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1899.] MARINE REVIEW. 13 The total number of engineers was so large that it was utterly impossible to have even a majority of them skilled men; but a number of talented young engineers came into the service, and the profession generally has learned to recognize their ability from the fact that in the years since the close of the war a large proportion of the leaders in mechanical engineer- ing in Our country are men who were naval engineers during the war. The first president of this society (Dr. Thurston), as well as the second (Dr. Leavitt), were naval engineers, and so was that other able man, Charles E. Emery, now gone to his long rest. William Everett, who became famous in connection with the laying of the first Atlantic cable, was another, and so was George Westinghouse, whose wonderful achieve- ments, both as an inventor and as the creator of great industrial works, entitle him to be called the Napoleon of industrial engineering. Theo- dore Cooper, the great bridge engineer, and Lay, the inventor of the automobile torpedo, were naval engineers during the war. We must also call attention in passing to Chief Engineers Alban C. Stimers and Isaac Newton, who brought the original Monitor down to Hampton Roads and enabled her to whip the Merrimac. But for their ability and inde- fatigable labors the results would have been very different. We might also recite case after case of gallantry and daring where vessels were saved by the skill of the engineers; where they lost their lives through attention to duty, or where they distinguished themselves specially in other ways, but time will not permit us to dwell upon these features. ; 3] During, all the period which we have thus far considered, the en- gineers, for the navy had, obtained their education outside of naval influ- ence; but.in.1866,a class of young men was ordered to the naval acad- emy to be trained as.engineers in a naval atmosphere. A number of _these gentlemen are still in the service, and were chief engineers: of our large vessels during the recent war with Spain. In 1871 engineer cadets were appointed for the naval.academy, the course being for two years only, until in 1874 a class was appointed whose course was to be for four years. These young men were appointed by competitive examination open to the whole country, and as the course became 'better known the - numbers who came to compete increased, and their attainments became so high that an unusually able class of young men was obtained as cadet engineers. Unfortunately for the service, congress was seized with one of its periodical fits of retrenchment, and as no patronage was affected by abolishing the cadet engineer system, the separate course for engineers was wiped out in 1882, and tor a time engineering education dropped out of the curriculum at the Naval Academy. It is probably safe to say that the young men graduated from the Naval Academy under the cadet engineering system presented a higher average ability than any equal number of young men from any of our great technical schools; indeed, so. great was their ability that the service was unable to retain them, but the country has profited from the training they received by their work in civil life. A. number are filling positions as professors of mechanical engineering in our leading colleges; a number are consulting engineers of the highest rank, and several are engaged in the manage- ment of our large manufacturing enterprises--one (whv is a vice-presi- dent of this society) being the general manager of one of the largest elec- tric companies in the world. It is a peculiar pleasure to me to bear tribute to the talents of these young men, because a great many of them have served as my assistants in the bureau of steam engineering, and while I am naturally filled with regret that the navy should lose their services, I also feel proud that my own judgment in estimating their ability should be so thoroughly confirmed by the esteem in which they are held by engineers outside of the navy. I would not have it supposed from my remarks about those who have left the service that they took all the ability with them. Some of the most useful and accomplished officers, graduates and non-graduates, are still in the service, which I trust will be able to retain them. In this connection, too, it is only right that I should bear testimony to the worth of the men who, at the naval academy, trained these young engineers. One of the earliest of the instructors was Dr. Thurston, the first president of this society, whose fame as an educator is world wide; but there were others who, while not so well known, nevertheless did splendid work. Just as I re- marked at an earlier point about the work of Mr. Haswell and others as pioneers, so it was with these early instructors in engineering at the naval academy, who had practically no text-books, and who were com- pelled, in the professional part of the instruction, to depend almost en- tirely on their own experience; further than this, they had nothing to guide them in the way of a curriculum, and they were compelled to es- tablish one tentatively and develop it as experience dictated. BEGINNING OF THE '"'NEW NAVY." Curiously enough, just about the time when congress was undoing the splendid engineering. work at the naval academy, the navy depart- - ment itself; was formulating plans for vessels which should be designed along lines so different from those which had preceded that. the, familiar _ epithet applied to them--the "new navy'--is entirely appropriate. The «labors of the first advisory board made available a mass of -information, asa result of which.congress in 1883 authorized the building of the four 'Roach cruisers, which were the beginning of the new navy. | These -vessels, I may say in passing, although: possessing few features of novel- ty, as far as marine engineering in general is concerned, were neverthe- less a marked change from the old wooden ships which had preceded them, and they rendered very valuable service, and are still, with mod- ernized machinery, very satisfactory and useful vessels. In 1885, when Mr. Whitney became secretary of the navy, there was inaugurated a period of great activity and progress in the navy department, taking what had been done by Secretary Chandler, who started the new navy, and carrying on the work along the lines of logical development. Mr. Whit- ney's determination was to have ships which should be fully the equals of those in any country, and it was through him that the speaker was called to the position of engineer-in-chief of the navy in 1887, succeeding his life-long friend, Commodore Loring, one of our past presidents, whose reputation as an engineer is too well known to all of you to need any praise from me. I desire, in this connection, to say that no head of an office has ever been more fortunate in the young men who have been his assistants. No one has ever had the