The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

November, 1909 making a great commotion, much to the interest of everybody within - sight and hearing and who all stopped work to watch it. For nearly half an hour the show continued before anyone madé a move to shut off the line. These are merely samples of the indifference with which time and money are regarded in the whole system. The Naval Gun Factory. During a meeting of a well known engineering society in Washington a few months since, a number, including the writer, visited the naval gun fac- tory. We commented on the speeds employed in turning large guns. We timed two or three different machines and the fastest was about 13 ft. per minute, the slowest about 11. Sever- al of us had, a few days earlier, wit- nessed the same class of work in a private establishment where ting speeds were 40 to 50 ft. per min- ute. steel castings, being bored at 12 to 14 ft, with a single tool, where the cut was not over % in. deep and the feed about 1-16 in. The speed should have been 50 ft., and with two or three tools in the bar. <A brass lining was being bolted into a gun slide and five men watched one man pulling a drill by hand. A trunnion on a slide was being cut off by a series of operations with a fly-cutter, requiring hours and hours where a mill would have done it in minutes. Everywhere time is the thing of least importance. But a common handrail around a _ machine or an opening in the floor must have brass trimmings, a guard over a pair of gears must be of copper, polishea, and brass trimmed; the substance ne- glected for the shadow. At League island I watched a pat- tern maker making a pattern for a "chock." Its mate lay on the floor, marked "Kansas". Now everywhere this class of work is looked upon as of the most transitory and unimportant character and only enough work put upon the patterns to enable the foun- dry to produce a castung. But the navy is different. Those chock patterns were as carefully and expensively built as a piano and as though they were to be used on repetition work and in- tended to last a lifetime. For every dollar that was necessary ten were spent. Work is done every day in the navy yards that would not be accepted from any private concern. There are just as many unfair holes and just as many poor rivets and just as much poor fit- ting in the navy yard built ships as in any old tramp built under a classifica- _ grade can be bought for, the cut- ~ We saw gun slides, clean, mild. TAE Marine Review tion inspection; I have seen some of the latter that put the navy 'yard work to shame. The steel foundry (also referred to previously) at New York gets just as many poor castings off its hands as any other foundry, and it does not turn out a pound that does not cost three times what the same When Mr. Landis called the navy a bluff he ap- plied the right term. It is worse; it is a fraud. It is a huge sink hole, but it is popular. What the navy needs, or rather the people who foot the bills, is a few men on the naval com- mittee who have some practical knowl- edge. Just as long as these things are in the hands. of lawyers the department can get away with the swag, because no one knows any better. The Navy and the Merchant Marine. THE Marine Review announced be- fore beginning the publication of these articles that it was moved to do so by the attitude of the navy towards the merchant marine. It takes occasion to say once more that it is not opposed to a navy in the second place with the commercial interests of the country first, but it is opposed to the navy's methods and to the enormous appro- priations made for it annually while the merchant marine not only cannot get any assistance, but the navy seeks to take from it even that which has always belonged to it, the carriage of the country's own supplies, and to build up an unwieldy institution which will come to be regarded with more hatred and contempt than respect. Admiral Evans has only recently voiced the real feeling of the navy when, professing sympathy with the merchant marine, he said in the same breath that the navy was no longer dependent even slightly upon the merchant marine for men, and that 24 hours at sea would give the greatest greenhorn his sea legs. Well, the chief of the bureau of navigation in his report says that 1 takes six years to train a man-of-war's man. Oh! if we only had more Evanses. We wouldn't need a navy at all. The navy has its ba-ad men with near-bel- ligerent handles bestowed by impress- ionable news-writers and emotional women and who form part. of the whole which has been fitly and truth- fully called a "blak; Those who take umbrage at the appellation had better call off the as- sistant secretary of the navy, who has over his own signature stated that the ships of the navy could not go to sea without a certain particular coal which is mined in the east. The navy needs delivery from its friends. 431 BRITISH TANK STEAMERS FOR THE PACIFIC TRADE. One of the most important of this year's transactions in the tank steamer business has been the equipment of the Pectan of the Shell line, and the Ober- on and Trinculo, owned by Messrs. C. T. Bowring & Co. with the Meyer's system of oil fuel burning and the chartering of these steamers to run in the California oil trade. The oil-burn- ing trial of the Trinculo off the Tyne occurred on Tuesday, Sept. 28. .Owing to the strong easterly wind and occasional wind squalls the Trin- culo did not leave the river in the early morning, but at 10 o'clock the company invited to be present went on board off Smith's Docks, North Shields and before 11 o'clock the large steamer (she carries 7,500 tons of oil) Was steaming out to sea. It was found when the Trinculo got outside the piers that the weather was too hazy for the officers tq make out the landmarks on the measured mile, and it was decided to take the runs by the log. Naturally, interest in the trip. centered in the stokehold equipment and the work of the engines running under oil fuel. The system was most carefully studied and the results, which were secured with a fuel oil supplied by the Anglo-American Oil Co., were satisfactory from the two most impor- tant points of view--low consumption and increased speed. The vessel ran slightly more than 11 knots, and, work- ing under trial trip pressure had a fuel consumption that worked out at 24 tons a day. Before the fireboxes were warmed up (the steamer having come straight out of the river to run her trial) the furnaces gave off some smoke, but before the run was finished there was perfect combustion, and the engineers expressed themselves thor- oughly satisfid that on the run out to the Pacific the vessel will make some interesting records in this particular trade, Distribution of Oil as a Spray. The feature of the system is the dis- tribution of the oil as a spray in the furnace in a heated condition and un- der pressure from an oil pumping plant. On the occasion of the Trin- culo trial the company were shown a simple hand pump and spraying con- trivance working with water, This gave a fine spray reaching away four or five feet from the nozzle. The ar- rangement elucidated points not easily grasped during a visit to the stokehold. The pumps'are in duplicate, one be- ing for use while one is in reserve. A suction heater has two filters, one of