CHAPTER XV 



THE MAN WHO SPEEDED UP TRAVEL BY SEA 



Sir Charles Parsons and the Turbine 



THE first man who ever described the surface of the 

 moon was the third Lord Rosse, famous as the 

 builder of the first really large telescope. It 

 weighed twelve tons and was mounted in the park at 

 Parsonstown at a cost of no less than thirty thousand 

 pounds. That was more than eighty years ago. 



Lord Rosse was much more than an astronomer. In 

 1854, when the Crimean War was raging, he proposed 

 that the British Admiralty should build ironclad ships. 

 He suggested a steamer of about fifteen hundred tons, 

 covered with four inches of iron. This vessel was to have 

 no bulwarks and no funnel, and her sides were to be only 

 fourteen inches above the water. Such a ship, he said, 

 could sink an opponent with one blow of her cutwater. 

 In fact, he planned a monitor years before the first of such 

 vessels was actually built. 



The children of such a man had every chance to learn 

 engineering ; one of them at least, the youngest son and 

 the subject of this chapter, has become world-famous 

 as the inventor of the Parsons steam turbine. When 

 he was only ten years old Charles Parsons was already 

 making small working models of cars and boats. He even 

 made a submarine. A little later, in his father's work- 

 shop, he constructed an air-gun. Not a toy, for he says 

 that he well remembers his delight at shooting a rabbit 

 with it. 



His next effort was a sounding-machine. This con- 

 sisted of a glass tube closed at the bottom and with a cork 



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