A world record of rapid work was made by one of these Great Lakes shipyards which launched a 3,500 ton steel freighter seventeen days after the keel was laid and at the end of seventeen more days delivered the ship to the Shipping Board complete and ready for service. During the fourteen months from the time when the Shipping Board took charge of the shipping program until the end of hostilities the Great Lakes shipyards sent to the ocean a fleet of 181 steel vessels aggregating over 600,000 deadweight tons, which was twice the record prewar output of sea-going ships of 1,500 deadweight tons and over. On the Pacific Coast one shipyard made another world’s record with a wooden ship of 4,000 tons which was launched seventeen and one half days after the laying of the keel and was ready for the sea in eight days more. The Pacific Coast yards built, to the end of September, 1918, 137 vessels totaling over a million deadweight tons. Delivery of completed ships was often delayed by lack of boilers and other fittings, the manufacture of which had sometimes to wait for steel upon other war necessities. Nevertheless, as yard after yard began to show the results of the speeding of construction, the monthly tale of ships grew by mighty leaps. In August, 1918, at the end of a year, it passed the record monthly production of British ship-yards, which previously had built a larger tonnage than all the rest of the world combined. It kept the lead and broke its own record the next month, and that one also in October when seventy-eight ships of 410,865 deadweight tonnage were delivered to the Shipping Board ready for service--a tonnage in one month exceeding by more than 100,000 tons our greatest annual pre-war output of sea-going vessels. During the twelve months ending September, 1918, the sea-going tonnage built in the United States aggregated a tonnage equal to 70 per cent of that built in the whole world in 1913, the year before the outbreak of the world war, which until 1918 was the highest total of ship production in any year in the history of ship-building. The total number of merchant vessels under construction throughout the world, excluding the Central Powers, at the end of 1918 was 2,189 ships of 6,921,989 gross tons, a little more than double the largest corresponding tonnage under construction by the world before the war. Of that total the United States was constructing 997 vessels of 3,645,919 gross tons, or almost half the number of vessels and more than half the tonnage.