A Stern View, showing Twin Screws.
Has the reader ever stood in the engine-room of an ocean steamer when she was plunging through an Atlantic gale at the rate of seventeen or more knots an hour? Even if he has done so, and been awed by the experience, it is not likely that he has been able to fully realize the immensity of the power exerted. He needs some standard of comparison, and for that purpose we may offer him the ancient galley, and repeat a passage from the address made by Sir Frederick Bramwell at the meeting of the British Association last September: “Compare a galley, a vessel propelled by oars, with the modern Atlantic liner…. Take her length as some 600 feet, and assume that place be found for as many as 400 oars on each side, each oar worked by three men, or 2,400 men; and allow that six men under these conditions could develop work equal to one horse-power; we should have 400 horse-power. Double the number of men, and we should have 800 horse-power, with 4,800 men at work, and at least the same number in reserve, if the journey is to be carried on continuously. Contrast the puny result thus obtained with the 19,500 horse-power given forth by a large prime-mover of the present day, such a power requiring on the above mode of calculation 117,000 men at work and 117,000 men in reserve; and these to be carried in a vessel less than 600 feet in length. Even if it was possible to carry this number of men in such a vessel, by no conceivable means could their power be utilized so as to impart to it a speed of twenty knots an hour.”
The City of New York ready for Launching.
Model of a Steamer Designed to Cross the Atlantic in Five Days.
Huge as the several parts are, their adjustment is a matter of extreme delicacy, and yet so carefully is it accomplished that a steamer may leave the builder’s hand at Fairfield and proceed on a voyage of twenty days or more without once having to slacken speed on account of her engines.
It is a fair sight to see the men come to work when the bell rings in the morning. When the yard is fully occupied there are between six and seven thousand of them, and the wages paid have amounted in one year to one million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.
The head and front of all this industry—Sir William Pearce—was himself in early life a workman in the yard. I met him soon after his elevation by the Queen to the baronetage. He was then, apparently, in the best of health, and was full of plans for building still faster steamers for the Atlantic. That he would have soon put afloat a vessel of greater speed than his own Etruria, there is no doubt in the minds of those who knew his genius as a naval architect, and the indomitable and imperious will with which he carried out all his plans. But he died suddenly in 1888, and though his work was incomplete, he had already done wonders in minimizing the discomfort and duration of the now familiar passage of the Atlantic.