by Brad Matsen
Andrews was thrilled to be building ocean liners that would stun the world because it was exactly what he was meant to do. By the time he had apprenticed, he’d understood Archimedes’ law, which states that a body immersed in a fluid will experience an upward force equal to the weight of the fluid the body displaces. A ship floated only if it displaced an amount of water equal to or greater than its own weight. That explained why a steel ship with an enormous volume of air inside floated and a solid steel bar sank. It also explained why, if the hull of a ship were breached, the water flooding into its interior would reduce the amount of water the ship was displacing and it would sink. For Andrews, learning why a ship floated and why a ship sank was like being admitted to a society of sorcerers.
Andrews knew that his responsibility as a marine architect was to make decisions that would strike a balance between a ship that would be built too heavy and a ship that would be built too light. Working from Pirrie’s sketches, he began making those decisions, with Edward Wilding helping him calculate the dimensions of the steel for the keel, frames, rivets, and plating.
The keel of a ship is its spine, as crucial to its existence as the cord of bone and nerves that defines a human being. When a ship fractured its keel, it was said to have broken its back. Andrews fabricated this vital beam from solid steel bars 3 inches thick, wide, and deep in lengths of 50 feet. The keel bars would be milled to overlap, and joined by 6-foot-long rivet plates to form a solid piece running 850 feet along the bottom of each ship from bow to stern. The keel bar would form the base of a hollow box 5 feet, 3 inches deep with walls 1½ inches thick. From the top and bottom of that box, steel bars would extend to the port and starboard sides, tied together by eight more solid steel beams running bow to stern. That framework would be covered by steel 1¼ inches thick to form double bottoms for the ship. The massive assembly of the keel box and double bottoms would be pinned together by half a million iron rivets, driven by hydraulic pincers that generated far more force than the men with hammers who would fasten most of the steel in the ship. At a little over a pound each, the rivets in the keel box and double bottom alone would weigh 540,000 pounds.
Andrews then drew the ribs. They would be steel frames rising from the double bottom to crossbeams and plating 60 feet above, tying the port and starboard sides of the ship together at the top. More crossbeams at each of the decks of the hull also tied the frames together, forming a lattice of strength that Andrews reinforced with gussets and brackets at every angle. For most of these frames, Andrews specified 1¼-inch steel placed three feet apart. For some frames in the bow and stern of the ships where the loads would be the greatest, he specified 1½-inch steel. Where the hull curved to the bow and stern, the ribs would be two feet apart instead of three.
To further strengthen the ship’s skeleton they would have fifteen steel walls, called bulkheads, dividing the ship’s bottom into sixteen watertight compartments. Andrews had to decide how high to make the bulkheads. Watertight bulkheads had been in use for over fifty years. In 1862, the revolutionary iron sailing steamer Great Eastern had proved their worth when it sideswiped a rock off the coast of Long Island, opening a gash in its side 83 feet long and 9 feet wide. Great Eastern was 692 feet long, five times heavier than any ship that had ever been built, and it could carry 4,000 passengers and 418 crew around the world without refueling. It survived the collision with the rock because it had a double hull from its keel to its waterline, and fifteen watertight bulkheads running up to an iron deck that completely sealed those compartments.
Andrews studied Great Eastern and saw that the trade-off for dividing a ship into completely watertight compartments was an inconvenience for passengers moving between those compartments. He compromised by designing the new White Star liners with bulkheads that ran only part of the way to the top deck, allowing much freer passage through the ships. The bulkheads would rise to the fourth deck, 11 feet above the waterline and 45 feet above the keel. Two of the watertight bulkheads in the bow would extend higher, to the fifth deck. The doors in the bulkheads would be controlled either by automatic floating switches or by command from the bridge. Andrews calculated that the ships would stay afloat with as many as four of the watertight compartments flooded.
