Iron ship

“ There are two or three iron vessels of 1000 tons displacement, built during the period of greatest demoralization, and on account of political pressure brought to bear in the interest of iron merchant-ship building. These vessels can scarcely be pointed at with pride, since, throughout the naval world, pure iron construction is found only in transports and troop-ships. In England, where iron ship-building had its birth and development, constructors have never proposed this very excellent type of merchant-ship construction for war-vessels. ”

“ This curious interlude in an ocean voyage developed strange faculties in our men. The iron bands, which form part of the fittings of a ship's yards, were, owing to the skipper's desire to have heavier spars, found to be too small. No matter. An impromptu forge was rigged up on a barrel filled with sand, a most ingenious bellows was made by somebody, and, as if born and bred in a smithy, the bo'sun and two hands manipulated that ironwork in such workmanlike fashion that it answered its purpose as well as if turned out of a Blackwall foundry. ”

“ It may be imagined that the change from wood to iron in construction did not find us—in our dock yards, at least—with a body of men accustomed to work with the new material, and when it was decided to build an iron ship of the 'Warrior' type at Chatham it had to be carried out by shipwrights whose previous experience had been limited to wooden shipbuilding. ”

“ He can trace, for instance, the effects of the change from wood to iron, and from iron to steel, in the carrying capacity of ships, and he can note the effects of successive improvements in the propelling machinery in saving weight and space occupied by engines, boilers, and bunkers; and in conferring upon a ship of a given size the power of making longer voyages. Here, too, he can learn how it was that the American clipper supplanted the old English sailing merchantman, and how the screw iron ship, fitted with highly economical engines, has practically driven the clipper from the seas. ”

“ An iron ship—frames, plating, decks, beams, stanchions, carlings, engines, smoke-pipes, yards, masts, shafts, armament in a ship-of-war, and numberless other parts—is not like the steel bar, a simple magnet, but a network of magnetic entanglement; yet, how complex soever this may be, for the purpose of investigation, to the end that proper means may be devised for coping with it, its influence may be considered as taking place in three co-ordinate axes, namely, fore-and-aft, athwart-ships, and vertically downward, with the compass-pivot as the origin. ”

“ Since no shipbuilder had the necessary data for the construction of such a vessel, and shipbuilders as a whole were by no means favourably disposed towards iron ships, possibly because they had not the plant necessary for their construction, and as there was also a very widespread belief that a vessel of the size and dimensions of the Great Britain could not be built of iron, the directors were unable to find a contractor who would undertake her construction. They were therefore obliged to instal the plant for building the ship and the engines also. ”

“ In 1853 James Hodgson of Liverpool issued a circular on the advantages of iron sailing ships, in which he pointed out not only the greater strength obtained by using iron but the comparative cheapness of construction. The circular stated that a wooden ship of 1000 tons would cost £16 10s. per ton, and an iron ship £13 10s. per ton, both fitted for trade to the East. ”

“ In the present construction of iron ships the plates are not proportioned to the strength required at different parts, and nearly 20 per cent, of the total weight is expended in angle irons or frames, which may be useful or convenient in the mere putting together of the whole as a great box, but is almost useless, or very much misapplied, in affecting the strength of the structure as a ship. ”

“ We also shared largely in the trade, and for several years kept regular lines of swift ships, laden with American goods, which found a ready market in Melbourne. After the adaptation of iron to ship-building, the British copied our clipper lines for most of their new sailing-vessels, and now compete successfully with us in carrying heavy cargoes. Iron ships have the preference in carrying grain from San Francisco to Europe.
In 1813 a vessel from China received a pilot off Cape Cod in a fog, and kept close inshore to avoid two British frigates which were in the bay. ”

“ You will all have heard of the iron ships which are now so common, and you may have wondered how it 36is, that ships made of thick plates of iron riveted together, and weighing many thousand tons, do not go to the bottom. But they are nothing but our tin canisters on a great scale, and they float because each ship weighs less than a quantity of water of the same bulk does. ”

“ The skill to be aquired be a few years’ experience, would at a fair price for iron, enable our ship builders to construct iron ships, which, taking into account their greater capacity for freight and greater durability, would be cheaper than vessels of wood, even whilst timber was as abundant as now;—at least such was the information he had derived from persons well informed upon those subjects. ”

“ Iron is now employed in almost every part of a war-ship, the masts themselves being in many cases of iron—hollow tubes through which the running rigging may be let down when there is danger of its being damaged by the enemy’s fire. The majority of modern ironclads are built in compartments, with this advantage that, if damage is sustained in one part of the vessel, and the water rush in through the gap made by shot or any other cause, the ship will still float until the water can be let out again. ”

“ The superiority of the screw over paddle-wheels, and the greater merits of iron ships compared with wooden vessels, have long been accepted; but the adoption of iron as a material and of the screw for a propeller came about slowly. Indeed, iron ship-building made little progress in Great Britain before 1850, and in this country wood was adhered to till much later. One reason why the English did not change to the screw and iron more quickly was probably the great influence exerted by the powerful Cunard line, whose conservatism caused it to hold to wooden ships until 1856. ”

“ The ribs are placed from ten to eighteen inches apart, and the whole structure is of iron. The simplicity of the construction of an iron ship is such, that when the plates are ready, it can be put together with wonderful rapidity. ”

“ Again, a wooden ship must have her skin and ribs made of a thickness far greater than an iron ship, for the clear reason that one inch of iron is much stronger147 than one inch of wood; in other words, to obtain a given strength the iron will take up less room in the ship. ”

