not sure if changing this would require a POD pertaining more to steam engine technology, or preference on part of ship designers.
 
I'm doubting they lasted long.

A bunch of them are still around. I've actually sailed on one - although it's now more of a museum and sail-training ship than a cargo ship.

They were built specifically for ultra-long-haul circumnavigation-of-the-world trade routes between Europe and Australia (they were also used for the nitrate trade with Chile during WW1 I believe). The idea was that on long voyages, sails were most cost-effective than steam because they didn't have to carry coal or other fuel, and also didn't have to worry about making stops at coaling stations. They were still slower than their steam-powered counterparts, and less reliable, but they were shipping cargos that didn't spoil easily. They were also built with steam-powered capstans to adjust the sails, so that they could be sailed with minimal numbers of crew - again to keep costs down.

I think the main advantage of sails after the mid-19th century is that it saves on money spent on coal, so if you can think of a way to make coal expensive, then sails will persist.
 
Technically the masts on even the largest ocean liners were supposed to double as sailing masts until around the mid-1920's IIRC.
 
There's some information about the survival of sail in DK Brown's Warrior to Dreadnought. In 1882 the Carnarvon committee summed up the balance of sail and steam on various trade routes. The North Pacific was dominated by sail, as was the West Coast of South America; in India and Australia sail and steam were equal, and everywhere else was steam. Brown also comments that "by 1911 there were 48 sailing ships and 234 steamers carrying oil in bulk", which intrigues me.

The problem is that the hull form required for efficient screw propulsion is very different from that required by sail, so ships can never be good at both. A combination of delaying the invention of compound engines, which would limit the range of steam ships, and making coal exceptionally expensive overseas, to make resupply difficult, is probably the sort of thing you're looking for.
 
Do you know of any sources or pictures that show that in use?

I remember reading it in the book The Only Way to Cross. The masts themselves were a leftover from the days when steamships still used sails due to reliability issues with the engines. However as reliability improved to the point that sails were no longer needed the masts got a second life as range extenders for the telegraph and radios. Though up until the 20's or so they were still technically supposed to be able to double as sailing masts in an emergency.(How effective they would've been though is up for debate)
 
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The largest ever sailing ship (tonnage) was France II, Bordeaux 1911 - 127.5m long, 5633 tons, 5 masts. Wiki looks pretty accurate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_II

Largest in dimension was Preussen, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preußen_(ship)

There's a decent chapter on late sailing ships, and some good illustrations, in Veres Laszlo and Richard Woodman: The Story of Sail (Chatham, 1999).

Otherwise, as robcraufurd points out, you need to delay the introduction of engines of more than simple expansion efficiency - perhaps through retarded metallurgy.
 
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