I found a clip segment from a Discovery Channel programme which mentioned some technology transfer supposedly brought from China to UK by a British naval architect in 1782.

http://player.youku.com/player.php/sid/3750566/v.swf

Unfortunately, I cannot find the preceding clip. Anyone knows what this was referring to?

No idea. But the pre-eminent British naval architect within that time frame was F. H. Chapman who did much to improve the structural stability of ships as well as instituted a system for manufacturing naval warships using parts that were first put together in modules - in short turning ship building from a species of artisanal work that consumed lots of time and effort to an assembly-line type production process. The latter began in earnest at just about this time - 1782 - and was credited with being one the reasons for the subsequent dominance of the Royal Navy.

No clue as to whether there was any Chinese connection at all though. I wonder what the evidence is for any of this esp. since the revelant source material must have been worked over by historians quite a lot already so any "discovery" or revelation of this sort that only now comes to light strikes me as rather incredulous prima facie.

If you look at the colored illustration in the video clip, they show a picture of a paddle wheeled vessel. The Chinese had man powered armored paddle wheeled "tower ships" which dated back to the time of the Han Dynasty.

The British took this idea and later adapted it to steam power.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_China

I know that China had paddle ships, but what evidence is there that the British (or anyone else for that matter?) got the idea from the Chinese in developing steam powered paddle ships?

Actually, the earliest possible Chinese record of paddle-wheeled ships is from the 6th century, towards the end of the Age of Fragmentation. The Chen Shu biography of Xu Shipu (506-560), an admiral of the Southern Dynasties, states that before a battle between Xu's loyalist Liang fleet and the navy of the rebel Hou Jing in 551, Xu augmented his fleet by building "tower-ships, striking-arm ships, fire-boats, and water-chariots" 楼船、拍舰、火舫、水车. If these 'water-chariots' were paddle-wheel ships, then it is also clear that they were not the same as tower-ships.

The earliest undisputed record of a Chinese paddle-wheel ship is from the Jiu Tangshu biography of the Tang aristocrat Li Gao (733-792). It states that Li Gao once "exercised his mind's technical ingenuity to create a warship that held a wheel on either side, which [people] trod on" 运心巧思，为战舰，挟二轮蹈之. The Song-period statesman Li Gang (1083-1140) believed paddle-wheel warships, which were widely used in the Hunan region in his time, were invented by Li Gao: 荆湖间车船乃唐嗣曹王皋遗制.

(see http://baike.baidu.com/view/50685.htm )

However, there is an earlier non-Chinese record of a paddle-wheel warship, in the anonymous Roman military treatise De Rebus Bellicis, which is generally dated to the 4th or 5th century AD. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steame...ly_developments



The first known paddle steamer was built and tested in France in 1783: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroscaphe
It had two paddle wheels of a 4-meter diameter, but steamed for only 15 minutes before the steam engine failed.

But in 1825, by which time seagoing paddle steamers were coming into use, the director of the Spanish royal archives claimed to have a document dated 1543, mentioning a trial made in Barcelona under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of "a machine to propel large boats and ships, even in calm weather, without oars or sails... it consisted in a large copper of boiling water, and in moving wheels attached to either side of the ship". French scholars and scientists quickly disputed this claim, and because the Spanish scholars could not produce the relevant document, the controversy was never really resolved. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasco_de_Garay

As far as I know, there is no evidence that the French paddle steamer of 1783 was inspired by Chinese technology brought to Britain in 1782. But someone who watched the Discovery documentary may be able to comment further on this.



He was actually working for Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_Henrik_af_Chapman