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The Times of London said her size made her seem to "elude comprehension
and weigh upon the mind."
Isambard Kingdom Brunel had built the largest ship the world had ever
seen: an iron, double-hulled steamship 692 feet long and more than
18,000 tons, with two separate engines turning both paddle wheels and a
screw propeller, and five funnels standing over her deck. She would
remain the largest ship in the world for the next forty-one years, until
the length of RMS Oceanic passed her in 1899. Brunel designed her for a non-stop route between England and Australia, with room for four
scithousand passengers. She was built at Millwall by the shipbuilder
John Scott Russell. Construction, delayed by a fire and by money
trouble, took four years; a first launch attempt failed in November
1857, and she finally slid into the Thames on 31 January 1858, launched
under her original name, Leviathan. The cost of getting her that far had already ruined the company that ordered her. She lay unfinished for a
year before a new company bought her, completed her, and renamed her
Great Eastern.
She very nearly finished the man who designed her before she had gone
anywhere at all. On 5 September 1859, as she prepared to leave on her
first voyage, Brunel had a stroke on her own deck and was carried home.
She sailed on without him. Four days later, off England's south coast, a stopcock that had been left shut let pressure build inside one of her
funnel casings until it exploded, tearing open the deck and killing five
of her crew. Brunel died six days after that, on 15 September, aged fifty-three, having lived long enough to be told what had happened to
the ship he had built.
Repaired, she was put back into passenger service. It did not go well.
When she finally crossed the Atlantic to New York, in June 1860, a ship
built to carry four thousand people sailed with thirty-five.
For years after that she sat half machine, half embarrassment, until
somebody worked out the one job her enormous, unwanted hull could do
that no other ship on Earth could. A telegraph cable had been laid
across the Atlantic once already, in 1858, by two ordinary ships meeting
in mid-ocean to splice their two halves together, and it worked for a
little over two months before it failed. No ship afloat was large enough
to carry the whole length in a single piece, except this one. In 1863
her passenger decks were torn out and three huge tanks were built into
her, the widest of them seventy-five feet across, to hold 2,490 nautical
miles of cable weighing 7,000 tons.
Cunard released their own best captain for the job: a Dumfries man named
James Anderson, whose parents had once tried to keep him off the sea altogether, sending him instead to work as a printer's boy on the local
paper, the Dumfries Herald. He joined the merchant navy at sixteen, then Cunard in 1851. His first attempt with the cable, in 1865, failed the
same way the old one had: it snapped in mid-ocean and sank beyond reach.
The following year, he tried again. This time the cable held. On 27 July
1866 she reached Heart's Content, Newfoundland, and Britain and America
were joined by a cable that kept working. Then Anderson turned the ship around, found the dead 1865 cable lying on the seabed, hauled it up,
spliced it, and finished that one too. Two working cables, where the
year before there had been none.
He was knighted for it, and given the freedom of his native Dumfries.
Nobody was ever formally blamed for the stopcock that killed five men
and so nearly finished Brunel, seven years before Great Eastern did the
one job in the world only she could do. See less

