BY DEMAND FOR INCREASED SAFETY. 39 



With regard to the bulkheads themselves, it is absolutely essential, if you are going to put 

 in bulkheads, to have them do their work, and I think, perhaps, more attention will be paid 

 to the strength of bulkheads in the future than has been paid to this question in the past. 

 There is no use putting in a bulkhead unless it is a real bulkhead. 



Mr. Gatewood mentioned something about wing compartments. I think we should go 

 rather slowly with reference to wing compartments. It is a question in my mind whether 

 a wing compartment is of great value. It forms a second line of defense, but unless there 

 are some means adopted to connect the wing compartment to the corresponding one on the 

 other side of the ship, they may prove a positive danger — -that is, the vessel may lose her 

 transverse stability sufficiently to capsize, so that the longitudinal bulkhead is not, in my 

 opinion, an added means of prevention of sinking, unless it is kept rather close to the ship's 

 side itself. 



Naval Constructor J. G. Tawresey, Member: — Both of these papers are by gen- 

 tlemen who can speak with authority on the subject. There is one rather unusual circum- 

 stance in connection with the preparation of Mr. Dickie's paper, that should make it of special 

 value to the Society; that is that the paper was actually written at sea where the conditions 

 and the limitations, especially the limitations, are very real, very much more evident than on 

 blue prints spread on a draughting board. Mr. Dickie's long experience — a lifetime spent in 

 designing and building ships, both warships and merchant ships — qualifies him to observe 

 these conditions. 



I note that, leaving out some of the details, the broad conclusions in the papers are 

 somewhat identical ; both of the writers seem to take the view that has been taken in the 

 Navy, that the effect should be to make the ship herself safe rather than to depend on boats ; 

 also the methods adopted are practically the only ones that can be adopted, namely, subdivi- 

 sions by bulkheads, double bottoms, and by cellular compartments at the water line. In some 

 ships of the Navy, the small compartments are confined more to the spaces at the sides of 

 the vessel, whereas Mr. Dickie's paper seems to divide the whole space between the decks 

 into small compartments. 



We also note the reappearance of the center-line passage — Mr. Dickie's favorite center- 

 line passage — ^but in this case he moves it higher up. 



The question is: can the usages in commercial practice be modified to make a ship of 

 this character satisfactory to the owners and to make it financially successful? I am 

 rather surprised to find a man who has been so intimately connected with the merchant 

 service proposing to sacrifice, unless he can find some way of using it which does not occur 

 to me, so much space to protect the ship's buoyancy and stability. He has gone quite as 

 far as a naval architect goes in designing a war vessel. 



Naval Constructor D. W. Taylor, Vice-President: — I did not propose to mingle 

 much in this discussion, but in reading Mr. Dickie's paper there was one thing which puzzled 

 me very much. It may be a clerical error. You will observe in his plate he gives the long- 

 itudinal section of the ship, and that deck which slopes down at each end he calls through- 

 out the upper deck. I was aware that in the mysterious systems adopted by classification 

 societies the upper deck is never the highest deck, but did not know that it had got into the 

 hold yet, and I am wondering whether there is not a possibility of some confusion as regards 

 that matter. 



I observe that Mr. Dickie's tendencies run largely to horizontal watertight divisions. 



