The Shipbuilding Industry in Belfast 1 9 



Nothing has ciused so great a revolution in modern steam 

 engine practice as the invention of the steam turbine. In itself 

 it is, in its essence, a very old idea, seen in the toy whose 

 invention is attributed to Hero of Alexandria, and (in prin- 

 ciple) found in every windmill, or child's whirling paper wheel. 

 Turbines, then, there have been, and turbines of other patterns 

 there will be in the future, but the man who made the revolution 

 a reality was an Irishman, the Hon. Charles Parsons, of Birr. 

 Nobody had heard of Charles Parsons, outside his own circle, 

 until the Naval Review held at Spithead for the Queen's 

 Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The lane between the warships 

 had been cleared for the Royal Yacht, and no unauthorised 

 craft was free to move within the cleared area. Suddenly an 

 odd lean little boat leaped into view. A couple of torpedo 

 boats, the fastest in the Navy, started to dri\^e off the intruder. 

 The " Turhi7iia "just kept gently speeding up as they piled on 

 fuel, and finally left them standing, racing up the open lines at 

 40 miles per hour, faster by a good ten miles than any man 

 then thought possible. The episode itself did not concern Bel- 

 fast, but it has changed a good deal of Belfast engineering. 

 Messrs. Workman & Clark were the first builders to apply 

 the turbine to a liner of the first class, the " Victorian" 

 while Harland & Wolff were the first to adopt, on a large scale, 

 the combination of reciprocating engine and turbine. 



Turbines driven by high pressure steam run too fast for 

 ordinary marine work, and are not easily adapted to it. More- 

 over, they cannot be reversed, a separate special turbine having 

 to be used for this purpose. But a low pressure turbine can 

 take steam from the exhaust of an ordinary marine engine at an 

 absolute pressure of 9 or 10 lbs. per sq. in., (about 5 or 6 

 lbs. below atmospheric pressure), and can go on developing 

 power from it right down to within half a pound per 

 square inch, about the commercially possible vacuum of a first 

 rate condenser. What Harland & Wolff now do is to fit their 

 ordinary well-tested marine engine of the conventional type, 



