3o8 : The Atlantic 



was about loo feet in length. The first turbines he provided spun pro- 

 pellers at a rate of 16,000 revolutions per minute. This only drove the 

 ship at about nineteen knots, which was regarded by Parsons as a fail- 

 ure. He made a study of the way in which propellers were losing their 

 grip on the water and produced as a by-product one of the first sci- 

 entific papers on cavitation. By 1896 he had a new set of turbines in 

 the Turbinia. These drove three shafts and each shaft had on it three 

 propellers. The boilers provided steam pressure at 210 pounds per 

 square inch. All of Parsons' work on this vessel had been confidential 

 and secret. 



His opportunity came in 1897 when Queen Victoria was celebrating 

 her diamond jubilee and when vessels of the British Navy and visitors 

 from many other nations were assembled in the waters o£E Cowes in 

 the Isle of Wight. Parsons had smuggled his ship into this port and 

 when all the vessels were lining up for the review the Turbinia sud- 

 denly appeared on the course. At first she was regarded as an insig- 

 nificant little nuisance, then she got under way, eluding and outdis- 

 tancing all patrol vessels. She flashed up the line of the parade at the 

 unheard-of speed of thirty-four and a half knots, the equivalent of 

 approximately forty miles per hour. 



Many years later I stood in a Paris apartment looking at a model of 

 the Turbinia while Parsons explained some of her technical features 

 to me. I ventured to remark on the complexity of his problems and 

 the enormous cost involved in their solution, and to suggest that he 

 might have begun with a simpler demonstration. 



He said it would probably have cost more in the long run. "Besides, 

 my boy, if you believe in a principle never damage it with a poor 

 expression, you must go the whole way. I had to startle people." 



He succeeded. Among other things he startled the British Navy into 

 an order for two turbine destroyers, the Viper and Cobra, in their day 

 the fastest ships in the world. By 1904 the Allen Line had built two 

 turbine Hners, the Victorian and the Virginian. The Virginian could 

 make twenty knots, which was about as fast as the best hour's sailing 

 of the Sovereign of the Seas. The Virginians advantage was that she 

 could hold this pace hour after hour regardless of the wind, and she 

 succeeded in doing it hour after hour and year after year at least until 

 1929. Some of my readers will remember her under her new name, 

 the Drottningholm of the Swedish American Line. 



So in the nineteenth century the steam engine grew up and went 

 to sea. It began as a baby — heavy but puny — its costly and feeble 



