22 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



Upon the occasion of a visit to the galley by the imperial party, all 

 the rowers were at their posts, and immediately, at a signal from the 

 commanding officer, all the oars were in movement with perfect reg- 

 ularity, although the men had received but little drilling. The galley 

 on leaving St. Cloud went down the river towards Neuilly-bridge. 

 Her speed, allowing for that of the current, was five and a half knots 

 an hour. Before reaching the bridge at Neuilly the trireme was 

 turned round by the action of her rudders and the oars on one. side 

 backing water, while the others pulled as before, after which she 

 again ascended the river to St. Cloud. During the passage back the 

 emperor had different experiments made of the action of the different 

 rows of oars, suppressing in succession that of the talamites, the 

 zygites, or the tranites. 



BOAT-BUILDING BY MACHINERY. 



We presume it is tolerably well known that a boat is made of a 

 great variety of pieces of wood, separately sawed and shaped and then 

 put together. Mr. Nathan Thompson, of New York City, has invented 

 a machine, or rather several machines, working together by the per- 

 fection of mechanism and driven rapidly by steam, which cuts, ham- 

 mers, saws, and bolts in rapid succession the component parts of a 

 boat, with a magic-like rapidity. 



Mr. Thompson has been nineteen years in perfecting his machinery, 

 which originally was very elaborate, but is now reduced to thirteen 

 separate machines, which work simultaneously. When the various 

 parts of a boat have been perfected in twelve of the machines, the 

 thirteenth puts them together. This latter is termed by the inven- 

 tor his " patent assembling form." It is in reality the reversed frame- 

 work or shell of a model boat, a kind of boat mould, if one might 

 employ such an expression. It is a frame adapted to receive all the 

 parts of the boat, to hold them together firmly in their proper places, 

 and to retain them there until the easy work of bolting and screwing 

 has been thus expeditiously performed, and the perfected craft is lifted 

 off the " assembling form," and pronounced ready for sea. 



The framework is so arranged that every piece and joint of the 

 boat finds a fitting place upon it, and the craft is thus put together 

 somewhat as the portions of a dissecting map may be combined. The 

 wonderful simplicity of the whole system, and the marvellous perfec- 

 tion of the separate pieces of machinery which carry out the objects, 

 are described as astonishing. For instance, a skilled workman of 

 uncommon energy can make, under the present system, twenty ribs 

 in a day. Mr. Thompson's rib-making machine can be thoroughly 

 explained to the most ordinary field laborer in a few hours ; and the 

 individual thus taken from the spade to be converted into a naval 

 architect can, after six hours' instruction, turn out five hundred ribs as 

 the result of a day's work. The machine which shapes and planes 

 beams, with a convex surface on one side and a concave on the other, 

 exactly corresponding to curves which had been previously deter- 

 mined, and regulated by a process beautifully simple and certain, is, 

 perhaps, at once the most important and the most novel of all the 

 mechanical appliances which the inventor has introduced. A very 



