The wonders of the world

by John Loraine Abbott

AN OCEAN STEAMER.

The Baltic is of thirty-two hundred tuns’ burden, carpenter’s measure; in length, two hundred and eighty-seven feet; breadth of beam, forty-six feet; depth of hold, thirty-two feet; to the top of the gunwale, thirty-four feet and six inches. The diameter of her wheels is thirty-six feet; the number of floats, (corresponding to the buckets or paddles of a common water-wheel,) twenty-six in each wheel; their length, twelve feet and a half; their breadth, twenty-eight, and their thickness, three inches and a half; each float being armed with three hundred pounds of iron, so that it requires six men to lift it. The engine has two working cylinders, each ninety-six inches in diameter; the length of their stroke is ten feet; and the number of revolutions is from eleven to fourteen in a minute. The vacuum is equivalent to fourteen pounds upon the square inch; a near approximation to a perfect vacuum, which corresponds to fifteen pounds on the square inch. The pressure of steam is from twelve to twenty pounds upon the square inch; usually from twelve to fifteen pounds; this is all the amount of the power tending to produce explosion, while including what is gained by the vacuum, the effective motive power is equivalent to twenty-six, twenty-nine and thirty-four pounds on the square inch. The highest pressure used in an ordinary passage may be about eighteen pounds, equivalent to a working force of thirty-two pounds; and the lowest about seven or eight pounds, giving a moving force of twenty-one or twenty-two pounds. The ability of the boilers corresponds to fifty pounds, and with the addition of the vacuum, to sixty-four pounds; it follows, therefore, that they are generally worked with less than half their power. The entire weight of the steam machinery is one thousand tuns, and it occupies sixty feet in the length of the ship.

As to capacity for passengers, there are one hundred and sixty berths, aside from the accommodations for the people of the ship. As to strength of structure, the timbers are fitted side by side, and calked so tight that it was said the ship would float even before she was planked. Plates of iron six inches wide and an inch and a quarter thick, are let, obliquely, into the timbers at the distance of twenty-eight inches from the centers of each, and therefore they are twenty-two inches apart. These are crossed obliquely by other bars or plates of the same dimensions, which are let into the boards or planks that are nailed over them. Copper bolts, for twenty feet from the keel, pass through the plates of iron at their intersection, and in many other places, and copper sheathing covers eighteen feet of the lower part of the hull, the draught being nineteen feet, and twenty with the coal in. The ships of this line are as strong as wood, iron and copper can make them, and they hardly leak at all. They would bear long thumping upon the rocks before they would go to pieces. The movement of the machinery, and the stroke of the waves, produce scarcely a perceptible tremor, and not the slightest deviation in the deck from a right line can be seen, when viewed horizontally from stem to stern through its length of nearly three hundred feet. No opening of a joint is perceived even in the beams that form the capping of the gunwale; a knife-blade can not be passed between their contiguous ends.

The machinery rests on an iron bed-plate, on the keelson, or engine bed; and the bed-plate, which is cast in one piece, weighs forty tuns. The machinery is below, and is invisible from the deck, except through certain doors. A wave can hardly reach it at all, even should it break over the ship; and by closing the apertures above, the engine room is safe from flooding, while ventilation is secured by large tubes, having their orifices higher than the upper or promenade deck. The people below, on the level of the keelson, where there is little motion, hardly know when there is a storm above; they live in a comparatively quiet world of their own, and always in a tropical climate, even when among icebergs. The working of the machinery is admirable. It travels onward with the greatest ease and regularity; even with a heavy head-wind and opposing waves, it moves like clockwork, without apparent labor, throwing up its mighty arms and moving its ponderous levers as if there were no weight to be lifted, or vis inertiæ to be overcome. By observations made up to the tenth day of one of the passages, there had not been the slightest leak of steam, nor had it been necessary to turn a screw, although for several days together there was a heavy head-sea, impelled by adverse winds. Except the effect of hidden flaws in the immense masses of wrought iron that form some of the principal moving parts, there seems to be little cause for anxiety, as the machinery appears to be, in general, equal to every emergency.

