The Pensacola journal., 1919-11-16

American shipping Not only that
but the hitching up Of the shipyards to
the great organized steel industries as
sures disabled American ships getting
back on the seas in quick time. For
example: a freighter comes limping
into Sparrows Point with broken
propeller blade. In the old days be-
| fore the repairs could be made, shop
ping had to be done in the market.
Steel companies had to be canvassed
| to determine when they could deliver
the blade. A ship could be tied up
for months because no one had any
interest in bending every effort to get
| it under way again-no one but the
shipbuiider. Today in such an emer-
gency, a wire is flashed from the Beth
lehem yard at Sparrows Point to
Bethlehem steel and blade is i'm
lmediate1y cast and shot back to the
waiting ship. Such service means the
saving of hundreds OF thousands of
dollars to Yankee shippers.
Breaking Records.
The workers in the various yards
| are eager. Their pride in their yard
| is great. They are even more anxious
to work than they were during the
war, for where in 1918 the .atten-
dance" per cent. of men on the total
payroll reporting daily for work, was
| s5 per cent, today it is 80 per cent.
! Also, thye are building faster. Consider
the Fore River yards. They have built
one batch of thirty-five knot destroy
ers. A construction chart shows that
the completion time falls in a des-
cending curve for 312 days, the period
consumed in building the first destroy
ers, to 1T days, in which the most re-
Gently delivered was finished. This is
a worlds record.
Unfinished in these yards are sixty
three merchant ships, totalling 600,0
tons and 107 naval vessels, including
}sixty-five destroyers, thirty eight sub
marines, one battleship, one battle
cruiser and two scout cruisers. Will
Yankee ships lead the world? The
answer is in those figures.
It is in Bethlehem that the scientific
Engineering part of shipbuilding is
done. There is the largest draughting
room in the world, vast place. with
walls Of glass, where four hundred
men transform the designs that the
company's own merchant and naval
architects have made, into preliminary
plans for the shipyards. Here. draw
ings are made of every part of the
hulls. engine. superstructure, indeed
of every part of ship. There is a de-
mand for young college graduates of
engineering training in the draughting
room at Bethlehem; and one observed
not a few college athletic stars, who
were taking this chance to learn the
practical side Of their profession, with
| all the experience of the great steel
1and shipbuilding plants theirs for the
asking.
From the drawings done in the huge
sunlit room, blue prints are made to
be sent to the Bethlehem steel works
and to the shipyards. Follow one of
these blue prints into the land of steel
That is a vista of rumbling buildings
and towering chimneys reaching down
the valley at Bethlehem for five miles
There, are three made-mountains, of
! iron ore and of limestone and of soft
coal Steadily in one direction, ever
! forward. these materials pass down the
valley going from furnace to furnace,
from mill to mill, until emerging as
steel plate, they encounter the blue
prints drawn by the four hundred men
in the great sunlit draughting room.
Each blue print is of hull plate or
| of some other part of a ship and from
T! it the steel is cut to suitable size. Each
plate is numbered to key with the blue
prints, copies of which are sent to the
shipyards.
Secrets of Progress.
So, as ships are ordered at BethIe-
hem, out to the various plants along
the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards go
the orders: Build ten freighters,
Luckenback type" There follow blue
prints and steel to the yards.
Come now to one of these yards, to
historic Quincy on the bank of the
Weymouth Fore River. and about six
miles from Boston. Here it is that
Yankee "git up and git" pulled Tir-
PITTS beard, for here during the war
they turned out merchantmen and de-
| stroyers and turbines so fast that the
German submarine campaign became
a forlorn hope. To Fore River, then,
just as to the Harlan plant in Della
ware. to Sparrows Point in Maryland,
to the Moore plant in New Jersey, to
the Union plant in California, come
from Bethlehem the preliminary plans,
the blue prints and the raw materials.
Famous for two centuries as a ship
building center, the Fore River yard
has today an area of eighty acres.
With twenty shipways. it is equipped
to build anything from an ocean tug to
| a battleship, 900 feet long. A few
miles away, on Boston Harbor is
is Squantum, owned by the navy but
operated by Bethlehem-an astonish-
| ing place. nothing like it in the world
for there in a vast glass rooted and
glass walled building are the ways on
which ten destroyers can be built at
the same time. From the moment the
raw material enters the yard until it
leaves it moves in a straight line
ever nearing completion. to the waters
edge. to the launching of the destroy
| er. And all the work is done indoors.