The skin of a ship had to bind the keel, frames, and beams together to form a single gigantic girder strong enough to resist the force of the worst possible sea conditions. Because the White Star behemoths were so long, Andrews knew that the hull girder would have to be strong enough to span the crests of two or more waves, flex in the middle, flex at the ends, and twist in several directions at the same time—but not break. Smaller ships could ride a single big wave into its trough and then continue up the next wave to its crest, but not these giants.
The British Board of Trade published lists of minimum specifications for building ships. An owner who accepted delivery of a ship that did not meet those standards would never get it insured, so architects submitted their plans to the board for approval as they went along. When Andrews drew up his tables of steel plates and iron rivets, he went beyond the board’s standards to err on the side of strength. Nobody—not even the Board of Trade—knew how 80 million pounds of steel would behave at sea. He increased the required 1-inch thickness for the hull plating to 1¼ inches, and increased the diameter of most of the rivets from the required 7/8 inch to 1 inch. The penalty for adding the weight of that extra steel and iron was 4 million pounds, plus the cost of the coal to move it through the water.
To reduce side-to-side rolling and further strengthen his extraordinarily long ships, Andrews also decided to spend precious weight on a pair of beams known as bilge keels. These 1½-inch-thick, 2-foot-wide, 300-foot-long steel plates would be riveted to the outside of the middle of the hull where the side of the ship turned into the bottom. Each bilge keel began 300 feet from the bow, ended 282 feet from the stern, and added more than 400 tons to each ship.
For the top three decks above the main hull—the superstructure—Andrews wanted to use thinner steel—½-inch in some places, ¾-inch in others—to save weight and keep the ships’ center of gravity lower. The problem was that the thicker steel of the main hull would withstand the flexing of the ship at sea, but the thinner steel of the superstructure would not.
Andrews came up with an ingenious solution that had been tried but not perfected, simply because no one had ever built a moving steel object so big. Instead of building the top three decks as a single piece of riveted steel, subject to the same flexing forces as the thicker main hull, he would build the superstructure in three sections. These sections would be riveted solidly to the top of the highest deck, but they would be separated from each other by gaps that would vary, as the ship flexed, from as little as 2 inches to as much as 6 inches. Andrews designed the joints to extend into the main hull, where they would end in a V-shaped notch. The gaps in the superstructure would be covered with brass plates and leather sheaths to keep out the weather but allow the joints to move. Carlisle, Wilding, and Pirrie agreed with Andrews that the two expansion joints would not weaken the ship. Above all, they would save weight.
While Andrews and Wilding concentrated on the hull and the superstructure, Carlisle designed the accommodations and deck gear, including the lifeboats and the davits to lower them into the sea. He, too, used the Board of Trade specification books. Any ship over 10,000 tons sailing under the British flag, they said, had to carry sixteen lifeboats under davits that could launch them quickly. Carlisle also found out that the board had realized that the size of ocean liners had outgrown that twenty-year-old rule, and would probably change it in the near future.
It would be better, Carlisle thought, to specify davits that could handle more than one lifeboat so that White Star wouldn’t face expensive refitting when the Board of Trade increased the number of lifeboats required for larger ships. Welin Quadrant, with whom he had done business in the past, had just figured out a system of davits that could be rotated 360 degrees to pick up lifeboats sto
wed both beneath them and behind them on the deck. Carlisle included the Welin davits in his plans, with 16 lifeboats ready under them and either 16 or 32 more lifeboats stacked on the deck, depending on how many White Star wanted to carry. Bruce Ismay would make the final decisions about spending weight and money that exceeded the specifications of the Board of Trade.
A year later, on July 29, 1908, Pirrie led a White Star entourage on a tour of Harland and Wolff as a prelude to reviewing the plans for the ships upon which they were betting their company. He wanted Ismay to see how radically he had transformed his shipyard to accommodate the White Star order so there could be no doubt that he was committed to building them. The shipping business was still in the doldrums, and Pirrie knew that a ship owner—even one in whose company Harland and Wolff had a huge stake—might get cold feet about making so enormous a leap into an uncertain future.
