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Engineering Art: Cross Sections of the HMS Olympic (1909) and HMS Mauretania (1906)

ITEMS: (1)  Full-page, 15x10 inch cross section frm the 14 August 1909 issue of The Illustrated London News featuring the Olympia. Very good condition.  $50 

(2) Full-page, 14x9 inch cross section of the HMS Mauretania.  1907.  Good condition. $50

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1382

"...And a Gymnasium."

Resting comfortably in-between this blog's Cross Sections and Looking-At-Things-Straight-On series is this straight-on cross section of the midship section of the HMS Olympic.

This cross section appeared in the 14 August 1909 issue of The Illustrated London News, just six months or so after she was laid down. The Olympic was finished in 1911 and sailed through until 1935, a considerably much-longer career than her two sister ships, the Titanic and the Britannic.  The Titanic of course was launched in 1911 and went down on 12 April 1912; the Britannic lasted a little longer, though this ship never really had much of a career, launched just before the beginning of WWI and then used immediately as a hospital ship, striking and being sunk by a mine in 1916.  The three ships were beasts, about 882 feet long and about 53,000 tons displacement. The viewer certainly gets a good idea of the scope of the ship from this image.  

Third class looks pretty rustic, a no-bones approach to ocean travel, stuffed into the space next to the squash courts and under the gym. 

Next comes the HMS Mauretania, again form The Illustrated London News right at the time of its record-setting speed attempt to cross the Atlantic in November 1907.  The ship was long (almost 800 feet) and about the fastest ocean-going ship in the world,. crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic in 12 days.

 

The Display of Information: Shoes and Children and Naval Strength

ITEMS:  (1)  "The Price of Armed Peace" (described below), Illustrated London News, 14 x 10 inches, printed 21 August 1909.  Full page illustration.  Good condition.  $50   (2)  Ships are a Nation's Shoes--We Need Shoes.  National Marine League of the United States, 1934.  3 leaves, 7x5 inches.  $35

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1380

It is a hallmark in displaying ideas and information that brevity, design and clarity carry the day.  For this reason we have the Pie Chart (happily invented by a very ingenious and polymathic idea-experimenter in the form of William Playfair in 1801¹), and not the Enormous Cake Chart, which had been baked previously for hundreds of years in the ovens of Raymond Llull2 (and those he influenced) and then to a lesser degree by Giordano Bruno. The entwined, overlapping combinatorial diagrams that were initiated by these folks didn't really start to get straightened out until the ideas were in the hands of Leibniz and Euler, and then prettily and usefully, finally, by Playfair.  It was through the 19th century that the pie chart began it great ascent in the hands of Guerry and Lalanne and Nigthengale, and then on to Jevons, and then on into modernity.  But the thing that made these contributions significant was the amount of information they were able to easily and cogently display.

The pie chart could definitely have been used in these two displays, below--the information was certainly simple enough, and the comparisons easy.  But there was a certain genius to displaying the data using children and shoes that enabled the information to ride along with its viewer deeper into the future than if it had simply been encrusted in circles.

For example, in the first image, a full-page illustration from The Illustrated London News for 21 August 1909, "The Price of Armed Peace, the Cost of the World's Great Navies", displays the size of expenditure on leading navies in terms of children's toy boats.  I am positive that the lasting image here would've been the size of the German toy gunboat compared to the dreadnaught of Great Britain.  Likewise the ships/shoes comparison of the next image, published by the National Marine League of the United States,  a sort of PAC for the merchant marine.  They simply state that ships are the nation's shoes, then interlace a graphic showing the paltry showing of American ship tonnage compared to 10 other leading maritime nations, and then smply state that "we need shoes".  The graphical display shows vividly that the United States' total ship tonnage was tiny--eleventh of eleven powers--but the bit that would no doubt stay in the heads of any readers was the shoe part, which would then be associated with the diagram, which on the face of it was a little muddled and not clear.  This was a smart sales job, delivering a brisk message that would not be befuddled by numbers--it wasn't that the U.S. ranked 11th in total maritime tonnage against other leading powers, it was that we needed shoes. 

