336 BANQUET. 



Department and deliberately asked them to assign me to the Milwaukee, which was then 

 building on the west coast, and at that time was about to have its machinery fitted. I spent 

 one year in seeing the engines go into the ship and the connections being made, and that was 

 my entire experience during that period of time. Everybody said I was crazy, but I fig- 

 ured it this way : If they would let me go to the Union Iron Works, and spend a year watch- 

 ing the piping going in, the valves going in, the engines going in and Mr. Peabody's boilers 

 going in, at the end of that time I ought to have sense enough to observe enough to take the 

 personnel they gave me and use the brains of those fellows to run that machinery. That is 

 the way I figured it. 



Prior to putting the ship in commission I had to organize the engineering department, 

 and knew absolutely nothing about engineering organization. How did I do it ? I had seven 

 warrant machinists, men who had spent their lives among machinery plants. I asked them 

 to make recommendations, and I was very fortunate. One man brought in a brown sheet 

 of paper with a pencil diagram, showing all the stations of the complete organization. That 

 organization was not all that it should have been, but it was a foundation on which I could 

 start. I took that brown sheet of paper and worked over it for three months. My person- 

 nel was tO' consist of 250 men — it was large for those days. The ship was 35,000 horse-power 

 and had sixteen Babcock and Wilcox boilers. By the time I got through with this three 

 months' study of the plan, I took what I considered the finished product and put it up to 

 seven or eight engineers and asked them to criticise it. They did criticise it, and after they 

 had got through with the criticism, I put the plan intO' effect — I used some of the criticism 

 and some of it I did not, as 1 thought I understood the matter a good deal better than some 

 of those engineers did. 



I went to sea in that ship. At that time we did not know very much about taking care 

 of watertube boilers — we do not know too much about it today, as the Shipping Board is 

 finding out — but I had seen an article in one of the service magazines about taking care of 

 boiler water with chemicals. I did not know anything about taking care of boiler water. I 

 did not think you had to look out for the water, but the metal, and did not think the water 

 had anything to do with it. I read this article, and it seemed like good, sound sense. I saw 

 the warrant officer having charge of the firerooms and told him that we would test the water 

 chemically. He thought I was crazy — he knew I did not know any engineering, but I in- 

 sisted. We had salinometers and I used them for a week. At the end of the week I was in 

 the fireroom, and the men were taking salinometer readings. The salinometer showed that 

 the water was fresh, but I tasted it and the salt in it nearly knocked me down. I took a 

 small bucket and put some chemically pure water in it. This bucket I placed inside a larger 

 bucket in which there was some other water. I set the larger bucket over a fire and brought 

 the water in the inner bucket up to 89.5° C. I then placed five of the hygrometers which 

 were furnished with the salinometers in the water in the inner bucket and they gave me five 

 different readings. One said the water was 4/32 salt, another 3/33, another 3/33, another 

 said it was fresh, and the fifth said it was alcohol, I did not have to be an engineer to de- 



