NEW 20,000 TON TANKERS. 41 
spacing of the transverses and still retain the same arrangement as to plating, etc. The 
frames—that is, the transverses—were made of I-beams and the bulkhead bounding 
bars were of T’s, and there again we had uniformity in shell connection. You can see 
in that particular case, where upwards of 100 shell plates were from the same template 
and where it was possible to punch and stack and use the plates as they came to hand, 
there must be a considerable saving. The flat shear penalized the ship about 6 inches 
on freeboard. 
Tur CHAIRMAN —If there is no further discussion, we will ask Mr. Norton to close. 
Mr. Norton:—Mr. Frear’s remarks as to the size of ships and boilers and the 
other remarks remind me of the story of the old Scotchman who was found by a 
party of tourists sitting on one of the Scottish cliffs gazing out across the Atlantic. 
A young woman of the party spoke to him and said: ‘‘This is a wonderful view you have, 
away across the ocean.” He replied, ‘‘Yes.”’ She said, ‘‘I suppose on clear days you can see 
the shores of America.” He replied, ‘‘ Yes, you can see further than that; on a clear night 
you can see the moon.’’ So it seems to me that many things depend entirely upon the 
point of view and the thing at which one is looking, and I shall not attempt to argue the 
question of whether our ships are the largest, or as to the priority of ideas in the design. 
The paper is intended only as a description of the vessels. 
In connection with the matter of the cargo space, I may say that Mr. Frear is en- 
tirely correct, and this is a matter of compromise in the design. In these particular ships 
we tried to arrange things as we thought would produce the most desirable balance. 
We could have distributed the cargo over a greater length of the ship by increasing the 
wing passage spaces and lowering the upper deck, and in various ways, but we tried to 
make what seemed to us the most desirable balance of all of these features. 
In connection with the matter of straight shear, I may say that we have rather com- 
mitted ourselves to the straight shear on our recent tankers, thereby indicating that the 
preponderance of opinion in our yard is that the straight shear is desirable. I do not 
know that we can state exactly how much economy results, and there is some difference 
of opinion among us as to whether any great amount of economy really does result. 
But in a ship of this size we found that the penalty in freeboard with the straight shear 
was not sufficient to give us any trouble. The fact that all of the main oil-tight bulk- 
heads through the central portion of the ship are exactly alike is of course of some ad- 
vantage, and by making the pump room the same length as a cargo tank, which, as 
Mr. Frear remarked, helps the distribution of the cargo and at the game time gives 
greater symmetry to all of the construction, we believe that we have selected what is 
teally a desirable arrangement of all these features. 
There is one other little point that may be of interest. I do not know whether Mr. 
Frear has had the same experience, but we have had the greatest difficulty in persuading 
the owners, and the owners’ representatives tell us they have had the greatest difficulty 
in persuading their captains, that if there are to be empty tanks in an oil tanker, the 
place to have them is in the middle of the ship. For some reason the captains cannot 
get away from the idea that the place to have empty tanks is at the ends of the ship. 
They seem to be used to seeing an empty space at each end of the ship. So we believe 
that if we had, right in the middle of the ship, right in front of their eyes, an empty space 
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