The double topsails and double topgallants were the arrangement which persisted until modern times.

  When a ship was fitted with single topsails and was lying in harbour with all sails furled, the lowered yards had a wide space between them, an appearance which their commanders took pride in. The upper yard of a double set, however, when lowered lay close in line with the lower one, an appearance which the old-timers hated. Therefore purely for appearance they would raise the upper yard with its furled sail to a position approximately halfway between the yards above and below, thus somewhat equalizing the spacing between all the yards as in the old style.
Aside from the developing double topsails, quite a number of ideas came out following on Howes' rig, all with the idea of making the large single topsail easier to handle. These were self-reefing sails on rolling spars, the best known being Cunningham's and Coiling & Pinkney's, both British.

  The general idea of Cunningham's invention was to reef and furl the single topsail on a revolving yard. The yard turned in two hoops at the yardarms which took the usual lifts and at the centre the mast parral also had a cogged sheave arrangement around which passed a chain tie. The two ends of the chain passed through sheaves at the topmast head and then down to the deck. By hauling on either one the yard could be made to rotate either way, being lowered or raised (parbuckling). The gear in the middle of the yard required the sail to be split into two halves down as far as the cap level, where across reef band was fitted. The gap was covered by a vertical strip of canvas (bonnet) which was laced to cross-battens at 12 in. intervals. The batten ends were grooved to fit around doubled rope bindings on each vertical edge of the sail. The bonnet could thus slide in the gap and bunch up like a Venetian blind. Battens tapered in an opposite direction to the yard taper enabled the sail to roll up on a parallel diameter .

  An additional spar about one-third the diameter of the yard was fitted parallel to it and just clear behind it, held by brackets from the yardarm hooks and at the middle sheaves. This spar did not revolve but took the footropes and stuns ail booms, and could take the reef points for more security when the yard was lowered to the cap. The appearance of this sail when set was like a normal single topsail with a reef band at cap level and the vertical strip or bonnet looking like a ladder above it. It can be seen in the illustrations of the Fiery Cross (12) and Lahloo (13) and is often seen in old prints. The sail could only be close reefed, and to furl completely it needed men on the yard as usual.

  Coiling & Pinkney's differed chiefly in that the rolling spar to take the sail was not the actual yard but a lighter one supported in front of it by  yardarm attachments, the revolving action coming from a sheave arrangement at each end with chains up to the masthead working in a similar parbuckling action as Cunningham's.