Why is the area where the captain is, is called a wheel house and not a bridge? Are the words interchangeable or is their some sort of set definition for nautical terms?
To me “bridge” implies “up there” in a large ship and implies also a bigger room with more stuff while “wheelhouse” suggests just a hut on deck housing the wheel and little more.
ChrisBooth12, you may be amused to learn that when I Googled this question, this very thread was the 4th hit.
The term bridge originally referred to the raised structure that spanned the beam of the ship, (literally a bridge to let them cross from one side of the ship to the other), allowing the officers to look out over the sides to direct docking movement or examine the paddle wheels, etc. The term wheelhouse referred to the tiny cabin in which the wheelsman stood, protected from the elements.
I suppose that one might make a claim that technically, there is no bridge unless there are the actual wings that extend to shipside, but I’m pretty sure that such a claim would be deservedly laughed off as silly. (Imagine Capt. Kirk walking out on the bridge wing at Warp 7.)
At a better guess, warships and very large vessels are liable to nearly always have a bridge, and so the area from whch the ship was conned became known as the bridge by association. (This would have particularly followed the movement away from the quarter deck (from which sailing ships were conned) to a position amidships or forward with the development of powered vessels.*) On the other hand, on ships with different structures, “wheelhouse” is an adequate representation of the location of the conn, and that term has stayed in circulation.
A third term is pilot house which is, of course, where the pilot stands.
Note that on this photo of the Edmund Fitzgerald, there is not really a “bridge” alongside the pilot house, as the high position of the pilot house far forward of the unobstructed deck allows the officers to see the ship’s position without actually stepping out of the pilot house, while on the this photo of the United States, the bridge wing is noticeable, projecting out far enough to allow the officers to see aft past the upper cabins, lifeboats, etc.
- Of course, more recently, there has been a movement on most freighters to use an “all cabins aft” design, but the bridge is still useful for seeing along the shipside when docking or past the rest of the cabin and stack at sea.
In modern commercial shipping parlance, the term “bridge” is loosely used to mean the wheelhouse and perhaps the bridge wings although if you wanted to refer to the wings you’d probably say so specifically. However, the term wheelhouse would still be used if you wanted specifically to refer to the internal part, as opposed to the wings.