comments include

Underestimated Arsenal
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Author
The SS Great Britain Trust's own account of the 1859 explosion is blunt
about how it ended: "A formal investigation was held into the explosion,
but it could not determine who was at fault." The funnel it blew apart
had its own strange afterlife anyway. It was landed at Weymouth, sold to
the local waterworks company, drilled full of holes and used as a water strainer, and a section of it now survives as a museum piece in the
Trust's own collection in Bristol, the harbour where Brunel's other ship
is preserved.
The other name that gets left out of most retellings of 1866 isn't
Anderson's, it's Daniel Gooch's: the engineer who bought Great Eastern
for the cable company and sailed on her for both the failure and the
success. The Dictionary of National Biography records why he was
honoured for it: "For his energy in conducting this enterprise he was
made a baronet on 15 Nov. 1866." Two men knighted or made baronets for
the same voyage, a few weeks apart, and one of their names barely
survives the story at all.
Reply
Roger King
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Don't forget Daniel Gooch... Brunel's right- hand man& Chief Engineer of
the Great Western Railway... He was responsible for much of the work & machinery that enabled the Great Eastern to handle that cable... and was onboard during the voyage..
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Louis Trazino
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A ship far ahead of her time.
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Al Oswald
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My great grandfather, Dan Oswald, was said to be able to drink enough
beer to sink the Great Eastern! Don't think that this was ever
scientifically tested though!
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Barry Moore
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My Grandfather talked about the Great Eastern a lot, was a pretty
impressive ship in its day
Ii believe it was photographed in stereo to see in 3D Binoculars as if
you were right there
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Kevin Paul Moreau
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The Great Iron Ship!
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Jim Huntley
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An incredible feat of engineering - the crowning achievement of the
stand out figure from the heroic age of engineering.
Reply
Dennis Rolfe
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She was designed to take enough coal for the return journey as none had
been found by then in Oz.
Ironic, as they have plenty now
Reply
Darryl Coulthard
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I have an old print of the Great Eastern
No photo description available.
Reply
Richard Warren
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And one of its masts was bought by Everton club for a flagpole and today
it still stands at LiverpoolrCOs Football ground
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Jim H Jones
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This was how it done exactly the same 1982 Antwerp docks by hand. Me
brown coat project manager 6 days non stop
No photo description available.
Reply
Martyn Sudworth
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Hang on, how did he find the old cable? And bring it up to mend it?
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Eliot Reader
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I understand that she used a lot of coal during her short service life
due to the design of marine boilers then in use. Great picture of her
under way
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Roger Edward Crossley
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Given the freedom of Dumfries, just have to hope it was better then than today, still the thought was thereEfya.
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Letigger Julio
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My great great grandfather Henry Hughes worked with Brunel to build the boilers and other steam parts on The Great Eastern.
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David Bailey
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Apparently it was cursed. A tv mystery series many years age narrated by Valentine Dial stated that when the ship rocked side to side there was a mysterious banging coming from inside the steel cladding. When the ship
was scrapped many years later a skeleton was found wedged between the
hull plates.
Reply
Ivan Dobsky
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She did finish him.
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Jonathan Richards
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The Times (of London is unnecessary as anyone sensible would realise
they were not quoting an inconsequential newspaper of the period).
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Bill Staples
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Good thing she was made, then!
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Bryan Richards
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Brunel's iconic steamship, the SS Great Eastern, spent nearly eleven
years docked or anchored at Milford Haven in South Wales during the
1870s and 1880s.
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Ian Todd
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It's just 'The Times'.
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Terence Gray
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When Britain Was Great, we took a chance thats would make us Great,
Reply
Pratap Balakrishna
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Also inside that double hull a Welder and his boy assistant were trapped inside , their skeletons were found when the Great Eastern was boken up
for scrap.
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Brian Simm
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The damaged funnel was off loaded at Weymouth and is said to have been
used in the pipework outlet to a reservoir above the town and is still
there.
Reply
Adrian Thomas
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....I am in awe of the Victorians engineering abilities.
Reply
Dave Collins
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It was cut up scrapped on a beach just down the road from me on the
banks of the Mersey (New Ferry). The bottom plates were mostly left on
the beach and bits can still be located!
Reply
Ben Tombs
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I wonder what the gaffer is to the right...
Reply
Roger King
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I believe that a buoy was left at the site of the cable break... and its position recorded.. they had some kind of measuring device on board, to indicate how much cable had been payed out....
Reply
Sue Jordan
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Amazing- thankyou.
Reply
John Haitch
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Interesting.
Reply
Mike Kent
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A Amazing Marvel of marine Engineering, EfaiEfai
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Roger Goold
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Have to admire the ambition.
Reply
John Hanson
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Interesting read!
Reply
Rob Stoakley
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If the Great Eastern had collided with the iceberg that sank Titanic
itrCOs estimated that the Great Eastern would have survived; Titanic
didnrCOt and went to the bottom of the North Atlantic
Reply
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From Newsgroup: soc.history.war.misc

"a425couple" wrote in message news:PjFpS.211189$ORN1.160563@fx24.iad...

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Underestimated Arsenal
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Follow
2 days ago
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The Times of London said her size made her seem to "elude comprehension
and weigh upon the mind."
Isambard Kingdom Brunel had built the largest ship the world had ever
seen: an iron, double-hulled steamship 692 feet long and more than
18,000 tons, with two separate engines turning both paddle wheels and a
screw propeller, and five funnels standing over her deck. She would
remain the largest ship in the world for the next forty-one years, until
the length of RMS Oceanic passed her in 1899.

---------------------------

Brunel's previous record-breaking ships had been more successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Western https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Britain

The limitations of riveted wrought-iron boiler construction and lack of a
good pressure gauge severely limited pressure and engine efficiency. The
first steam engines of 1698 had suffered badly from boiler explosions which kill the operator and anyone else nearby.