Danger from fire, is always a subject of anxiety; but in ships protected as the Baltic is, the danger is believed to be less than in a sailing ship. The engine room is lined with iron; the boilers and their furnaces are everywhere surrounded by that metal and by water, and no wood is in a position to be unduly heated. All lights, except those necessary to the management of the ship, are extinguished at eleven o’clock; many people are up all night, and are about in every place; there are fire-engines always ready to flood the ship, and they are adapted so as to be wrought both by hand and by steam power. The behavior of the Baltic as a sea-boat, is admirable in every variety of weather. This immense vessel rides upon the waves like a duck, and has, in general, a dry and comfortable deck, rarely shipping a sea, although the spray dashes over the forecastle in showers. The ship is warmed by steam tubes, passing under the marble tables. More than fifty persons are employed about the machinery, of whom forty-eight attend to the coal and the fires, and there are six or eight engineers. There are between thirty and forty servants, twenty or twenty-five sailors, and three or four supernumerary officers; in all, about one hundred and forty, besides passengers. The style and furnishing of the Baltic are elegant, rich enough for a nobleman’s villa. Of mirrors, large and small, there are about fifty; indeed, they are in such excess that a passenger can not look in any direction without meeting his own image or the faces of his companions. The tables of these steamers are amply supplied, and have the best attendance; and of luxuries, there seems to be no end. The saloons of these steamers are fitted up in superb style. Some of the table-covers are of beautiful variegated marble, and the panels around are finely decorated with emblems of the various American states. The cabin-windows are of beautiful painted glass, embellished with the arms of various American cities. There are large circular glass ventilators reaching from the deck to the lower saloon. There is a rich and elegant ladies’ drawing-room near the chief saloon, and there are berths for about one hundred and fifty passengers. Each berth has a bell-rope communicating with one of Jackson’s patented American annunciators. Crossing the ocean in one of these steamers, some one has said, is no cross at all!

Such are the present ocean steamers; and yet even these immense structures will soon be thrown in the background by steamers of still vaster dimensions. For the Edinburgh Journal gives an account of an immense iron steamer, now (1855) being constructed for the Australian trade, which will far surpass them. The actual measurements of this leviathan vessel are, six hundred and seventy-five feet long, eighty-three feet wide at her greatest breadth of beam, and sixty feet deep in the hold, forming four decks. She will be furnished with paddle-wheels and a screw, the former of a nominal power of one thousand horses, the latter of sixteen hundred horses; but practically, the combined power may be estimated at three thousand horses. The four cylinders in which the pistons are to work, are the largest in the world; each of them weighs twenty-eight tuns. When they are lying on the ground, a man, with his hat on, may walk through them without touching the upper side. The engines, when erected and put together, will be upward of fifty feet in hight. The weight of the entire machinery will be about three thousand tuns, and of the hull, ten thousand tuns, making thirteen thousand tuns. She will carry several thousand tuns of coal and merchandise, sixteen hundred passengers, and her measurement capacity gives about twenty-five thousand tuns’ burden! Notwithstanding, her draught of water will be but small, not exceeding twenty feet when light, and thirty feet when fully loaded. She will carry five or six masts, and five funnels. Her cost will be about eighteen hundred thousand dollars. She will carry coal enough for a voyage round the world, and is built upon a model to insure great speed. Her ordinary speed is expected to be eighteen or twenty miles an hour. She is expected to make the voyage from England to Australia in thirty days, and return by Cape Horn in thirty days more; thus making the circuit of the globe in two months.

More wonderful still, it is said that Mr. Vanderbilt, of New York, is about building an immense steamer, which is to be eight hundred feet in length, and of corresponding proportions throughout, which of course will surpass even the huge steamship just described. Where the rivalry and enterprise in this matter are to end, who can tell?

CHINESE JUNKS.

As in perfect and wonderful contrast to the magnificent floating palaces just described, we close the subject of navigation by a view of the clumsy Chinese junk, which is represented in the cut below. The Chinese, though neither a savage, nor a barbarous people, are still, in most respects, very unlike other civilized nations. In houses, dress, furniture, equipage, worship, indeed, in most of the actions, feelings, and opinions of life, they are a peculiar people. They have, in fact, struck out a civilization of their own. Their religion, their literature, their arts, are all Chinese, and nothing but Chinese. It is curious to observe that although, for many centuries, they have been a cultivated people, and have even preceded the Europeans in many useful and ingenious discoveries, they seem to stand still at a certain point, beyond which they are not capable of improvement. There they remain, century after century; and, while other nations have surpassed them, they still conceive that they are the most learned, civilized and polished people in the world. All other nations they conceive to be barbarians, and hold them in supercilious contempt. And the Chinese vessels may serve as a sample of their national character. We give above a picture of one of their junks, which shows some ingenuity, and no little industry; yet how clumsy, how ineffective is it, in comparison with a Yankee steamboat! The Chinese can go, by dint of rowing, three miles an hour, while we go fifteen. This is about the difference between the energy of the Chinese and the civilized people of Europe and America.