====================================================================== |Date of |Registered| No. of | Average | Per NAME |Building| Length, |Main W. T.| Length of |cent. of | | Feet [1] |Bulkheads |Compartments| Length -----------------+--------+----------+----------+------------+-------- Titanic | 1911 | 852.5 | 15 | 53 | 6.2 Lusitania | 1907 | 762.0 | 16 | 45 | 5.9 George Washington| 1908 | 699.0 | 13 | 50 | 7.1 Great Eastern | 1854-59| 680.0 | 9 | 68 | 10.0 Carmania | 1905 | 650.0 | 15 | 50 | 7.8 Campania | 1893 | 601.0 | 8 | 67 | 11.1 New York | 1888 | 517.0 | 14 | 37 | 6.7 Alma | 1894 | 270.7 | 11 | 23 | 8.3 -----------------+--------+----------+----------+------------+-------- [1] Figures in this column represent the length between perpendiculars. An interesting study of bulkhead practice in some notable ships is afforded by the table and diagrams which are herewith reproduced by the courtesy of "Engineering." In the matter of height of bulkheads above the water-line, the _Great Eastern_ stands first, followed by the _Paris_, the _Lusitania_, the _Campania_, and the _Titanic_. CHAPTER V THE UNSINKABLE _GREAT EASTERN_ OF 1858 The term "unsinkable," as applied to ships, is used throughout the present work in an accommodated sense. There never was but one unsinkable craft, and for that we must go back to the age of primitive man, who doubtless paddled himself across the rivers and lakes upon a roughly fashioned log of wood. In the modern sense, an unsinkable ship is one which cannot be sunk by any of the ordinary accidents of the open sea, such as those due to stress of weather, or to collision with icebergs, derelicts, or some other ship. Can such a ship be built? Not only is it feasible to construct vessels of this type to-day; but, as far back as the year 1858, there was launched a magnificent ship, the _Great Eastern_, in which the provisions against foundering were so admirably worked out that probably she would have survived even the terrific collision which proved the undoing of the _Titanic_. The _Great Eastern_ represented the joint labours of the two most distinguished engineers of the middle period of the nineteenth century, I. K. Brunel and John Scott Russell. The former was responsible for the original idea of the ship, and it was he who suggested that it should be built upon the principles adopted in the rectangular, tubular bridge that had recently been built across the Menai Straits. To Scott Russell, as naval architect, were due the lines and dimensions of the ship and the elaborate system of transverse and longitudinal bulkheads.