G.—ENGINEERING. 117 
decision, taken early in 1905, to fit turbines in the large Cunarders 
Lusitania and Mauretania, built by Messrs. John Brown and Messrs. Swan 
& Hunter respectively, was a very bold and momentous one fully justified 
by the success of these vessels ; it was a tremendous step to take from the 
smaller vessels already built and tried to these leviathans crossing the 
_ stormy Atlantic. In 1905 the Admiralty also decided on the general 
introduction of turbines in all classes of warships. 
The earlier turbines were all fitted as direct drives and hence to vessels 
of fairly high speed, when the revolutions were not too low to spoil the 
efficiency of the turbine nor so high as to spoil the efficiency of the propeller. 
But from the first it was felt that some means of gearing down the propellers 
was absolutely necessary; Sir Charles Parsons’ conversion of the 
Vespasian in 1909 from reciprocating to geared turbine gave the answer 
required and marked another new era. This was quickly followed by the 
partial gearing of the Badger and Beaver T.B.D.s for the Royal Navy, 
and the complete gearing of the Normannia and Hantonia for the 
South-Western Railway Company’s Southampton-Havre services, so well 
known in this district, built under the advice and to the design of Sir 
John Biles by the Fairfield Company. These were early examples of 
many single-reduction gears, but for the slower cargo-vessels still greater 
reduction of propeller revolutions was required and double-reduction 
gears were introduced, thus enabling the advantages and economy of the 
turbine to be available to owners of all kinds of vessels. Other forms of 
gearing have been used—Fottinger hydraulic in Germany and electric 
dynamo to motor reduction principally in America, though some have been 
fitted to vessels built in this country by Messrs. Cammell Laird for the 
United Fruit Co. 
As we are to have a paper from Mr. Stanley 8. Cook, a colleague of 
Sir Charles Parsons, dealing with the turbine and its auxiliary machinery, 
I need say no more, but I would like to emphasise one point of ad- 
vantage of the turbine over the reciprocating engine. In the latter, 
racing of the engines at sea is a trouble which is practically absent in 
turbines. 
In 1897 Dr. Diesel began developing his internal-combustion engine, 
depending for the ignition of the charge of heavy oil not on electric sparks, 
hot tubes, or bulbs, but on the heat generated by compressing the air 
charge. It took some considerable time to get over the initial mechanical 
difficulties, and to decide the necessary scantlings and quality of the 
material to be used in the cylinders and other parts, and there were some 
regrettable accidents due to explosion of cylinders. 
I would draw attention to the immense developments which 
have taken place in this direction. Initially the greatest progress was 
made with this type of engine on the Continent. My information is 
that the first successful ocean-going motor-ship was the Vulcanus, built 
“in 1911 by Werkspoor of Amsterdam for the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum 
Oil Co., while the first completed in this country was the Jutlandia, 
built in 1912 by Barclay, Curle & Co. 
While this country may have been slow at first in taking up the Diesel, 
she cannot now be blamed for lack of interest and initiative, and while 
_ many of the builders of this type are licensees of foreign patentees, certain 
_ types—such, for example, as the Doxford and the Cammell Laird-Fullagar 
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