When at length she was launched, the directors’ minds misgave them as to an Australian trip, and they determined to cross the Atlantic instead, for a trial voyage. She started on the 8th of September, 1859, but alas! when off Hastings some steam pipes burst. Several persons were killed and wounded, and the voyage ended at Portland.
Next year she tried again and crossed in eleven days, after which she made several voyages with success—on one occasion conveying soldiers to Canada. Unfortunately for the owners, however, she did not pay.
Then in 1865 she began to be engaged in submarine telegraph work, by which she will most likely be best remembered, and two years later she was chartered to convey passengers from America to Havre for the French Exhibition, but this scheme failed.
Then for some years from 1869 she was successfully engaged in cable-laying, in the Red Sea, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, etc., after which she came down to be a coal hulk in 1884, stationed at Gibraltar.
At length she was sold for £26,200 at London, by auction, and was on view in the Thames, and also in the Mersey. At this latter river her huge sides were used as an advertising “board” for a Liverpool business house. Again in November, 1888, she was sold by auction, this time for breaking up, and it is said that the total proceeds of the sale which lasted five days was £58,000, more than double what she had previously brought!
“A ship before her time,” says some one, thinking of the huge vessels of the last decade of the nineteenth century. That is true, but the immense space required for coal, and her low-pressure engines, had also something to do with her comparative failure. The problem which the Great Eastern failed to solve has been met in other ways—viz., by the use of high-pressure steam and compound, triple-expansion and even quadruple-expansion engines. That is, the steam, working at 150 or 160 lbs. pressure, instead of the 25 lbs. of the Great Eastern, is passed through two, three, and even four cylinders respectively, and the economy in coal consumption is astounding. Thus the use of triple expansion engines has brought the saving in coal down from 4 lbs. per indicated horse-power to less than 1½ lbs.
There have been many other improvements also, such as the use of steel instead of iron, the parts being thus stronger and yet lighter; the circular tubular boiler enabling high-pressure steam to be economically produced and maintained; the use of surface condensers, by which the exhaust steam is quickly reduced to water and returned to a “hot well” ready for the boilers, to be speedily again raised to high pressure steam; and a forced draught by which the furnaces are made to roar furiously and heat the water in the boilers speedily.
THE “GREAT EASTERN.”
But these things were not all attained in a day. The introduction of the compound marine engines in 1854-56 by John Elder, marks the first great step of the new departure. In 1856 he engined vessels for the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, on the compound principle, which proved very satisfactory.