The works cover nearly seventy-four acres, and lie on the south side of the Clyde, about three miles from Glasgow, with which city they are connected by a continuous chain of docks, warehouses, and other ship-yards. Not very long ago this great inclosure was arable land attached to a comfortable mansion which still retains a few vestiges of its former dignity. But now the verdure has been trampled down and the face of the earth is hidden by paving-stones and iron rails. The river is inky, and the smoke lying in a brown fog over-head is ever being replenished from the high chimneys of the neighborhood.
The scene within the high brick walls which keep out idlers is exhilarating but scarcely picturesque. All the materials which enter into the construction of a modern ship are visible in profusion. A bird’s-eye view reveals great stacks of timber, iron, and steel; a net-work of rails which connect the works with all the principal lines converging at Glasgow; long brick sheds, and edging the water-front the launching-slips, where as many as fifteen vessels have been in course of construction at the same time. There the great hulls of many of the most famous Atlantic liners have been put together; this was the birthplace of all the new ships of the North German Lloyd line; of the Arizona, the Alaska, the Oregon, the Umbria, and the Etruria.
Running at right angles from the river, a dock has been excavated, large enough to accommodate a vessel of twelve thousand tons, and after launching, the steamers are hauled in here to receive their engines and boilers. Immediately in the rear of the launching-slips there is an enormous shed, with a roof of glass and iron, where all the iron-work for the hulls of fifteen ships has been handled at one time. Within it gangs of workmen, each skilled in a specialty, carry on that part of the work which belongs to them. Some are carriers of angle steel or iron, others receivers of angle iron, which they place in the furnaces until the metal is at such a heat that it can be shaped to suit the water-lines of the vessel for which it is intended. Others still are busy with reverse frames and with the bending of plates; others with funnels, ventilators, and skylights.
The Manganese Bronze Propeller-Blade of the Wrecked Steamer Mosel, after it had beaten upon a reef.
There is a special department for the casting of manganese bronze, which is used for the blades of propellers. Standing against a wall not far off is a blade saved from the propeller of the wrecked steamer Mosel. She ran ashore on a rocky coast, and her propeller played upon the reef like a flail upon a threshing-floor without break or fracture; so great is the strength of the bronze that the only effect upon it was a feathering of the edges as revealed by the blade in question.
Then we see the engineering, forge, and pattern shops. Forgings of steel are made which weigh as much as thirty tons, as in the case of the crank-shafts of the new North German Lloyd steamers. A shafting of that weight is lifted as easily, and with as little commotion, as a bar of angle iron, and placed on a table to be finished. All the tools are of enormous size, and nearly all of them are adaptations of the well-known turning-lathe. Either the tool turns or the work turns. A steamer’s cylinders are bored out with a bar, the bar moving. In turning a thrust-shaft the shaft moves, not the tool. In facing a condenser the tool moves, not the condenser. Cutting, planing, and turning are all accomplished by modifications of the lathe. There are in all nearly forty lathes, vertical, horizontal, and oblique, each gnawing at some vital part of a ship, and there—there is the “devil.” This is the name given by the workmen to an immense metallic disk, over sixteen feet in diameter, which bores through solid steel at the rate of two and a quarter inches in four minutes. The workmen fill what standing room there is between propeller blades, cylinder liners, piston-valves, and sole-plates; they swarm like ants, each gang carrying on its specified work with diligence and singleness of purpose.
Let the reader figure to himself the gleaming tools, the whirring machinery for the distribution of power, the begrimed toilers, the ponderous masses of iron and steel—now swinging in mid-air, then clutched to the breast of an excoriating monster like the “devil;” let his eye rest on those forty lathes all busy at once, eating with unwearying jaws into the metal fed them, and on the plane which shaves an armor-plate as if it were a deal board; then let him fill his ears with the groaning, creaking, hissing, grinding, shrieking of all this activity, and add to it the battle-like din of the boiler-makers. Thus he may know what Fairfield is like.
Ranging up and down these work-shops, and pausing before this or that lathe, we see in undistinguishable fragments the engines that are designed to propel the seven or eight thousand-ton ship; then the pieces are gathered together and united in a pit; power is applied from an auxiliary engine, and the work of final adjustment is proceeded with. That completed, the engines are again taken apart and transferred to the vessel for which they have been built.
