Born from a desire to make boats go faster, today the hydrofoil is being revived as a cleaner form of water transport by helping boats rise above the waves.

It would have made an unusual sight in 1860s France – a rowing boat rising and appearing to float high on the water, a series of wedges helping to raise its hull upwards as its occupant pulled hard on the oars. It's not known if this hydrofoil boat was ever built by Parisian inventor Emmanuel Denis Farcot, who filed the first patent for a vessel of this kind in 1869. What is clear, however, is that over the next 50 years others would succeed in "flying" a boat above the water.

Italian inventor Enrico Forlanini floated a working hydrofoil boat on Lake Maggiore in the Italian Alps in 1906. Canadian Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, also developed several hydrofoil technologies in his quest to design an early aeroplane. Bell's fourth hydrofoil vessel, known as HD-4, was clocked travelling at more than 70 mph (113 km/h), which broke a world speed record for watercraft and held onto the title for a decade.

"In the early 1900s, people were experimenting with hydrofoils and they gave the craft some interesting characteristics, like higher speed, low drag – seakeeping characteristics that are different from other types of boats," says Jakob Kuttenkeuler, professor of naval architecture at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

In the 1960s there was another boom in interest in hydrofoils, making use of some of these characteristics discovered earlier in the century. "People wanted to go faster,” said Kuttenkeuler.

Now, the hydrofoil is seeing another resurgence – this time, for its potential to reduce emissions from small boats, such as ferries. "Today, the driving force for going hydrofoil is electrification," says Kuttenkeuler.

Early hydrofoils ran on fossil fuels and were built with heavy metal bodies. Their double edged, V-shaped foils allowed them to move much faster than traditional hulls, but still caused considerable drag. By the mid-20th Century, hydrofoil technology had gone as far as it could with the materials, energy sources and technology available at the time.

But hydrofoils have had a modern comeback of sorts, Kuttenkeuler says, largely due to new technological advancements. That includes smaller, more efficient batteries, lightweight building materials, and microcomputers that run sensors which automatically balance hydrofoils, allowing the newer style to replace the clunky self-adjusting V-shaped foils for a streamlined single foil that raises the boat's hull fully into the air.

Kuttenkeuler, who invented the eFoil, a board attached to a hydrofoil that people can ride smoothly on top of water, is optimistic about the potential uses for the hydrofoil. Today you can see sports enthusiasts and billionaires like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg cruising around on a commercialised version. Kuttenkeuler has been called the "godfather of hydrofoils" and has spent years researching the benefits and drawbacks of the technology among other maritime vessels.

But the hydrofoil is not just changing watersports, it is also capable of raising entire ferries out of the water in an effort to significantly reduce their emissions.

Engineer Gustav Hasselskog remembers being struck by the extraordinary quantities of fossil fuel used by an old boat he kept at his summer home in Vindö, Sweden. He calculated the boat was consuming around 15 times more fuel per kilometre than his car. It was 2014, right around the time electric vehicles were poised to take off globally, and it got Hasselskog thinking.

"Nobody has done........

© BBC