i88 AN ELECTRICALLY PROPELLED 



of excursion vessels rather than that of the special method of propelling them, and 

 I am not at all familiar with the particular needs in this case, but there are a few 

 ideas which suggest themselves to an outsider in the course of the remarks which 

 have been made on this paper. Anybody who has traveled around the world knows 

 that every locality has its own kind of boats, and nobody has found a way of making 

 the people of one place use the kind of boat which the people of another place have 

 devised, and there is no boat anywhere in the world that is more characteristic 

 of its locality than the side-wheel beam-engine steamer as seen in New York Harbor. 

 When this subject comes up for discussion, it is interesting to hear the views of the 

 men who know that boat and know the business of building her and running her. 

 But in engineering we must look at all sides of the case, and while marine architec- 

 ture in certain localities is very conservative, engineering is essentially progressive 

 and always changing. 



Now, what has been said at great length about the safety of a wooden or iron 

 vessel is obvious to everybody. We all know that many things spoken of as dan- 

 gerous are really safe as compared with the risks of our ordinary lives, but we want 

 to consider that people go a long way to make a small improvement; they do it as 

 a matter of sentiment and principle. I suppose that the New Haven Railroad 

 carries about one milUon passengers a day, and I do not remember ever having 

 heard of one of them being burned alive, and yet they go to steel cars, and a steel 

 car is just as difficult a thing and just as inconvenient a thing to make as a steel 

 superstructure on a boat. Furthermore, we cannot say how simple or effective 

 the steel superstructure might be made by careful study, and I think the effort to 

 make such study ought to be treated with due respect. 



As to the general type of the boats and their method of propulsion, Mr. Don- 

 nelly's statements as to the inadequate design of existing boats of this class, while 

 they may be subject to criticism in regard to detail, are in the main certainly true. 

 Some of the large side-wheelers on the Hudson are using 40 pounds steam pressure 

 and types of engines which, from the modern standpoint, are regarded as very crude, 

 but the defence of them is that they are thoroughly practicable and are built very 

 cheaply and can be operated very cheaply. The reason they are built cheaply is 

 largely, I think, that they are so well understood and standardized. On account 

 of these low speeds these engines are quite heavy, and when you study them point 

 by point there is a good deal of work on them. 



Comparing the methods of propulsion proposed in this case, we must consider 

 that the turbine, the high-speed turbine, such as Mr. Donnelly proposes to use in 

 this case, is a device far simpler than the reciprocating engine of any type, and tur- 

 bines which would propel this vessel are not materially larger than our president's 

 desk, and are of such proportions that two or three men could lift the top off them. 

 They only have two wheels with two rows of buckets on each wheel, and with any 

 one row of these four rows of buckets the ship could be run at half speed. The 

 shafts are very large in diameter and there is nothing to the mechanism but two 

 bearings. Such a device is very simple to repair and it requires practically no 

 expense to operate such a device. 



