will the long grass creep up over our huge new fabricating plants, which have transformed the Delaware into a greater Clyde? Reduced to its lowest terms, the question comes to this will the advantages of standardization and fabrication, in the way of eventual cheapness and rapidity of construction, be sufficient to balance or to overcome the advantages possessed, in any particular trade, by a ship which was specially designed and built, made to order for that trade? When I had asked myself this question, I saw immediately that I could not answer it, and I set out to find someone who could. For several days I went up and down from one to another of the big buildings down near the New York water-front, seeking out the big men of America's merchant marine, and each time I cornered one of them, putting to him my question. There was a remarkable similarity in the replies I received. It required no great taking of stock to discover that for every time I had put my question, I had had the same question put to me. I found the men with whom I talked, the ablest and best-informed shipping men of whom I know, are asking each other the same question, and asking because they, themselves, do not know the answer, and they are too wise and too honest to be afraid to admit they do not know. I even found men in the same office who disagreed with each other as to the answer to this question. One man would argue closely and keenly that the need for specialized ships for special kinds of traffic will always dominate in ocean transport service; that the requirements of different ports, different depths of water, different arrangement of cargo, space for widely different kinds of cargo, will always be too varied to permit of standardization of cargo-carriers on a scale sufficient to make it profitable. And at the opposite desk, perhaps, would be sitting a man equally willing to express his own faith in the success of our gigantic experiment. Finally I decided to take my question from the ship owners to a shipbuilder; a man who himself is building standardized ships. And I went to the president of the Merchants' Shipbuilding Corporation, which has a contract with the Emergency Fleet Corporation to build forty 9,000-ton standardized, fabricated steel freight steamers in a new yard, which the corporation is bringing into existence for the purpose, at Bristol on the Delaware. It may be timely, just here, to tell a little more about these forty freighters, which form no inconsiderable portion of the great experiment, and about the man who is building them. He himself is a naval architect, and it is not so long since he was Naval Constructor R. H. M. Robinson, U. S. N., one of the most brilliant aides of Rear-Admiral Washington L. Capps, when the recent head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation was chief constructor of the Navy. He is the man who built the "Connecticut" and several other ships of our first line of defense; and since he is also the inventor and designer of the famous "basket" type of military mast, with which every American battleship is equipped, and which is unique in the world, it may be said that his ideas are prominently impressed upon our fighting fleet. Incidentally, I went to Mr. Robinson with my questions with trepidation, because I have a vivid recollection of long hours of hard study spent over a book filled with intricate diagrams and terrifying problems labelled, "Naval Construction: A Textbook. By R. H. M. Robinson." But Mr. Robinson is out of the service now, because W. Averill Harriman, son of the great railroad man, exercised some of his inherited insight in observing that the upbuilding of our merchant marine is for this generation what the upbuilding of our railroad system was for the previous one-the biggest and most vital task in sight-and going into the shipbuilding business, selected R. H. M. Robinson for his chief of staff. The ships which Mr. Harriman and Mr. Robinson are building at their two plants at Bristol and Chester, Pa., are a bit different from the others of the Government's program. The others are being built to the Government's plans, and, it is whispered, are in many respects more distinctively emergency ships, designed primarily for quick construction; possibly even justly to be characterized floating steel boxes, rather than ships. But the Harriman standardized ship is none the less a ship, and therefore, perhaps, not unlikely to prove the standardized ship of the future. As now being built, she represents the very latest and best ideas in ship construction. Of course that means nothing directly to our question, because these ideas can be applied also to the made-to-order ship which she will have to meet in after-war competition. Still it is interesting to note that she is to be equipped with Parsons steam turbines, with mechanical reduction gear, and oil-burning water-tube boilers the original plan contemplated Scotch boilers, but a sufficient number could not be obtained to equip the entire fleet, so water-tube. boilers were substituted, although requiring greater skill in handling and firing, and therefore considered less desirable, despite their greater economy and effectiveness in other respects. Moreover, this type of ship is not fabricated —that is, shaped in mills miles away, and assembled on the ways-throughout. Her entire midship section is fabricated, and was designed as simply as possible for this purpose, with few and sweeping curves. But her bow and stern, for the last few feet, are to be built on her on the ways, by skilled shipwrights, quite in the old fashion, though none the less to standard designs. This is Mr. Robinson's compromise in ideas, for the greatest allaround efficiency. Moreover, since it is more difficult to build a fabricated ship with a sheer -that sweeping, graceful curve of the deck line that makes for seaworthiness-he has devised an imitation sheer for his otherwise straight and ungraceful creation, by giving her a poop and forecastle which curve upward from the straight main deck. "What do I think of the future of the stan dardized ship?" said the man responsible for this specimen of the breed, when cornered; "I believe in it. Seems to me that what I am doing would tell you that." "Yes, but this Government program is, after all, an emergency program. The very name of the Government agency which contracted with you for these ships is 'Emergency Fleet Corporation.' What is going to become of the fabricating yards after the emergency is passed?" "Well, of course, I can't tell you what is going to become of the others," said Mr. Robinson, "but speaking of ours, I can assure you that we expect to continue in business after the war, for an indefinite period. As you know, Mr. Harriman has given the best indication possible of his own faith in the future of the standardized ship, because before getting any Government contracts he took over and began enlarging the Chester yard, and secured the land and commenced erecting the Bristol yard, and after the Government program is out of the way we expect to go right on turning out standardized ships. And we expect to be successful at it." "Then here is the real heart of the matter; after the war is over, and the Government program out of the way, are you going to build ships, even standardized ships, to order or will you go right ahead building them and selling them on the open market, precisely as automobiles in standard makes are built and sold? In other words, will the shipping industry after the war revert, even though the ships are fabricated or assembled, instead of being built on the ways, to the made-to-order stage, or will it be permanently transformed into a ready-made business?" "In my opinion, it will do neither. So far as we are concerned, we expect to go ahead with the ready-made ship business. Of course, there will be room on our ships for the purchaser to introduce his own individual ideas, just as the man who buys an automobile can have his own ideas followed in its upholstery and fittings, and so on. But at bottom, each |