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AMERICAN GIRLS, LIKE THOSE IN ENGLAND, CARRY LUMBER AS
THOUGH THEY WERE ACCUSTOMED TO DO IT, IN THE MUNITION
PLANTS OF UNCLE SAM

9,000-ton, 11-knot type. General Manager
Piez' commendation of the Merchant Corpo-
ration's experience in shipbuilding was ex-
tended to that possessed by the Submarine
Boat Corporation, the only qualification he
made being that the Submarine Corporation's
work has been done on small vessels.

Again, where both the Hog Island and the

ings. Still, to be freed from the housing problem as a whole is an advantage of exceptional moment when both time and labor are limited to the famine stage. Intermeshed with the question of housing are conditions of sanitation, safety and transportation-all of them. factors bearing directly on the vital problem of the labor turnover in any ship yard. In

terms of mere money-and the phrase is warranted from the attitude the Government has taken towards expenditure in its insistence on speed-housing at Hog Island entails the outlay of $10,000,000, while the estimate for housing at Bristol, in all probability too high, has been $6,000,000. The yard which, like the Submarine Corporation's plant at Newark Bay, could lay its first keels and approximate actual working conditions without calling for help in accommodating its force of workmen, is exceptionally fortunate, both for economy of construction and for expedition of progress.

It is in the Newark Bay, the Bristol and Hog Island yards that the Government of the United States is putting its fortunes of war to the test of fabrication on a scale which, should it fail, may well nigh prove disastrous, and, should it succeed, carries our emergency fleet successfully over the top of Germany's sub

marine barrage. No one can dispute that there are two opinions about it.

J. W. Powell, now vice-president of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company, having contracts to deliver nearly a hundred steel merchant ships to the Government, was formerly a U. S. naval officer attached to the Bureau of Construction and Repairs and has served as an executive at Cramps' great ship yard in Philadelphia, and as president of the Fore River Company at Quincy, Mass. The Emergency Fleet Corporation, Mr. Powell declared, has tackled the biggest job that exists in the world to-day at a period when labor employed in shipbuilding is 60 per cent less efficient than it was before the war began. As for the system of fabrication, ships can be fabricated only up to a certain stage; after that, Mr. Powell contends, they must be completed in the regular old shipbuilding fashion. And when

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SOME OF THE 20,000 MEN WANTED, WHO ARE ENROLLING TO BUILD SHIPS FOR UNITED STATES

the ends of the vessel come to be fitted, they will not fit. While the programme of the fabricated ship is by no means doomed, he is certain that it must encounter several months of unavoidable delay.

Per contra, Rear Admiral Bowles, who recently took charge of the Hog Island yard as representing the owning Emergency Fleet Corporation, has stated that he regards the fabricated ship as being built quite as substantially as a ship built in the old way, and he looks upon the fabricating processes as the great, inspiring thing of the programme we have undertaken.

In view of such contradictory opinions, and of the magnitude of the results attending the issue of the undertaking, a resume of the brief but lucid explanation of the difference between fabricated ships and vessels of ordinary construction, made by Rear Admiral Bowles to the Senate Committee, is well worth the attention of shipping men as well as lay readers.

The idea that the fabricated ship originated in Great Britain is erroneous; none are building there. None are building anywhere outside of the United States. The fabricating process appears to be distinctively an American conception-so American that, in the minds of our people, it has been growing for the past four or five years, while it remained for our dire emergency to demand that it be put in practice.

In the ordinary construction of vessels the plates and shapes are delivered in the ship yard as they come from the mill. The vessel having been laid down in the mold loft, the templates are made and the frames of the vessel are bent and adjusted to the templates, and so prepared for erection on the building slip. The plates of the vessel are templated in the mold loft and are then sheared in the shops. Their edges and butts are planed; the rivet holes are laid off from the actual template and punched under the individual punching machine in the ship yard. They are then erected, placed and riveted.

Now, in the fabricated ship, the design has been made to eliminate curvature wherever it

can be eliminated; that is, throughout the length of the ship a uniform section is maintained as long as possible. The sides of the ship are practically flat; the bottom is flat; the curvature of the bilge is made as short as it can well be. The ship has no shear; she does not rise forward and aft; the deck, having no crown, is flat.

Under these circumstances of construction it is possible, after the ship is laid down in the mold loft, to take the templates to structural shops that are accustomed to fabricating steel for the construction of buildings and bridges. It is there practicable to punch all the rivet holes in the plates and the shapes, and to template them in portions as large as can be transported on a railway car, all riveted together. When this material comes to the ship yard, it comes in pieces that are ready to be installed in the ship and require riveting only where connections are made to the piece adjoining.

It constitutes a means whereby it becomes possible to utilize the skill of the workers, together with the machinery, in the fabricating shops of the country's bridge builders. An additional class of labor, numerous and highly expert, is enlisted for the gigantic shipbuilding programme; the structure of the ships is simplified; the speed of construction should be increased materially.

It is the function of the three great fabricated ship yards-at Newark Bay, Bristol and Hog Island, estimated at their inception to cost $58,000,000-to make the fabrication scheme work; and on its workableness depend 2,941,000 tons of shipping out of the total of 8,246,308 tons planned, or more than 351⁄2 per cent. That is nearly twice as much tonnage as the 1,551,900 tons of wood and composite ships contracted for. It is only a little less. than the 3,056,008 tons of steel ships that have been requisitioned by the Government. And it amounts to 81 per cent of all the steel ships for which the Emergency Fleet Corporation has contracted as being indispensable to the winning of the war. No burden of responsibility for American victory has been assumed that is greater than this.

In any general review of the emergency fleet programme, diverging opinions of authorities must be reckoned with. The Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company's expert, Mr. Powell, was inexorable in decrying every tendency to optimism.