Pirrie and Ismay strolled side by side, with Margaret Pirrie on her husband’s arm, followed closely by Andrews, Carlisle, and Wilding. Then came an apprentice carrying Pirrie’s suit coat on the warm summer day, a service that was a coveted honor among the boys of the shipyard. Pirrie handpicked his coat boy by merit and paid him a £1 bonus, an enormous windfall for a man whose daily wage was a quarter of that. Behind the apprentice, a dozen naval architects from both companies walked in a cluster that shifted its shape as the men jockeyed for position close enough to their bosses to hear what they were saying.
From the back of the drawing office, Pirrie led his procession between the two 900-foot-long slipways where the ships would be built side by side. The concrete foundations of the slipways were four and a half feet thick to support the hulls and the overhead gantry cranes, which were nearly finished. The gantries themselves weighed over 6,000 tons, the largest of their kind in the world. Four scaffoldings rose 75 feet high along the full length of each ship. Tracks ran on the tops of each pair of scaffoldings on which sliding hoists were spaced that could cover every inch of the ships below to lift the frames, plates, and beams to their places.
Pirrie had ordered work on the gantries halted so his voice could be heard. Hundreds of men, many of them just hired for the enormous new project, perched silently in the scaffolding as the inspection party passed below. It took the bosses fifteen minutes to walk leisurely from the top of the slipway, where the bows would be, to the bottom, just a few feet from the river. At the water’s edge, Pirrie pointed out another stupendous piece of equipment he had bought specifically for outfitting the big liners: a floating crane that could lift 250 tons. With a crane stationed onshore, workers had to move the ship every time they wanted to lift a boiler, engine casting, or anything else to a new location on the ship; with the floater, they would simply move the crane with a steam tug instead of moving the ship.
Bosses in the shipyard wore black bowlers and were known to the men who worked under them as “hats,” a term that usually carried a hint of scorn. As Pirrie steered his entourage back up the sloping concrete ramp of the slipway, Andrews looked up into the scaffoldings around him, smiled broadly, and made the unheard-of gesture of tipping his bowler to the workmen above. First one, then a few, then many, then all of the men hanging in the gantry clapped and banged on the steel frames as the bosses walked below. Pirrie and Ismay glanced up briefly, waved, and continued their conversation. The others, led by Andrews, returned the salute with their hands clasped over their heads and cheers of their own.
For two days, Ismay and his men, along with Pirrie, Andrews, Carlisle, and Wilding, huddled around a cluster of tables in the drawing office as the White Star architects examined the drawings and specifications for the new ships. Two inspectors from the Board of Trade looked over their shoulders to be sure the plans met the minimum specifications for the strength and stability of passenger ships. The inspectors would make hundreds of visits to the shipyard as the new White Star liners were built, checking every detail.
On the afternoon of the second day, Ismay told Pirrie that he liked what he had seen. He had only one major problem: weight. After the initial cost of building a ship, every owner wrote his biggest checks for the coal to fire the boilers, drive the engines, and move thousands of tons of steel, cargo, or passengers across the ocean. The discovery of oil in America fifty years before was promising, and the rush was on to find more. But for the time being, shipping was still a slave to coal. Miners’ strikes flared up with alarming regularity, and the cost of coal could double overnight. White Star’s gigantic ships would burn 650 tons of coal per day with a full load of passengers and cargo.
Ismay asked Andrews if the ships would be strong enough with the 1-inch plating and 7/8-inch rivets approved by the Board of Trade instead of the thicker plating and rivets in Andrews’s specification tables. It would save about 2,500 tons of dead weight, which meant 25 tons of coal every day, year after year.
Andrews hesitated. How could Ismay ask such a question? He had spent months calculating loads, stresses, and the strength of steel and had recommended a thickness of 1¼ inches for the plating, and 1-inch rivets. Andrews knew that if an owner wanted his ship made out of papier-mâché and the Board of Trade approved the specifications, the owner would get a papier-mâché ship. Andrews had no choice but to agree.