“ The carrying power of steel ships is so much greater than that of iron ships that the former earn twenty-five per centum more than the latter. So great a gain is this, that one-fourth the total tonnage of British ship-building in 1883 consisted of steel vessels. ”

“ On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam ”

“ The difficulty was to enable an iron ship to carry a skin of copper or yellow metal, the latter being mostly used in the mercantile marine, and the former for ships of war, private owners with their own money to spend being usually more economical than governments with the taxpayers’ money behind them, and not hampered by the problems of making the ships pay commercially. ”

“ With the introduction of iron and steel for ship-building purposes the necessity for ransacking the forests of the world for timber suitable for the frames and beam-knees of ships passed away, and Great Britain, which early became, and thus far remains, first and greatest in the production of iron and steel, was thus invited to such a development of [13] naval power as the world has never seen. The mercantile marine of England at the present time furnishes a splendid demonstration of the readiness with which the commercial classes have appreciated this great opportunity ”

“ The battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac convinced every one that wooden vessels could no longer be of any service against ships of iron. In less than a generation, every navy of importance in the world was made up exclusively of iron ships. ”

“ By the use of cement inside, and by careful attention to outside coating, a well constructed iron ship can be reckoned upon to last, in first-class condition, for a period of at least twenty years. Wear and tear of equipment, and of the wood used in their construction, must in all cases be excepted. ”

“ In addition to the fact that all ships have characteristic ways of their own, most ships react differently under different conditions of loading and when carrying their varying cargoes. A tramp loaded with iron ore will sometimes be uncomfortable in heavy weather even though she may be thoroughly comfortable in a similar storm when loaded with coal. The reason for this lies in the fact that iron ore, being heavy, loads a ship to her Plimsoll mark without filling her holds. Thus the heavy cargo gives the ship a low “centre of gravity” and she may roll heavily and constantly. ”

“ Iron built, supplied with all the improvements of modern shipbuilding, aided with the auxiliary power of steam, and manned with a sufficient crew, well officered and commanded, it would have seemed almost out of the range of probability that such a ship should have been drifted upon a lee shore in a familiar locality by a gradually increasing storm, and there shattered to fragments, and engulfed, with well nigh all her human freight, within a few hours’ sail of her own port. ”

“ Among the advantages which experience has proved iron and steel to possess over wood for the purposes of ship construction are: (1) the structure of the ship has less weight; (2) it has greater durability; (3) the requisite general and local strengths are much more easily obtained.
The importance of the first of these advantages can scarcely be overstated. The primary object of a particular ship is to carry cargo or passengers, or both, from place to place, at a given speed (in the case of a warship, the armament, ammunition, armour, &c., constitute the weight to be carried) ”

“ Fast cruisers cannot be built of iron alone on account of the fouling, and the smaller the ship the greater the harm from this cause. War-vessels of any kind are excluded from this construction on account of the vulnerability of the sides, combined with the impossibility to stop a shot-hole which is starred with long rents. In the heavy iron-clad, however, the third disadvantage is done away with by the application of armor. ”

“ Much is yet to be done by the substitution of steel for iron in many parts of our engines, and experiments abroad lead to the hope that the weights of boilers may be much reduced, but as the question stands to-day it is impossible to provide any single ship with all the appliances that are considered necessary for a perfectly equipped vessel-of-war. ”

“ Just as iron was stronger than wood, so steel was proved to be stronger than iron: consequently, the weight of the ship was diminished, which meant that the ship could carry a greater amount of158 fuel or cargo, or allowed of her being fitted with more powerful, though more weighty, engines. Steel is now very much cheaper than wrought iron, and is used not merely for the plates of the hull, but in almost every portion of the ship’s construction. Even in sailing ships the yards, masts, and rigging are to a large extent now made of this material. ”

“ While all who were concerned in the construction of vessels in which iron was so largely employed, and those who had to manœuvre them when completed, were soon convinced that the momentum of such a weight brought in contact with another ship must prove irresistible, a few were such enthusiastic champions of the ram as to desire that ships should be constructed specially for this purpose. They went so far as to say that to give guns in addition would diminish the efficiency of the ram by perhaps enshrouding the vessel in smoke at the critical moment. ”

“ With the cheapest iron in the world, we have at least succeeded in making steel, the raw material of the modern ship, cheaper than it can be made elsewhere, and that accomplished, our primacy in the matter of ship-building is a matter of the immediate future. A picturesque illustration of this change is afforded by the fact that in 1894 the plates of the "Dirigo," the first steel square-rigged vessel built in the United States, were imported from England. ”

“ Little appears to have been attempted in this country for some years in the way of iron shipbuilding, although in Ireland three or four small iron sailers or steamers were constructed for inland navigation purposes. But in 1828 John Laird of Birkenhead had his attention directed to iron shipbuilding, and completed his first iron vessel there the following year. Other builders followed where he showed the way, and in less than three years there were shipbuilders on the Thames, Clyde, and east coast of Scotland who were launching iron vessels, the great majority of which were sailing ships. ”

“ In the ’seventies steel was first introduced as a serious competitor to iron for the construction of ships. Its greater strength and its comparative lightness were its principle claims to superiority, but so important are those that while the Allan liner Buenos Ayrean, launched in 1879, was the first steel sea-going ship, to-day every merchant ship (with exceptions hardly worthy of mention) is built of steel. ”