A GREAT DESIGNER OF WARSHIPS.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1687, 1 March 1913, Page 4

A GREAT DESIGNER OF WARSHIPS.

The death of Sir William White, sometime Chief Naval Constructor for Britain, is announced in to-day's cables, and another of the great men who made tho Victorian age wonderful in achievement in so many directions has passed away. As to Sir William White's metier as naval constructor, there is only room for one point of difference of opinion. It is not a question as to whether he was a .''great" designer. The real question is:. Was he the greatest designer of the nineteenth century? There is much hard evidence which would lead ono to,suppose th:it he was. Ho was tho father of tho present type of hull which still finds favour in England, and was subsequently copied, first 'by America, then by Japan, and later by Germany, and_ (to some extent) by Russia. It is the upstanding type of hull, with due metacentric height, always more or less steady in a heavy sea," and with sufficient freeboard to afford what artillerists term a good "command" for the guns: i.e., height above water level. Th 3 differing school of thought and construction is, of course, the French type, with heavy "tumblo homo" sides, a complete belt of varying thickness all along the side on the water line, and a "command" for the guns only obtained by certain perilous experiments with the ship's stability. Tho second great point in Sir William White's theory wa3 the Creation, of . homogeneous squadrons—that is to say, that as many ships as could be conveniently commanded by a single admiral in battle should bo of the same speed and gun plan, so that the fastest ships in a ; battle squadron should not have to waste power by waiting •on the "lamo ducks" in the same squadron, and that an admiral, having selected the angle of approach on an enemy, should know at a glance how many guns would be training on any target at any given compass bearing. This theory is now admitted by almost all naval architects to be universally sound, but other considerations (beyond the control of naval architects—developments in artillery, for instance) have forced tho hands of constructors. The present British Dreadnoughts, for example, are anything but homogeneous, and this is due, not to negation of Sir William White's great principle, but to the effort of our present chief constructor to increase the field of all round firo for the ships, with due regard to groupings of boilers, funnels, etc. On the whole, possibly the only type which Sir William White over regretted designing was our late flagship the Powerful and her sister the Terrible. They were built in deference to something like a popular ■ clamour that Britain should have something afloat which, >in a very peculiar class, would be able to cope with tho Russian Rossiya and Rurik. The fallacy of this type has long been exposed. It may bo of interest, too, to mention that our present Chief Constructor has taken one line, diametrically opposite to that which Sir William White would fain have pursued. In designing a now type of ship, Sir William always waited to see what foreign Powers wero doing, and then, if possible,- went one better. Now—for better or for worse —we have changed all that. We took the initiative with tho Dreadnought typo.