ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
In McClure’s Magazine of last May is the following description of the great steamship Oceanic, then in course of construction:— “Ten thousand tons of steel beams and braces and plates, forming a framework one-seventh of a mile in length, and carrying a mass of ponderous machinery of almost equal weight—that is the biggest of ocean steamships, in rough analysis. It is easy to forget that it is a ship. When she is lying at a pier, her vast form towers up like a great building; and her construction is more akin to that of a modern ‘sky-scraper’ than to that of any craft of earlier days. A skeleton of steel girders, rising tier above tier to the height of five stories, is the frame of the Oceanic’s great body; and over this is a skin of steel plates. These plates vary from an inch to an inch and three-eighths in thickness; they weigh above two tons apiece; they were fastened together by the largest riveting machine ever built; and they make the Oceanic the strongest as well as the largest ship of her kind. “She is an ocean city—nothing less—a modern driving, twentieth-century city, teeming with all the occupations that man has devised for himself; an epitome of the continents that she helps to unite. Her population is upward of 2,000 persons. Set up on land, her steel timbers would provide the framework of dwellings for all of them. Her plates would surround the town with a solid wall five feet high and eight miles in length. Her bunkers would supply all the coal required by the community for two years. Her stores would stock all its shops. Her electric-light plant would light all the streets. Her engines would drive machinery sufficient to employ all the inhabitants. What she could do on land she does in more wonderful ways at sea, for there this city must be not only self-contained and self-supporting, but must, in addition propel itself across 500 miles of ocean waste every day, in storm or calm. To do this—to rise superior to all stress of wind or weather or ordinary misfortune—requires not only vast power, but a vast reserve power.”