Great Eastern

The ship could be set in motion:

• The screw is a 7.3-meter 4-blade propeller (39 rpm, screw pitch 12 m).
• Rowing wheels with a diameter of 17 m (11 rpm). On each wheel there were 30 blades-tiles, measuring 3.9 m in width and 1 m in height. Due to the huge difference in precipitation in the empty and loaded state (about 5 m), the wheels could become 14 m in diameter.
• Sails ^[2] .

The bow of the ship (up to the second mast) was occupied by cabins, crew’s cockpits and service rooms. In the middle part hold were engines and coal pits. Cabins were also located above them and in the stern. The ship could accommodate 4,000 passengers, of which 800 in class I cabins, 2000 in class II and 1200 in class III cabins.

Corps

The Great Eastern hull was completely metal , the bottom and sides for the first time in shipbuilding history were double, assembled from steel plates 19 mm thick. The length of the vessel was selected as equal to the length of the ocean wave. To achieve the strength and unsinkability of such a long ship, the hull set was made not transverse, but longitudinal - along the bottom, sides and deck stringers were launched, on which 10 waterproof bulkheads rested, rigidly fastened with them and reaching the upper deck. The entire length of the engine and boiler rooms (about 120 meters) were installed two longitudinal safety waterproof partitions.

Main power plant

Marine power plant consisted of:

• four-cylinder steam engine with a capacity of 4000 liters. p.), built by the company "James Watt and Co." and working on a screw ;
• steam engine with 4 swinging cylinders with a capacity of 3650 liters. pp., built by Scott Russell and working on paddle wheels.

10 Watt boilers. The total area of ​​the grate and heating surface was 200 m² and 4270 m², respectively. Steam pressure 1.6 atmospheres. Every two boilers had a common firebox and one common chimney. Since there were 10 boilers, there were 5 pipes on the Great Eastern. Later, two boilers were dismantled, and the number of pipes was reduced to four (see below ). The average daily coal consumption at full speed is 380 tons. Coal pits could hold about 10,000 tons of coal.

Sails

6 masts, named after the days of the week (“Monday” in the bow, “Saturday” - in the stern), from 1686 m² of sails: 7 haws and 9 straight . In some sources, the area of ​​the Great Eastern sails is estimated at 5,435 m², but this is unlikely: only large sailboats with 30 straight and many oblique sails had such an area ^[3] . Masts “Tuesday” and “Wednesday” carried three straight sails, and “Thursday” also had three yards for straight sails at one time. Over time, part of the rails was removed, no more than 4 direct sails were set.

All masts, with the exception of mizzen, as well as yards, were made of iron. The lower rail was 37 meters long, 0.84 meters in diameter, and 16 tons in weight.

The ship could not go under all sails, simultaneously using steam engines: the heat from the pipes would lead to the ignition of the nearest sails.

Internal device

In the bow of the vessel, up to the second mast, there were passenger cabins , crew cockpits and office space. In the middle part of the ship, boiler rooms and engine rooms, as well as transverse coal pits, were located. Coal was also stored on a platform located above the boiler and engine rooms. In the aft , immediately behind the engine room of the propeller , there were also rooms for passengers. Cabins and various salons were also located above the coal storage. Coal loading was carried out through special holes in the sides - lapports ^[2] .

The idea of ​​creating a gigantic ocean ship, five times the size of any ship of its time, arose at Isambard Brunel in 1852. It was intended for the Eastern Steam Navigation Company on the route England - Cape of Good Hope - Calcutta - Australia - Cape Horn - England. The so-called "Eastern Company", created in 1851 to service the England- Alexandria - Suez - Sydney line (the Suez Isthmus had to be crossed by land by camel). ^[2] and had to carry so much coal (about 15 thousand tons) so that at least half the way did not need to call at the port. The double hull, the simultaneous presence of a screw and propeller wheels were designed to ensure the reliability of the ship.

The manufacturer of the ship, called the Leviathan, was the shipyard Messrs Scott, Russel & Co. of Millwall , located on the Thames ( boathouse made on " Dog Island " near the mouth of the river), the customer - "Eastern Company". Brunel managed to convince financiers to invest £ 600,000 in the project.

There was a problem associated with the launching of the ship's hull into the water: in the case of a longitudinal descent, it would have crashed into the opposite bank of the river. Therefore, for the first time for ships of large displacement, lateral descent was applied. Another description has been preserved: like all other Leviathan vessels, they had to be lowered in a longitudinal way, for this a boathouse was built parallel to the shore, but under the mass of the hull the soil was donkey, and there was no necessary slope for launching. Then from despair and applied descent aboard. The width of the launch platform was 324 m, and the slope was 4.7 °.

