QUEER CRAFT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 65, Issue 5547, 9 November 1942, Page 6

QUEER CRAFT

ECCENTRIC SHIP BUILDING

CRANKS AND GENIUSES

(By

F.A.)

In the sideshow of sea literature there are not a few freak ships—some like the genius, bom before their time, others the offspring of cranks and unpractical minds, and, strangely enough, two or three perfectly suited for the purpose for which they were designed.

Even the craziest vessel ever launched has contributed its quota to nauti cal science.

Compared with other centuries, the reign of Queen Victoria was fecund with marine oddities and monstrosities. The mechanical age was just beginning, and naval architects, engineers and inventors became intoxicated with the potentialities of iron and steel. A rare specimen of the freak show was the Swan of the Exe, built at Exeter in 1860 by Captain George Peacock. His giant mechanical swan measured 17J feet. The framework of the body was bolted to concealed twin boats which cleverly supported the fantastic structure. The neck, as #iast, carried the running gear for wing-shaped sails. To a metal ring round the neck gilded pendant blocks held halyards for sails. Under its full-bottomed stern a fish-tail rudder proved an unswanlike concession to necessity. But a pair of realistic webbed feet worked pendulum fashion by a hand lever inside the creature’s body atoned for

this incongruity. The inside of the swan was fitted like a first-class railway carriage, with windows, plush-covered seats and bevelled mirrors. The bird’s neck was used for a galley, with a stove, the smoke coming out through the beak, which held a banneret bearing the yacht’s name. At night port and starboard eyes were illuminated by red and green.

FLOATING VERSATILITY

In July, 1863, the Connector made her trial trip up the Thames- Sponsored by a company of business men, she was intended for a coasting collier to outstrip the “Geordies,” the familiar collier brigs that then monopolised the trade between Newcastle and London. Her versatility was implied by her name, but in action she was unique. Onlookers saw her slowly divide into three and become three vessels, with mast and sail, capable of independent action. The brains of Russia caught the

fever and conjured up some queershaped craft, including the Lavadia, of plate shape. In 1861, under American expert supervision, that country ordered vessels of cigar shape, without keel or cutwater, to be built at St. Petersburg. Three years before an American inventor, Ross Winans, built at Ferry Bay, near Baltimore, the first of these cigar ships—fashioned afte rthe design of Jules Verne’s Nautilus—but it was no submarine. Its 180 feet of streamlined body was propelled by a ring of blades riveted within a flat iron belt round the great hull’s diameter. In the “80’s” the turbot-shaped creations of the Russian Admiral Popov were built in a British ship yard.

In 1863 the astronomer Bessemer invented an anti-mal-de-mer salon, because he always became seasick crossing the Channel. In the meadow at the rear end of his palatial mansion on Denmark Hill, London, he built a structure 20 feet square to represent the centre section of a vessel with its equilibrating weight and

mechanism in a pit beneath. The circular cabin hung on a central bearing and was kept level by a rigidly suspended pendulum weighted underneath. An attendant had to be on hand to control an hydraulic brake if the spirit-level indicated any deviation from the horizontal. Evidently his invention did not receive sufficient attention, for he took up astronomy, and later built a costly observatory in the grounds of his house. The Great Eastern was for 41 years the biggest ship in the world—even Noah’s Ark was superseded by it. This Victorian giant’s length of 692 feet, compared with the 512 of the Ark, gave her a tonnage greater by nearly 10,000. She was built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1858. Even Norwegian sea captains played their part with “unsinkables.” Captain Donvig built a perfect sphere in 1900. Round its equator was a heavy collision fender. From the north pole rose a vertical tube which could be raised or lowered. Fitted with a rudder and portholes, it was capable of holding 20 persons and a ton of water in each of its four ballast tanks. It proved quite seaworthy, and was awarded a medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900, after a demonstration on the Seine. This type of ship remains a lonely curiosity, probably because of insufficient deck space and the difficulty of getting through the small circular hatch.

FORESHADOW OF THE SUBMARINE Three years later Captain Ole Brude invented an egg-shaped fantasy. While his creations rusted in

Norwegian shipyards like gigantic eggs left by some fabulous prehistoric bird, his lifeboat received approbation and was incorporated by steamship companies in their latest life-saving devices. The whale fac-tory—-the Baltic ferry which swallows trains instead of whales—and the dazzle-painting of the Roman galleys for camouflage 2000 years ago are ideas that seem to have come to stay.

And so has the submarine! Simon Lake little thought, as he fitted out his Argonaut as a salvage ship, that the great Powers of to-day would be using his model. On the surface it resembled a small steamer, but it has earned a place because of its ingeniously devised wheels that travelled along the sea bottom. An air lock beneath its bows provided an independent air supply, and a diver could submerge and examine a wreck by the help of a powerful searchlight from the forward part of the vessel. The optimistic inventor even went so far as to supply a special hoisting crane for bringing up buried chests of treasure. The two large wheels amidships had metal cleats to give added grip to the sea floor, and a small trailer wheel was under the propeller. A petrol engine for surface cruising and an electric motor for cruising under the sea completed this curiosity plus.