DOOM OF THE STOKER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3778, 30 November 1907, Page 2

DOOM OF THE STOKER.

The days of the naval stoker are numbered. Within a few years the picture of men in the stokehold, stripped to the waist, “stoking, shovelling madly, keeping a head of steam,” will be a thing of the past, and the only men in the boiler rooms of ships of the Royal Navy will be those whose duty it is to superintend the working of machinery that will perform the work of the present-day stoker much more economically and efficiently. One of the chief causes of this is, of course, the introduction of oil fuel, which is now supplied to all new ships as an auxiliary to coal, and which is burnt exclusively in the latest torpedo craft. In the latter ships, it has been possible to reduce the usual stokehold complement by twothirds. But oil is not the only force making for the elimination of the stoker. The Admiralty is now experimenting with a mechanical apparatus which will largely dispense with manual labour in feeding coal to the furnaces. The torpedo gunboat Sharpshooter, attached to the Naval Engineering College at Devonport, has been placed at the disposal of Messrs Hodgkinson and Co., the manufacturers of the apparatus. So far, the trials have been very successful. The coal is fed through shoots above the furnace doors. The fire-bars, controlled by a small engine, move backward and forward, taking in with each movement a supply of coal, which is evenly distributed over the area of the grate, while the return movement ejects the ashes. The degree of heat in the furnaces and the consequent ’head of steam can be perfectly controlled by increasing or diminishing the speed of the engine. The experiments show that not only is a considerable amount of labour dispensed with, but that the coal, owing to its more even and regular distribution, gives much better calorific results than when it is man-handled. There is practically no smoke from the funnels, and none of that flaming which is such a detrimental feature of some of our destroyers and torpedoboats.