The other civilian member, the mechanical engineer, was Miers Coryell, of New York. This gentleman was connected in his professional capacity with the Cromwell Line of steamships plying between New York and New Orleans. He had shortly before the time under consideration designed an engine for the “Louisiana” of that line, which Mr. Roach built, involving an entirely new departure in sea-going engine construction. Perhaps the most concise way to describe this engine would be to say that it represented an effort to introduce the walking-beam of a side-wheel river steamboat into the engine compartment of a screw steamship. The advantage claimed for it was that it permitted the use of vertical cylinders within a deck-height not sufficient to admit the regular type of vertical inverted cylinders. This it undoubtedly did; but there its merit stopped. For the rest it was cumbrous, complicated, and of weight exceedingly disproportionate to its power. This unspeakable device Mr. Coryell offered to the Advisory Board, and, to the speechless amazement of the engineering world, it was adopted as the propelling machinery of the most important ship then authorized for the navy. It is worthy of remark here that these beam-engines were subsequently taken out of the “Chicago,” and a pair of vertical inverted or slightly inclined engines of the usual type substituted. And it might also be observed that this work, with some alterations in the hull, was done in the New York Navy-Yard at a cost of $1,300,000 as against an original contract price of $889,000 for the whole ship new; or, in other words, the cost of re-engining and overhauling the “Chicago” in a navy-yard was 40 per cent. more than the first cost of the new ship under contract in a private shipyard! The Navy Bureaus were not slow to discern what the creation of the Advisory Board meant for them. At first they tried to defeat it. Finding that impossible, two of the Bureau chiefs besought the Naval Committees of the Senate and House to provide that at least one of the four ships be built in a navy-yard. No member of the Senate committee favored this proposition, and but two members of the House committee, both of whom, it is hardly necessary to say, represented navy-yard districts and danced to the music of labor agitators. Thus, at the inception of the new navy the navy-yard snake was “scotched,” if not killed. When the contracts and specifications were drawn up in form, two facts became evident: One was that the knowledge of the new conditions of naval construction possessed by the authorities of the navy itself was altogether academic; and the other was that neither naval authorities nor civilians interested had any adequate idea of what the requirement of the law in regard to material actually signified. The law said that the ships must be built of “steel, of domestic manufacture, having a tensile strength of 60,000 pounds to the square inch, and an elongation of 25 per cent. in eight inches.”