The solution for the next hundred plus years was to condense low or zero pressure steam and pull the piston down with vacuum. Watt's contribution was condensing the steam externally to avoid also cooling the cylinder, but he campaigned hard and effectively against raising pressure. Newcomen and
Savery, not Watt, were the fathers of the piston steam engine. https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/the-newcomen-steam-engine

Steam power was too heavy and inefficient for transportation until around
1800 when English and American inventors Richard Trevithick and Oliver Evans began experimenting with higher pressure, and developing the means to
contain it. Still the boiler pressure control was by weights on a vent which were too easy for the operator to increase. https://www.bourdon-instruments.com/us/en/company/history-and-innovation/a/history-and-innovation

Coincidentally the introduction of Maudslay's screw-cutting metal lathe in 1797 initiated rapid growth in machining accuracy and capability which
enabled better engines. The mechanically guided slide rest that allowed accurately cutting parallel or perpendicular to the workpiece axis was at least as important as threading. In Watt's time engine cylinder bores could
be chiseled, filed and scraped "round" by hand to the accuracy of a worn shilling. Lathes are very ancient but metal was cut with hand held and
guided chisels as with wood, to similar (lack of) precision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe

My lathe is a 1965 South Bend 10L
https://www.lathes.co.uk/southbend/page4.html
Manually operated lathes have barely changed since the early 1900's; they
got it right back then. Then again carpenter's hand tools haven't changed
much since Jesus learned them from his father, maybe since ancient Egypt.

Furnaces hot enough to melt steel in quantity were developed between 1850
and 1870. Previously "wrought" iron could only be heated hot and soft enough to forge-weld together by hammering, like taffy, with the potential for internal voids to fail later, like in mid-ocean. "Wrought" meant hammered
into shape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery
"Inside the furnace, carbon monoxide from the incomplete combustion of the charcoal reduces the iron oxides in the ore to metallic iron without melting the ore; this allows the bloomery to operate at lower temperatures than the melting temperature of the ore. As the desired product of a bloomery is iron that is easily forgeable, it requires a low carbon content."

Steel was difficult and costly to make and production was low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_steel

Those who claimed the steel in the WTC must have melted have never tried blacksmithing. Steel becomes quite soft and weak at half its melting temperature. I've straightened a truck coil spring by hand at yellow heat, around 2000F. You can demonstrate this by heating a straightened paper clip red hot, ~1500F, in a candle flame. Molten steel at over 2500F glows like a bare light bulb filament, welders need almost solar eclipse level eye protection. https://www.autodrill.com/resources/charts/melting-points-of-common-metals-fahrenheit

Wrought iron is nearly pure iron metal, thus its high melting point. The
added carbon that converts it into hardenable steel lowers the melting
point, the way salt lowers the freezing point of water. Cast iron is
saturated with carbon. Nitrogen which is 78% of air cools a coal file below iron's melting point, so steel making furnaces preheat the incoming air to 1000F or more to compensate.

That's the short version.

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From Newsgroup: soc.history.war.misc

"a425couple" wrote in message news:PjFpS.211189$ORN1.160563@fx24.iad...

If the Great Eastern had collided with the iceberg that sank Titanic

itrCOs estimated that the Great Eastern would have survived; Titanic
didnrCOt and went to the bottom of the North Atlantic

------------------------------

Titanic would likely have survived a head-on collision though the officers' careers wouldn't have, instead the barely perceptible scrape opened hull plating rivet joints back to half way between the first and second funnels. There's a good possibility the iceberg was hidden until too late by a temperature inversion mirage caused by the large ice field under 50 degree air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)

A boiler room survivor reported the rearmost extent of damage. With his duty station flooded he was sent up to help with the lifeboats as the ship had
far too few deckhands for the task. Each lifeboat takes away 3 to 5 crewmen
to row and steer. Only the ship's officers and some male passengers were
left to manhandle the last spare lifeboats and they were swept into the
water as the ship submerged beneath them. They survived by carefully
balancing on the bottom of an overturned lifeboat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_Collapsible_Boat_B

Such a mirage would explain many of the unresolved questions such as why the distress call positions were 20 and then 13 miles too far westward, while
the latitude was almost exactly that of the cluster of boilers spilled when the hull broke from hogging strain. A fix on a star raised above its actual altitude could have been responsible. The Californian may well have been the 20+ miles away they claimed and still seen Titanic via the mirage.

https://timmaltin.com/2015/06/10/lawrence-beesley-thermal-inversion/
"As the earth revolved and the water edge came up and covered partially the star, as it were, it simply cut the star in two, the upper half continuing
to sparkle as long as it was not entirely hidden, and throwing a long beam
of light along the sea to us."

Was he seeing a direct view plus a higher refracted image of the star?

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