The construction of the hull lasted 1000 days from 1854 to 1857. According to estimates, more than 3 million rivets for ~ 30 thousand iron sheets of the hull weighing ~ 300 kg each were installed. The mass of the hull during the descent is ~ 11 thousand tons. During the work, Queen Victoria , Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha , Leopold I visited the shipyard.

On December 2, 1857, a launch was scheduled, which was attended by: Queen of Great Britain Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, Belgian King Leopold I, historian of the English fleet Lindsay, writers Robert Stevenson , Jules Verne .

In addition, the launch of the Great Eastern brought to the water more than one hundred thousand people. Brunel, who directed this unique engineering work, was forced to refuse to give commands by voice and urgently created a system of conditional signals using red and white flags. The descent process began in a typical way - a bottle of champagne was broken on the ship’s stem, and to the cries of a crowd of thousands, Brunel gave a signal to activate the hydraulic jacks . Maintaining an upright position thanks to the design of launching carts, the ship began to move slowly toward the Thames . But suddenly there was a skew about the direction of movement. This was due to the fact that it was almost impossible to synchronize the work of the extreme winches. The drum of one of them began to spin quickly, knocking down riggers. Five people were seriously injured. Yet Brunel managed to stop the ship and fix it on the launch platform. Preparation for the new descent took almost two months and cost £ 120,000. Brunel was fired, and he was asked to lower the Great Eastern at his own expense. However, all descent attempts ended in failure. And only on January 31, 1858, a very large tide, together with a hurricane wind, reaching the ship, launched the ship into the water. It took more than a year to complete the vessel — installing boilers and machines, masts and pipes, decorating salons and cabins ^[4] .

The ship was sold to Great Ship Company and renamed from Leviathan to Great Eastern. Until August 1859, the equipment of the ship continued. On September 7, 1859, the Great Eastern was sent on a test flight from London to Holyhead in western England. Brunel was not present on the wires due to illness. On September 9, a boiler exploded on the ship (as The Times wrote - as a result of an act of sabotage), the first pipe flew into the air like a rocket, 6 people died, 9 were injured. Upon learning of this, on September 15, Brunel died of a broken heart . Trouble continued to haunt this ship. During the passage from the vessel to the port on a boat, a captain and two passengers drowned in Holyhead.

Passenger ship

Only on June 17, 1860, the Great Eastern, which took over £ 760,000 to set up, went on its first flight: Southampton - New York , with only 43 passengers on board. Crossing the Atlantic took 11 days and 14 hours. In New York, excursions were taken to the ship, collecting $ 75,000. Then they organized a 2-day boat trip - more than 2 thousand passengers were aboard the ship on this voyage. In August 1860, the ship returned to England with 100 passengers. In May 1861, he made another flight to the United States.

During the Civil War in the United States , the Great Eastern was chartered by the British government and in August 1861 sailed to Quebec with 2,144 officers, 473 women and children on board, also carrying 122 horses. During this voyage, the ocean was crossed in 8 days and 6 hours, which became the personal record of the ship, however the Blue Ribbon never waved on its mast ^[5] . Then the Great Eastern returned to England with 350 passengers, transported 400 people to New York, but in December 1861 fell into a storm that disabled the steering wheel and paddle wheels, damaged part of the passenger compartment. The ship with great difficulty reached the 7th day to the port of Kob. Repair cost £ 60,000.

At the beginning of 1862, the Great Eastern made two transatlantic flights. From flight to flight, the number of passengers grew, reaching 800 people. However, on August 27, while performing the third voyage, he collided with an underwater rock, got a hole 3 meters wide and 25 long, only an undamaged second bottom saved the ship. All over the world there was no dry dock in which such a huge ship could be put for repair.

After 5 months of repair, costing £ 70,000, the Great Eastern made three more crossings across the Atlantic, but its colossal passenger capacity at that time remained unclaimed, the high consumption of coal and the civil war made transportation to the USA unprofitable. In January 1864, Great Eastern was leased to the Atlantic Telegraph Company on special conditions - in case of success, the owners of the vessel receive shares of the company, and in case of failure, the company refuses to pay.

Cable Stacker

Great Cable was made from Great Eastern. Two boilers were removed to accommodate additional equipment and bays with cable.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid with great difficulty in 1857-1858 by the Agamemnon and Niagara ships, but a month after the first telegram, in September 1858, communication over it ceased. Over the next few years, 75 shorter underwater telegraph lines were created, including the Trans-Mediterranean (1,500 km). In 1865, a new attempt was made to lay the transatlantic cable, already using the Great Eastern.