Ismay told Pirrie to use the Board of Trade specifications for the steel and for the lifeboats, as well. Sixteen wooden boats under the davits and four collapsible boats with canvas sides would be enough to ferry passengers to a rescue ship. The ships should surely be able to stay afloat long enough for help to arrive on the heavily trafficked North Atlantic route. Why clutter the boat deck promenade with three dozen more boats than the law required?
Late on the afternoon of July 31, 1908, Ismay signed a letter agreeing to pay three million pounds for the two ships, with the stipulation that Harland and Wolff could bill him for extras as the jobs progressed. Pirrie countersigned the letter. At that moment, the ships the two men had been dreaming about for two years became Harland and Wolff Hull Nos. 400 and 401.
Eight
A THOUSAND DAYS
Until Ismay signed the order letter on Friday, July 31, 1908, Hull Nos. 400 and 401 were paper ships. The following Monday the clock began ticking on the thousand days Andrews had to turn the first of them into steel. Pirrie made it clear to him that if 400 was not delivered in time for the beginning of the North Atlantic summer season in May 1911, they would face a defeat from Cunard from which they might not recover.
For a decade, Andrews had been buying steel from David Colville & Sons of the Clyde River valley in Scotland. Harland and Wolff orders accounted for half of Colville’s production. Andrews had studied the evolution of iron and steel as diligently as a surgeon learned anatomy. Ancient fire pits with traces of slag revealed that people had been making iron on the Clyde River for a millennium. But steel—an alloy hardened by precisely reducing the amount of carbon and other impurities in raw iron—had been flowing from the furnaces in industrial quantities for only fifty years.
In 1855, Henry Bessemer had invented a way to make steel by blowing air through molten iron in an oval metal container lined with clay. He called it a converter. As the air passed through the molten iron, carbon molecules bonded with oxygen molecules to form carbon monoxide, which burned away at the top of the converter. Silicon, manganese, and other heavy impurities bonded with the oxygen to form slag, most of which settled to the bottom. The amount of air Bessemer blew through his converter regulated the amount of carbon and other impurities, so he could produce steel in varying grades of hardness and flexibility.
Andrews specified the same grade of steel for 400 and 401 that he had been using in big ships for fifteen years. This especially hard alloy was what he’d built Teutonic and Majestic with. The yard workers called it “battleship steel.”
The steel for 400’s keel arrived from Liverpool on a blustery day at the end of November. A gang of men under two bosses unloaded the bars and beams from the freighter with steam windlasses, guided them onto single-
horse carts with flat, wooden beds, then clucked and whipped the horses back to the slipway over a log road laid over the muck. With direction from the bosses who consulted sheets of plans, they heaved the steel off the cart at approximately the place each would fit into the keel box and bottom, and went back for another load.
On December 16, 1908, Andrews and a half dozen men from the drawing office stood on the spot where the bow of Hull No. 400 would rise, watching a gang align a section of keel bar on the blocks running down the center of the slipway. A four-man rivet squad followed them. Riveters were the princes of the slipways. Piles of raw, rusting metal became ships because a four-man squad could drive 200 rivets per eight-hour shift. Unlike workers on salary or day wages, each rivet squad was paid for the number of rivets it drove, dividing the money according to its own rules.
Every rivet was a test. The heater boy had to bring it to exactly the right temperature. If it was too cold, the riveters could not seat it. If it was too hot, it would sag or crumble. The catch boy had to fit it into the hole quickly, or the rivet would cool. The lead riveter swung a four-pound sledgehammer to a precise cadence. A fourth man with a larger hammer hit the other end of the rivet. If the lead riveter hit the rivet too soon, it would fly from the hole like a red-hot bullet. Most pairs of hammer men who learned how to hit a rivet perfectly time after time stayed together as long as they worked in the same shipyard.
Andrews was glad to have started the work on the two giant sisters, but every day they were on the slipways meant more things that could go wrong. He had fifty bosses making sure the steel was where it was needed at the right time, and another fifty in the sheds keeping the cutting, punching, and fabrication of the plates, beams, and frames moving. So far, there had been no rumblings of a labor strike, but he was alert to the slightest ripple in the mood of his men.