DOCKING THE OLYMPIC

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXXIV, Issue 3, 25 October 1924, Page 2

DOCKING THE OLYMPIC

greatest weight-lifting FEAT. The greateest weight-lifting feat in the world has been accomplished at Southampton when the Olympic was docked in July last. An inert mass weighing 46,000 tons has been lifted forty feet into the air in three pours forty-five minutes. It is still poised there, and will remain poised for a week while antlike figures of men. eight or nine hundred of them, scurry round it with hammers, paint brushes, pneumatic drills, and all the impedimenta of shipyard work. The greatest British-built ship m the'world, the White Star liner Olympic, h as been lifted by the greatest floating dock in. the world, which is also British designed and built. Nothing like this has been seen in our waters in all the years of our sea history. Floating docks have lifted bi* -ships before, but notlrThg on this scale has been attempted. There were nervous moments during the docking. for man was juggling with immense weights wholly beyond his control if anything iyent wrong—and the vnly guarantee of success lay in an abstruse series of calculations pigeonholed in some engineer’s office In Newcastle. The multiplication table Xnd Mr Algebra between them lifted die Olympic. It was a case of equation, natation, and levitation. First the floating dock was submerged until there were 34 feet of .vater over the keel blocks and the cradle on which the Olympic was to ,-est. The n four tugs pulled the Burn'round from her berth and edged her in between the two walls of the •lock.

Three feel, of water remained between her keel and the blocks when <he came to rest, and with great •are the dock was lifted under her. (nches at' a time it rose, while men with a variety of gadgets watched and gauges and tested to make sure that the centre of the cradle was., unler the centre of the ship.

They touched. Red and green I mps lashed the message from thirty feet .elow water. The red predominat'd, so the Olympic was a fraction too nuch to port. Great beams of steel running through the wajlls of the lock (one of them had bee n chosen - a nesting place by two astonished pigeons) pressed against the sides of he ship and edged her a decimal point to starboard. At last the red md green lamps in the signal box turned level. She was truly centred.

More pumps silently started work. There was an uncanny silence throughout the whole of the uncanny business. The feat was carried through without a creak or a groan. Only when some oncoming workmen lumped a heavy pulley block on the steel platform of the dock was the silence broken.

Those on the dock had no sensation of movement. Yet they and the lock and the Olympic climbed ten

feet upwards in the first hour. The under-water hull of the liner came more and more in view and as it did so men in rough punts alongside scrubbed away the green growth of six months’ seafaring.