Sea Traffic.

Manawatu Herald, 3 February 1894, Page 3

Sea Traffic.

(Continued.) • The cost of working huge steamships is very large. Every horsepower indicated can be taken as worth £13.. The last two new Cunarders are stated to have cost half a million of money each. The wages list on big steamers totals to nearly .62000 a month and a twentyknotter must realise, every trip out and Home, £18,000 or suffer a loss. The Majestic cost £400,000, and for sfceamingpurposes evaporates 650,000 i gallons of water a day I Put in a ! different form, so as to illustrate the J immense consumption of water, it is ! said that 250 Majesties would require for steaming purposes, just the same timouht of water as is supplied to the whole .population of the county of London. To raise this water, for 1 the one vessel, to the needful pressure of 1801 bor more per square inch, the boiler furnaces have to be fed with over 300 tons of coal a day. ] I This is to get the water into steam ; but after that the sterm has to be condensed again into water, and to do this quite au ocean has to be pumped through 20 miles of condenser tubes, which it has to traverse three times before it has done, its duty; and during the six days crossing the Atlantic, laalf a million tons" of water pass through the ship for condensing purposes alone ! The screw of theso large steamers run into money. The Umbria has the largest propeller of all the Atlan- i tic liners. It is 244 feet in diameter, and has four blades, each of which \ weighs seven tons, and the complete screw weighs thirLy-nine tons. The boss cost £1,000 ; the blades of manganese bronze cost £120 a ton, or £3,860 for the four, so that with sundries we got close on £5000 as the cost ! The screw shaft of any of these big vessels is more like a watermain than anything else ; a series of short pipes cf mild steel, nearly a couple of feet in diameter, bolted together at their collars and resting almost shoulder high on their bearing.-!, with here and there a spare S2dion or so. lashed to the wall. The shaft of the Majestic weighs 70 tons. It is mentioned that the Tekoa, one of the New Zealand meat boats, once ran from Teneriffe lo Auckland, 12,059 Knots, without a stop or slackening speed ; and over the who'e journey from London to Auckland she carried her 6,250 tons of cargo at a speed of ten knots on an expenditure of 1237 tons of coal, or, in other words, she usecLbut half an ounce of fuel td carry atoa-of cargo a mile. The Tekoa gets along with twenty-five men in her engineroom ; a first-class ocean liner, like the Mnjestie, which has fifty four engines on board, in addition to the main one?, requires from 460 to 170 men to' work the three watches. Of this number 20 are engineers, 80 greasers, the rest either firemen or trimmers. The plan is now to pump air into the boiler-room, or else to pump hot air direct on to the fire, and this has the effect of considerably diminishing the temperature below. It is customary to light the . fires the day before the ship starts, in order that they may warm the metal up gradually. The Clyde men claim that they can build a ship to run forty knots an •hour, but then she will have to be 160,000 horse-power and burn 2000 tons of coal a day. In the Scot the smoke bas to travel 120 feet from plate bar to rim of funnel !