THE SHIP OF THE FUTURE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3028, 27 October 1908, Page 4

THE SHIP OF THE FUTURE.

Three years ago an English journalist asked the chief engineer of a large liner what he thought would be the motive power of the future—steam or electricity. The reply was, "Neither; suction gas," whereupon the journalist had to enquire what suction gas was. Suction gas has been used successfully on land for the last three years, but most people are in the same state of ignorance about it as was the journalist. Yet there is more than a possibility of it revolutionising marine propulsion. The London "Daily Mail" gives an interesting account c.f the experiments which have been made with it on the Rattler, an obsolete warship. The gas is prepared by passing water and air through a furnace in which coal or coke is burnt, and the gas produced, after being cooled and cleaned by its passage through a "scrubber" filled with damp coke, is sucked or drawn off engine just as it is required for driving it. Only so much gas as is wanted to feed the engine is thus produced. The Rattler was, when the writer visited her, driven by a suction gas engine at the rate of nearly eleven knots, at a cost in fuel of threepence a mile. A ship driven by this power has no boilers, and no funnels, and is driven smokelessly and noiselessly.