July 15, 1865 the ship sailed from the coast of Ireland , laying the cable along the bottom, but first on the second, then on the seventh day of sailing insulation damage was recorded: wires made of hard and brittle steel broke on bends and broke through the insulating sheath. I had to pick them up and repair. On August 2, the cable (it was already laid 1968 km) broke and went to the bottom. All attempts to raise it were in vain. There is also a version that damage to the cable was sabotage: it turned out that someone was trying to break its core by hammering large nails. When this was discovered, Captain stated that anyone caught in this occupation would be executed on the spot, after which the assassination attempts on the cable stopped.

Taking into account the shortcomings of the previous one, a new cable was made, and the Great Eastern managed to lay it along the ocean floor between the continents in 15 days (from July 13 to July 27, 1866). On August 9, the Great Eastern went to the site of the breakdown of a cable lost in 1865. He managed to raise, build up and September 8 to bring to Newfoundland . In total, from 1865–1874, Great Eastern laid 5 transatlantic cables and one from Bombay to Aden (February 14–28, 1870) with a total length of more than 25,000 km.

Great Eastern at the World Exposition

In 1867, in connection with the World Exhibition in Paris , the Anglo-French Society of Great Eastern Charterers was organized, which again temporarily converted it into a transatlantic passenger ship. Then on it the flight to America made Jules Verne . In addition to transporting passengers, the largest ship in the world was also on display in French ports. At the end of the exhibition, Great Eastern again became a cable layer.

Recent years

In 1874, a special cable-laying vessel, called the Faraday , was built. The Great Eastern was decommissioned and has been joking for over 10 years. In 1885, it was bought for £ 26,000 and was used in Liverpool as a floating circus and billboard. After it was used as a coal depot. In 1888, the ship was auctioned off for £ 16,000 for scrap.

The ship was dismantled for 18 months until 1890. There are reports that between the two layers of the body (the gap between them reached 1 m), 2 skeletons were discovered: an adult (riveter worker) and an apprentice boy. They died during the construction of the Great Eastern. Moreover, in the case of the first, there was probably a premeditated murder, since on the alleged day of the disappearance of the riveting worker, no incidents were recorded at the shipyard. One of the reasons for the unsuccessful fate of the ship was called the fact that "wherever the ship sailed, he carried 2 corpses with him . " These messages, however, have no documentary evidence. However, the fact is the gloomy reputation of the ship and the large number of accidents and accidents, including with human casualties, occurring in the history of the construction and operation of the ship. However, this was inevitable for such an innovative and ambitious project.

• Jules Verne visited the Great Eastern in 1859, when it was still under construction. In 1867, he traveled on this ship from Liverpool to North America. The ship served as a source of inspiration for the novel The Floating City ( Fr. Une ville flottante ; 1871), where Vern began to write it.
• In the novel “ Scar ” by Chyna Mieville , the ship “Grand Easterly” appears, reminiscent of the “Great Eastern” in size, failure in the first voyages and the presence of both propeller wheels and a propeller.
• In the novel “ Leviathan ” by Boris Akunin, the central place is occupied by a huge passenger steamer, which is very similar to the Great Eastern by description (more than 600 feet long, two steam engines, wheels and a propeller at the same time, 6 masts with sailing weapons, etc.). The name of the ship - “Leviathan” - coincides with the first name “Great Eastern”. However, the Great Eastern itself is also mentioned in the text as the only ship of a larger size than the Leviathan.
• The English singer Sting has on his 2013 album The last ship the song "The Ballad of the Great Eastern", which tells the story of the construction of the ship and its launch. The song, stylized as an old ballad, contains a reference to the legend of two dead men - a riveter and his apprentice son - immured in a double hull of the vessel. At the end of the song, it is claimed that the author of the project, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, sold his soul to the devil for completing the construction of the ship. Not being a strict historical document, the song well characterizes the atmosphere during the construction of the vessel, and the attitude of contemporaries.

• Great Eastern liner. Truth and fiction
• Evil Rock of the First Ocean Colossus
• Tsvetkov I.F. The Sea Monster of Engineer Brunel in Jules Verne's novel Floating City
• Great Eastern Salvage web site
• Brief description of the Great Eastern
• Great Eastern timeline
• Great Eastern , 1860-1888
• The Calamitous Titan
• Article “History of the emergence of telephone and mobile communications”