"I am sure," he averred, "that with the inevitable handicaps during 1918, it will be a very wonderful performance if the country turns out 3,000,000 tons of shipping."

In the summary of progress, reported to the Senate Committee on Commerce through Rear Admiral Bowles by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the flat statement was made that "from a careful review of the situation we anticipate a production of 4,000,000 tons of steel ships by this corporation during the year 1918. In addition, there will be produced about 1,390,000 tons of wood and composite vessels."

The discrepancy between Mr. Powell's "very wonderful performance" of 3,000,000 tons and the Emergency Fleet Corporation's confident anticipation of 5,390,000 tons, for the current year, amounts to very nearly 80 per cent of the pessimistic and to a trifle more than 44 per cent of the optimistic forecast. Well might Senator Johnson, of California, exclaim when Mr. Powell emphasized his estimate:

"The situation you describe is extremely alarming."

It should be if, in casting up the account to the date when last an itemized report was made upon progress-which harks back to December 1-no evidence appeared of recorded accomplishment and no credit was given for work performed upon the 74 wholly new shipyards which, once they shall have become active, can be depended on for enormous output before the year 1918 draws to its close.

But, even then, four of the contract vessels had been launched. On November 24 an 8,800-ton steel ship took the water at the Skinner & Eddy yard. On December 15 another, of similar tonnage, was launched at Los Angeles. At Grays Harbor a 3,500-ton wooden ship went down the ways on December 1; and

at the Knise-Banks yard, on December 15, another 3,500-ton wooden ship was launched.

Of the 379 wood ships under contract, keels had been laid for 166, which meant that 44 per cent of the hulls were then under construction. Out of the 166 keels laid, 130 were in yards which, prior to April 17, 1917, did not exist. Indeed, in the 72 contracts that were let for wood ships it was necessary to construct entirely new yards in 51 instances. The actual wood-hull construction work done represented 9 per cent of the entire programme of 379 hulls, totaling 1,344,900 deadweight tons. But the percentage applies to the hulls alone in the majority of the contracts and leaves uncredited the work done on designs, on materials ordered or received, and on the machinery equipment.

Keels for

In the field of composite ships four contracts, totaling 58 vessels, whose deadweight tonnage was 207,000, had been let. 12 of the ships were laid and, in every case, the contracts were for the completed vessel. On that basis of estimate, the work performed represented 20 per cent of the whole programme. The four contracts included three under which it was necessary to build the ship yards to carry them out. In the percentage of progress recorded, the building of the yards was not included, although that portion of the work went on simultaneously with the preparation of the plans for the ships. To-day, the three new yards are builded and are operating in the increased production of ships.

For the contract steel ship production, 32 contracts had been placed; and of those, 20 went to newly organized yards. With no credit whatever allotted for the truly enormous volume of work performed in the preparation of those 20 new shipyards, keels had been laid, by December 1, for 11 steel vessels and the total amount of work done on hulls and machinery represented 4 per cent of the contract steel ship programme of 3,638,400 tons. February 8 there were 14 keels unofficially reported as laid in the contract steel yards; but the actual number, on that date, may have been greater.

By

In the requisitioned vessels, the total deadweight tonnage requisitioned was 3,056,008, of which, as of date November 30, there had been 1,140,581 tons completed. Out of the 431 keels requisitioned, 158 had been laid prior to the requisition order of August 3; 101 were laid between that date and November 30, and 172 remained to be laid after November 30. Meanwhile, 80 of the requisitioned vessels had been launched.

Since the submission of the Emergency Fleet Corporation's detailed report, the concrete ship has made its debut as a factor— albeit on a tentative scale-in the plans of the Shipping Board for the immediate future. Contracts were let, on February 2, to the Ferror Concrete Shipbuilding Corporation, of Redondo Beach, Cal., for 10 concrete vessels of 3,500 tons each. The first of the ten is to be delivered to the Shipping Board within six months of the making of the contract, and the nine remaining are to be delivered within one year.

Patents were recently granted to the Ferror Company for a new plan of ship construction in concrete under which a material gain in speed is said to be attainable.

So here we are, rather anxiously, yet hopefully, on the knees of the gods of war, to be helped, if at all, only by our own wits and such elbow grease as we are patriotic enough to give to our unprecedented task.

And, in spite of deficiencies of wood supply

-which have been disturbing-and of transportation-which have been dismaying—it all comes down to the wit and the elbow grease. A critic like Mr. Powell may say of the labor that furnishes the elbow grease that the ship yards are getting shoemakers, stonecutters, piano tuners-everything but shipbuilders. The management of the Emergency Fleet Corporation is looking to its great trade training schools to develop the talent that shall convert those very shoemakers, stonecutters and piano tuners into mechanics efficient in the shipbuilding crafts to which their native aptitudes assign them. The men in the management of the Fleet Corporation, and the men who are operating the yards under their direction, may have been arraigned for initial errors of judgment to which, in not a few instances characterized by the candor evidencing sincerity, they have pleaded guilty. But they have not made the same mistakes twice; and every day that has passed, in the course of this tremendous onslaught of ours against the apparently impossible, seems to have afforded them a closer, a surer grip upon conditions which, in their origin, could have produced nothing short of countless dubieties and at least some misconceptions.

"But it is well to seek perfection. If you were less self-critical, you would be less efficient. Your ships will be ready."

Probably Captain Tardieu knows.

Sweet is the shade of the cocoanut glade, and the scent of the mango grove,

And sweet are the sands at the fall o' the moon with the sound of the voices we love, But sweeter, O Brother, the kiss of the spray and the dance of the wild foam's glee: Row, brothers, row to the blue of the verge where the low sky mates with the sea.

SAROJINI NAIDU, in "Caromandel Fishers."

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