The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-01-08
BUILDING BoArs.

Would q duck swimY' Is one of
 the old sarcastic questions. Would a
 stone sink?' is question of similar
 character. Would any one think of
 making boat out of stone? might be regarded as really silly question. {, Perhaps. as The New Haven Register
 suggests. the prehistoric boat-buiiders
 selected their material by testing it.
 If one threw a piece of light wood
 on the water he noticed that it float
 ed buoyantly. If he threw stone
 into the water 1t sank at once, there fore he discarded stone and built or
 dug his boats of wood.
 If these early boatwrights had been
 acquainted with iron and steel they
 would. in all possibility have tested 1t
 in the same manner. and of course would not have thought of making a
 boat out of it. That was because they failed to understand that a solid piece of metal would sink and didn't know how to render it buoyant. Yet we of
 this age know that vessels of iron and steel have ceased to be novelties. It would doubtless be practicable to
 construct boat without an atom of
 wood about it. and yet 1t would be a model boat in al, respects. So much steel and iron is now sused in naval construction that no wonder is ex- pressed over the use of such material. But to get back to the ignorance
 of the prehistoric age--and somewhat of our own, as to boat material. As The Register says. we hadn't thought of building boats of stone. Yes. stone is of lighter specific gravity than steel.
 but it just. couldn't be done. we as- stunned. There was a Baltimore engi-
 neer who rightly assumed that a thing isn't proven until 1t Is proven. So he built him a pleasure boat of concrete. | which is stone pulverized and re- formed. He made his boat eleven years ago. and has sailed 1t success
 fully and with very good results. but
 he didn't say anything about 1t until
 a few days ago when he learned that
 English boatbuilders are testing con
 crete in the construction of sailing
 vessels, with the idea that they have
 discovered something new.
 There Is the. Baltimore engineers l boat floating. seaworthy and a good
 rough- weather vessel He win proba- bly, be glad to show 1t to anybody who doubts that stone can swim. Whether it will lead to the general
 adoption of concrete for boat-building material one cannot say, but it is good to know that the thing is possi-
 ble. Wood may be very scarce some day.
 No, we hadn't thought of building boat out Of stone, or concrete. By the same token, we had not. until a
 recent period. thought of building q great many things of concrete, for that matter. Now they are building
 houses and bridges. and almost all other structures of concrete. Just as
 the vessel. Is made of steel worked into, proper form, so stone in the form
 of concrete and properly constructed
 makes 2 good boat. 2, we are more ad- vanced than our remote ancestors were; that is the main thing, and this | Baltimore engineer has shown us how to put our knowledge to good use in
 way that had not hitherto been at tempted.
 And. aside from the fact that wood
 may be very scarce some day this in- cident adds one more to the many
 uses to which concrete Is being put | Nothing in the history of construction
 has exhibited such development as
 this. It is not really a new method | of building in this country. We re-
 member that Orson D. Mum, of New
 York, one of the editors of The Scien- tific American. was an enthusiastic believer in it. As an evidence of his faith and confidence he had a house l of eighty rooms built for himself. and
 for time there was much talk of
 such buildings. A number of them
 were erected in Alabama, and in other
 sections the plan had quite a run for
 a time, but 1t never became popular. The plan pursued at that time,
 however, was quite different from the
 present. The walls were constructed
 of plaster or cement and stones of
 various sizes. poured into moulds and
 allowed to set firmly before the
 moulds were removed. It made a firm wall but the present plan is much better. The use of what We may call liquid concrete not only capacities the work very much but adds to It's dura- bility. If the concrete is composed of
 the right materials and properly com
 bined and used We see no reason why
 1t should not be practically as perma-
 nent and durable as stone itself. AL
 ready we are being assured that a
 house of five or six rooms can be
 erected complete in all its details. in
 a single day That is what we may
 call rapid construction, but it may
 come.
 And SO 1t is that the boat built by