Notes

1.  Playfair wrote his Statistical Breviary in London in 1801. 

2.  For example in his logic machines as seen in the Ars Magna.

 

Children, Artillery and the Geometry of Cannon Fire, 1812

ITEM: "Shipbuilding", enraved plate from Rees' Encyclopedia, 1812. 10x8 inches. Very good condition. $45

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1366

There were many integral components to firing a cannon on a ship, not the least of which were the Powder Boys, the small, young, semi-strong kids who would run the gunpowder from a below-decks armory to whatever gun deck was needed.  It was a relatively simple procedure, filling up a longish tube (cannon  derived from the Italian  cannone--or large tube--which came from the Latin canna from the Greek  kannē , meaning something like a reed or any similar hollow thing) with gunpowder and then cannonball/shot and then wad, then causing the gunpowder/propellant to ignite and throw the ball.  Basically, that was it, though you needed to maintain the cannon, aim it, and so on (don't forget to first swab the bore from unexploded gunpowder so you don't blow things up!).

The (first)  image above of found modernist/semi-dadaist artwork comes form 1812 and was found in Rees'¹ Encyclopedic Dictionary from the article on "Shipbuilidng"   and illustrates the ways in which the stern of a ship can be outfitted with cannons--actually, the sterns of the HMS Bodiceae (28 18-pounders)  and HMS Hamadryad  (36 guns). Also by this time cannons had been carried on naval ships for nearly four hundred years, while the first cannons appeared on the ground in Europe another few hundred years before that. 

 

In the third detail (below) we see the coverage of the four cannons placed in the stern of the Bodicae, mainly pointing out its weaknesses, showing the undefended arc, which comprises about 1/3, or about 60 degrees of the defensive posture.  The Hamadryad on the other hand shows 100% coverage of the 180+ degrees of attack possibilities shown, along wioth secondary and teriary areas of fire coverage covered by mor ethan one gun.

A fine,tiny detail from the full engraved sheet:

And the full sheet, available at our blog bookstore:

 

This is pretty much all that was needed to fire a cannon, except the men of course.

NOTES:

1.   I've written about before here, just enter "Rees" in the google box and there will be a dozen or so other posts.

Technical Drawing: an Early, Convict-Powered, Revolving Turret Ship

ITEM:  engraved sheet from The Engineer, 30  October 1874, 15 x 10 inches.  Good condition. $50  As follows:

This image (from the Illustrated London News for April 26 1871) shows a plan of the top floor of a revolving battery designed by M. Baltard in 1831.  This idea is probably ancient, though it really only had major technological legs by the 19th century. Even though Baltard is given some fair credit for the modern rediscovery of the revolving turret--and in this short article he is given premier status--there were earlier engineers at work before him.  For example, in the earliest part of the 19th century Col. John Stevens designed a saucer-shaped floating battery that was supposed to be able to fire in any direction; T.R. Timbly--slightly after Baltard--applied in the U.S. Patent Office in June 1843 for a device he called a "metallic revolving fort".  Then came the great John Ericsson--very long on accomplishments but very short now in modern memory, he is also one of those memorialized men in marble in DC for whom people have almost no modern recognition--who in 1854 produced an "impregnable battery revolving cupola", which led to his great innovation on the Monitor.  And as we recall, the Monitor's defeat of the Merrimack in Hampton Roads in 1861spelled the coming end of the wooden ship of the line--metal ships with mounted revolving turrets fore and aft would prove entirely too far superior to the 19th century wooden ship.

What we are seeing in the first engraving is the top floor of a two-story fortification--roof removed--showing the floor plan of the battery.  The walls and roof were stationary; the floor was not.  The two cannons were located on a revolving floor and were moved by turning the floor (basically) to one of the open firing windows (embrasures) a detail of which is above. When the barrel of the canon was pulled out of this opening, it was turned closed to prevent any fire coming into the fort.

The engraving below shows a cross-section of the two-turret land structure.

 

The engraving below shows the idea of the land fortification shipboard, one revolving turret fore and aft. It turns out that the engine for the vessel was human, the engineer calling for "either" convicts (forcats) or soldiers to row to move and position the boat

 

And a detail we can clearly see the long sweep oars:

And the turrets on the ship, the pre-Monitor-style ship:

I assume that the boat was being used for coastal or harbor defense, or at least something very close to land, and was really more a floating, positioning battery than a boat.  Seems to me though that after everything was said and done, after all the work was accomplished and the boat built, that making the whole thing dependent on sticks of wood was a fatal flaw.