Electricity on the Steamship (Series of Papers): the “Steamship,” vol. I., 1883.
On the Ventilation of Merchant Ships, by Mr Jas. Webb: Trans. Inst. N.A., vol, xxv., 1884.
On the Comparative Safety of Well-Decked Steamers, by Mr Thos. Phillips: Trans. Inst. N.A., vol. xxv., 1884.
On the Application of Hydraulic Machinery to the Loading, Discharging, Steering, and Working of Steamships, by Mr A. B. Brown: Trans. Inst. N.A., vol. xxv., 1884.
CHAPTER IV.
PROGRESS IN THE SCIENCE OF SHIPBUILDING.
The appreciation and employment of scientific method and analysis in designing and building ships have at no previous time been greater than they are at present. This is already yielding benefits and ensuring successes which only a few years ago would have remained ungathered and unachieved, or at best would only have been attained after wasteful expenditure of money, time, and skill, if not the sacrifice of human life. Not so long ago endeavours were seldom made to extract lessons of general value from particular occurrences, there being a disposition prevalent to accept facts without accounting for them—“to rejoice in a success and regard a failure as irreparable”—the outcome, it may at once be said, of indifference, false ideas of economy, and of a limited conception of the part scientific methods should play in successful shipbuilding.
Particular occurrences within recent years have without doubt played a large part in bringing about this more general and intelligent appreciation of such matters. Some maintain, indeed, that it is only under pressure of circumstances that anything like proper regard for fundamental principles has obtained hold among mercantile shipbuilders. This remissness, even admitting it to be true, is the more natural and excusable in private commercial concerns, when it is considered that the bulk of progress made, even in Admiralty quarters—where ships take several years each to build, and there is more time for scientific investigation and experiment than is possible in mercantile work—is more attributable to the awakenings which have followed upon great disasters than to the natural improvement of ordinary practice. The terrible loss of the Captain in September, 1870, for example, by which 500 lives were sacrificed, led to a fuller recognition of the necessity for exact experiment and calculation to determine thoroughly the conditions of stability for war vessels; and many war-ships then under construction at the dockyards—particularly those of the low freeboard type—were altered in consequence, for the purpose of adding to their safety. The capsizing of the Eurydice off the Isle of Wight in March, 1878; the mysterious and mournful loss of her sister ship the Atalanta in 1880; the explosion on board the Thunderer in 1876, by which 45 lives were lost, and the still more calamitous case of the Doterel in April, 1881, by which the ship and 148 lives were destroyed, are all instances of calamity, the causes of which have formed the subject of official inquiry, all in their turn teaching important lessons and yielding subsequent benefits not easily calculable.
Recent occurrences of a very calamitous nature in connection with merchant ships—some of which will be more explicitly referred to further on—have been attended with similarly mournful, but, it may be added, with similarly beneficial results. These disasters and the resulting inquiries have shown pretty conclusively that the knowledge of a vessel’s stability and other vital qualities possessed by ship’s officers is often meagre and erroneous; and that far too little attention is usually paid to a vessel’s technical qualities by shipowners or their advisers. They have also tended to prove that exact knowledge of the principles of ship design, and observance of scientific method in their construction, are not yet sufficiently prevalent or thorough in mercantile shipyards.