cooperation of abler men, and this has always been rendered with a loyalty and cordiality which deserve all the praise I can give, and I say with perfect frankness that if the progress of naval engineering in our country has been great durin» the past twelve years, it is due, in a large measure, to the cordial as- sistance of the talented young men who have worked with me. I believe it is generally admitted that the machinery of our navy has been in all respects fully abreast of the latest developments, and in many respects we have taken the lead. One of the first things which may be mentioned is the fact that during the period before water tube boilers were used in any way, and when in some foreign navies there was a great deal of trouble with the shell boilers, due to the effort to get an abnormally large amount of work out of them, we had no such trouble. We believed in the principle of never sending a boy to do a man's work, and as a result we never had a boiler incapacitated through leaky tubes. and never lost a trial trip on this account, while failures of this sort were very common things abroad. One of the first things we did was to establish the use of water tube boilers and light compound engines for our steam launches. Private builders in this country had used water tube boilers, but the results, owing to the type of boiler employed, were not altogether fortunate. We found a boiler which has proved entirely satisfactory, and also developed light machinery which was alsocsuffi- ciently substantial to stand the comparatively , rough handling with which the machinery of small boats. must,inevitably meet. We are-today -the only navy which uses water tube boilers exclusively in its. small boats. When we started, the effort was made to save as much water as possible, and small blowers run at a high speed were used for draught but the inevitable hurn caused so many objections to be entered by offi cers, of high rank that we were driven to the use of the steam jet. 1: was, of course, important that the most economical form of jet should be used, but when we came to determine this question we found tha there were absolutely no reliable data in existence. As a result, we ca~- ried out a valuable series of experiments at the New York navy yard and found an exceedingly simple form of jet, which was also very eco- nomical, giving us a fairly high rate of combustion for a comparatively small expenditure of steam. It was evident to us that with the prevailing tendency toward continual increase of speed and power, with the accom- panying increase of steam pressure, the shell boiler would at some near date have to 'be superseded 'by the much lighter water tube boiler, and we therefore invited a competition among the various manufacturers of ' water tube boilers, with a view to determining the one which, all things considered, would tbe 'best adapted to naval uses. Although this com- petition occurred about ten years ago, you are doubtless familiar with the circumstances, and that, as a result, we installed about 5,000 horse- power of Ward 'boilers in the coast defense vessel Monterey, this being at the time, and for several years, the largest installation of water tube boilers in any naval vessel. I am glad to say that these boilers have al- ways given satisfaction and are still in use. At this same time water tube boilers of a different type were installed on one of our torpedo boats, and we have never used any other than water tube boilers on any of the numerous torpedo vessels which have been built since. WHY ADOPTION OF WATER TUBE BOILERS WAS NOT HURRIED. It would have been an easy matter, and it would have brought tem- porary praise to the engineer-in-chief, if, after the successful trial of the Monterey, we had at once launched out into the use of water tube boilers for all our vessels; but we felt that there had not been sufficient ex- perience in their use to warrant us in making such an experiment in our first sea-going armorclads, and consequently, for a number of years, and even after foreign navies had begun to use water tube boilers ex- tensively, we continued to use the shell boilers in our large vessels. Two years ago, when I felt that there had been sufficient experience to warrant us in the final adoption of water tube boilers, I recommended in my an- nual report to the secretary of the navy that we should definitely adopt water tttbe boilers for all classes of vessels. For reasons altogether apart from the machinery, we were not at first successful in securing water tube boilers in the department's own designs in spite of my urgent recom- mendation, but the firms which tendered on the government's designs also offered to guarantee higher speeds if they were allowed to use water tube boilers and more powerful machinery in hulls of their own design. This I had advocated very strongly, and both the technical and daily press of the country had supported this position very heartily, believing that it would be a woful mistake for our country to build 16-knot bat- tleships when the rest of the world were building ones to make 18 knots, and when by the use of water tube boilers we could so readily do it. I am glad to say that the department accepted the builders' offer, thus definitely adopting water tube boilers and securing the 18-knot battle- ships for which I had worked so hard. At the present time all our, new designs include water tube boilers exclusively, = ci "One of the notable improvements in design which we introduced for large vessels was the use of triple instead of twin screws, We were not the originators of this method, as small vessels in both _ France 'and Italy had demonstrated its success, and both France 'and Germany were building vessels of about 12,000 horse power with this system of propulsion. When' it came to the design of the Columbia, the first of our commerce destroyers, with 21,000 horse power, I was satisfied, after careful study of the problem, that we would need to use triple screws to attain success. At the beginning I did not anticipate an economy in pro- pulsion, and the adoption of triple screws was for structural reasons; but when the Columbia's trial occurred we found that there was a ma- terial increase in the propulsive efficiency. When the Minneapolis was tried shortly afterward with the same system of machinery, this fact of greater economy was again established, so that we now feel that triple screws are justified not only for numerous other reasons, but on the | ground of economy. This arrangement of propellers has become very popular in a.number of foreign navies which have followed it out on a considerable scale, and have built all their large vessels with triple screws. It is probable that we shall do the same thing in our larger ships of the new programme. DEVELOPMENT'OF OTHER ENGINEERING SCHEMES. During our late war with Spain we developed and utilized two en- gineering schemes which had never previously been tried in actual