NEW AMERICAN LINER

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 63, 11 September 1937, Page 24

NEW AMERICAN LINER

"WORLD'S SAFEST SHfP"

America is to build the "world's safest" liner. According to American exchanges the United States Maritime Commission has announced plans for the building of a ship which can lay •claim to this title.

The new ship, bids for which are now being called, will be the longawaited successor to the retired Leviathan. Although she will be the largest commercial ship ever built in this country, she will not be in the same class with her German-built predecessor, so far as size and weight go. She will be dwarfed even further by the Queen Mary, the Normandie, and the new giants of the Italian and German merchant fleets. But into her will go details of design and material, according to the Commission, which will make her the nearest approach to the non-burnable, non-sinkable vessel that engineers dream about. The vessel will be 723 ft long with a displacement of 34,000 tons and a 22----knot speed. Thus she will be in the same general size class as the Paris and the Roma. She will be considerably larger than the George Washington and the Manhattan, now the largest American entries in the transatlantic ferry service. Her breadth of 92ft indicates that she will run to stability and comfort rather than to rakishness in design. The ship \vas designed by the technical staff of the Maritime Commission

I in consultation with other Government experts and a group of shipbuilders. In a sense, however, she will be international: her hull and superstructure will be the repository of every j safety device that has proved jts worth on the ships of all nations. In addi- j tion, the lessons of the Morro Castle j and the Mohawk—the first was destroyed by fire and the second crashed and sank —will be built into her every j plate and rivet. Despite the fact that she is, as yet. '■ only a series of blue prints, the ship has already gone through an ordeal by fire and has come out unscathed. Said the commission in announcing plans for her construction: "The ship will be constructed throughout of fire resisting material in accordance with the recommendations contained in the recent Senate Safety at Sea report I which resulted from the investigation j of the Morro Castle and Mohawk disasters."

The report was the worK of the Senate's Commerce Committee and em bodied the results of an eighteen-montt investigation into fire-proofing mater ials by a group of experts. The inves tigation was not academic. The experts boarded an abandoned war-time: hulk, the steamship Nantasket anchored in Virginia's James River, and turner her into a floating laboratory. Lining her staterooms and bulkheads with various types of fire-retarding and fire proof materials, they set fire to her r hundred, times, even setting off explosions on her decks.

Out of these experiments came a new concept of what the ideal fire-res is tan' material is like. Materials . which