FIREPROOF PASSENGER STEAMER. 183 



We have found in many cases that the beam-engine paddle-boat is best suited, 

 and I will request President Taylor to tell you of a comparison that he made some 

 syears ago between the twin-screw triple-expansion steamer Sandy Hook or Mon- 

 mouth and the Hudson River Day Line steamer New York, a single-cylinder beam- 

 engine boat. 



I do not think Mr. Donnelly is quite fair, either to the designers, the builders, 

 or the public, in selecting the steamer Grand Republic as a typical passenger excur- 

 sion boat of the type in use to-day. She is a very old wooden boat, very few of 

 which, if any, are now built, her boilers are down in the hold and are surrounded 

 everywhere by wood-work, and there is always a greater possibiUty of fire under 

 such conditions. The modern passenger boats are almost universally built of steel, 

 a steel deck is placed over the boilers, even if it is not for the entire length of the 

 vessel, and the boilers and machinery are encased in a heavy steel casing, which runs 

 from the main deck up through and above the topmost deck, thus encasing the boiler 

 and machinery entirely in steel and minimizing the danger of fire from same. That 

 we might reasonably consider a step in the advance of progression, as it greatly 

 reduces the chance of fire. 



Electricity, of course, is another element that had added to the safety of modern 

 boats with their great wooden superstructure. 



The records which Mr. Andrew Fletcher has just read, and which records are a 

 statement of facts, show that the danger of the traveUng public is to-day very small, 

 and we are apparently safer on the present passenger steamers than we would be 

 in our own homes, and we might almost include the fireproof building. To my 

 mind there is no place wherein we run a greater risk of danger from fire than we do 

 in the modern American basement or other three, four or five-story private house, 

 such as we have particularly in the city of New York. I think you will find, if the 

 records are searched, that the loss of life due to fires in private residences, when they 

 do occur, and I refer to the residences of people of means, is far greater in proportion 

 to the number of people involved than even on the old wooden steamboats. I 

 must, however, agree that these large boats with their immense superstructure 

 entirely of wood do look dangerous, and I have often looked at boats of this character 

 and wondered what would happen if a fire really got started. We, of course, had 

 an illustration in the case of the General Slocum. I happen to know about that 

 particular vessel, and I think she burned a little more rapidly than most wooden 

 boats, from the fact that when she first came out, her entire joiner work, instead of 

 being painted, was shellacked and varnished, and then year after year shellac and 

 varnish were added, and finally, after many years, she was painted. This boat was 

 a great open-deck structure, intended for carrying passengers during the summer 

 months, and was very much like a large loft building, in which there were no par- 

 titions. The hull of the boat was of wood and there was every chance for the flame 

 to make great headway with very little hope of stopping a conflagration, should 

 the fire once get well started. 



In the Sound and Hudson River night boats there are thermostats placed in 



