Inside a Submarine

New Zealand Tablet, 17 March 1910, Page 430

Inside a Submarine

Climbing down ten rungs of an iron ladder into the interior of a submarine is like going into a boiler shop where there is one continuous, deafening, ear-splitting racket, like a dozen triphammers clattering a tatoo amid a grind and rumble and thump of machinery as if especially designed to burst your ear-drums. t At first the noise in that narrowly confined space is painful and bewildering. To make yourself at all heard you must shout into the ear of a companion. So intense is the strain that you marvel how day in and day out human ears can withstand the ordeal. You find yourself inside what seems an enormous steel cigar, painted a neat pearl gray, a color which is serviceable and does not dazzle the eye. Light comes to you partly, through portholes and in part from incandescent lamps placed fore and aft in the darker parts of the. hull. You have expected, of course, to land in a tangle .of whirling machinery that fills the inside of the boat from stem .to stern threatening with every revolution to take an arm or a leg off. Instead, the first thing you see is an uninterrupted ‘ working space ’ or deck, measuring seven feet by twenty-five or thirty feet. At the stern, far in the background, . are the machines and engines; in fact, this section of the vessel is nothing but machinery, a rumbling mass of silvery steel and glittering brass revolving at the rate of five hundred times a minute, so compact that you wonder how the various parts can turn without conflicting, or how it is possible for human hands to squeeze through the maze to oil the machinery. But the economy of space is as nothing to what you will see. The floor you stand on is a cover for the cells of the storage batteries wherein is pent up the electricity with which your boat will propel herself when she runs submerged. The walls amidships and the space in the bow are gigantic ballast tanks to be filled with water that will play a part shortly when you get ready to dive. The four torpedoes, measuring sixteen feet three inches long, eighteen inches in diameter, and weighing fifteen hundred pounds each, are lashed end for end in pairs at either side, and directly over these are tool boxes, and hinged bunks for the crew to sleep in. The very air which is taken along to keep life in you in case the boat should be detained beneath the surface longer than usual, is compressed in a steel cylinder to two thousand pounds per square inch pressure so intense that were the cylinder to spring a leak no larger than a pin hole, and were the tiny stream of escaping air to strike a human being, it would penetrate him through and through and drill a hole through an inch-thick board behind him. And yet everything about the interior arrangements of this boat is so simple that you can see at a glance its purpose. Away forward, where the tip of the cigar comes to a point, are the two torpedo tubes out of which the gunner will send his deadly projectiles seething beneath the waters at the rate of thirty-five knots an hour against an unsuspecting hull. Directly under the conning-tower is a platform three feet square and elevated three feet from the deck, upon which the captain stands, head and shoulders extending into the tower so that while at his post he is visible to the crew only from the waist line down; and at the feet of the captain, and on a level with his platform, is the station of the second in command, in charge of the wheel that controls the diving rudders and the gages that register the angle of ascent and decline, and show how deep the boat is down. The two officers are in personal communication, so that in case of heart disease or other mishap either can jump to the other man’s place.