 Thank you, David. It's a real privilege to be here at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I have to especially thank my childhood friend, Charlie Edel, who is a professor here at the War College, who helped make this possible. He now has a fellowship at the State Department, so he's not able to be here, but I'm very grateful to him and to be here where there have been many distinguished speakers. It's a real honor, including Theodore Roosevelt, who made the famous speech about sea power just for the Spanish-American War. This is a two-part presentation. One is a book which I have already written about the great ship the SS United States, built in the 1950s at the high water mark of the American century when this ship was an expression not just of luxury travel, but also of military prowess, because she was built not just as a luxury liner, but as a secret weapon, able to be converted from a 2000 passenger luxury liner carrying rich people, Hollywood stars, you name it, all the way to immigrants, to an entire army division of 14,000 men. So that's the steamship era, that's the 20th century, but then I'm going to go back another 100 years to the book I'm currently working on also about fast ships, the clipper ship era. And in many ways there are similarities between the SS United States and wonderful, tall ships like the flying cloud, Romance of the Seas, I mean, they all these ships have wonderful names. But let's us start with a, if I can get it to work. That should work. It was working before. This generally happens. Of course. We used to use view graphs. You saw me do it before. Yeah. The other thing you had to worry about then is the bulk burn out. You already went on the internet. Reboot. Government confused. There we go. All right. Great. Well, this is the image that initially captivated me when I started working on a manned ship in 2007. And there were many great ocean liners built. The most infamous or famous of which was the Titanic of 1912, which was one of three ships that was actually built thanks to the financing of Not by British People by J.P. Morgan. The Titanic of why it was completely American owned. But this image is unusual because you do have someone who is deeply connected with the construction of a great transatlantic liner. This is William Francis Gibbs staring at his creation. She was coming to New York Harbor in a chilly fall day in October of 1957. And this is something he would do every two weeks when the ship would come in from a return trip from Europe. He would get up very early in the morning and drive over to the pier and watch her come in. And he'd be the first person to come on board. He spent 40 years designing this ship. It's something he wanted to do since he was a very young man since his 20s. And this ship came at a time when ocean liners were the peak of technology. This ship was almost three football fields long, 990 feet long, 101 feet wide. Why those dimensions? She could just squeeze into the Panama Canal. So if she was to be used as a military ship, she could make that passage. And this ship had the ability to travel at over 38 knots, top sustained speed. And her engines were 240,000 horsepower, almost a third more powerful than any comparable ocean liner, including the Queen Mary. The reason for these amazing statistics was that she was not just a beautiful luxury liner built to carry movie stars. She was built to be a military ship first and foremost. William Francis Gibbs, I believe, was one of the great designers on land or sea that America has ever produced. And this was the magic moment for him. This was in 1894 in Philadelphia when a passenger ship called the SS St. Louis was launched at the Cramp Yards. And William Francis Gibbs and his father are somewhere in that crowd. And when he was eight years old, he saw that ship being launched. He knew from that moment, I know what to do with my life. His father had other ideas. His father was a very successful Philadelphia financier and banker who wanted his son to be a proper Philadelphia lawyer. William Francis Gibbs had no intention of being a proper Philadelphia lawyer. He fought his father and mother tooth and nail to become a naval architect. He ended up enrolling at Harvard University where he dropped out when his very wealthy father, it turned out, was a crook and had been stealing money from one of his companies that had gone bankrupt. So William Francis Gibbs ultimately finishes college. He works his way through college and through law school. And after a few years of working as a lawyer, he ends up getting an apprenticeship with a gentleman called Admiral David W. Taylor, who was one of the top naval architects of the U.S. Navy. Admiral David W. Taylor was inspired by this young man. I mean, he clearly was very smart, loved ships, was passionate about ships. He basically received, gave Gibbs the training that he never formally received in college. So Gibbs ended up starting a naval architecture firm with his younger brother Frederick and with Admiral David W. Taylor in the 1920s. And he ended up marrying a lady named Vera Kravath Larkin as in the law firm Kravath Swin and More in New York. And here he is as a very, the picture on the left shows him as a very unhappy undergraduate at Harvard. He was miserable. He was bullied when he was an undergraduate because he was constantly reading books about ships and constantly doodling in class of ship designs. And he was not very social. But eventually he ended up on the cover of Time Magazine for his work as a naval architect during World War II. And this shows him sitting on the ventilator of one of his ocean liners, the SS America of 1940, wearing his characteristically very crummy, cheap clothing, cracked shoes, his hats had holes in them. He was very much an eccentric. And he also was known to having a very salty tongue and was known as a very hard-driving man. As one observer said, because he got a later start in the career he wanted to do, he had to work extra hard to achieve what he wanted to achieve. His firm achieved prominence in the 1930s during the FDR administration when they designed a series of destroyers that were the first American warships to use high-temperature, high-pressure steam, which gave this set of destroyers a top speed of close to 40 knots. And during the Second World War they were able to out sail anything the Japanese, the Germans, could produce. But during the war he was most famous for coming up with basically adapting the designs of a British tramp steamer and turning it into the Model T of cargo ships, the Humble Liberty ship. His firm came up with a prototype so that these ships could be mass-produced and over 2,000 of them were produced. And the thinking was build them faster than the Nazis can sink them. But Gibbs's real dream as a naval architect was to build a grand transatlantic ocean liner. This was the crown jewel of any naval architect's dream. The problem was as an American naval architect it was a very hard thing to do because in Europe the government, the French government, the British governments, the German governments, etc. were providing steamship companies with subsidies to build luxury liners. These were points of national pride. America did not offer subsidies for transatlantic steamship companies to build these bigger, faster, and grander ships. But as you can see these ships were not just engineering marvels. They were also cultural icons. They had the advertised glamour. I mean the French line especially appealed to wealthy Americans in their sense of what traveling on a French ship was like. And if you look at the names of ships that were from the 1890s all the way to the 1940s these are names that reflect nationalistic pride. Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, Rex, Kaiser Wilhelm de Grossa. Very nationalistic names, very different from cruise ships' names today. These were also floating palaces. One thing you might not know about the RMS Titanic of 1912 was that she and her two sister ships had the first floating squash courts on board. They were that big. Most of these ships, almost all of them, are gone. There's still some remnants of what these ships used to look like. This is the first class lounge of the RMS Olympic, the sister ship, the Titanic. When the Olympic was scrapped in the 1930s a hotel owner bought the first class lounge and put it in his hotel. That's all solid oak, by the way. Hand carved by the workers at Holland and Wolfe and Belfast. But the most important thing about these ships was their speed. This was the fastest way, this was the only way to cross the Atlantic before airplanes came along. So the faster people took ships not just to cruise but to go from point A to point B. This is a shot of the Queen Mary, the famous Queen Mary of 1936 going through the North Atlantic at over 33 knots. This ship was actually bigger than the SS United States. But when she came in for her maiden voyage in 1936 airplanes would circle around her to get a shot of this magnificent ship in action. And the Queen Mary held the transatlantic speed record from 1936 to 1952 and she was able to make a top speed of 31 knots and she crossed in three days and 20 hours. So back then that was considered very fast and over the course of the late 19th, early 20th century the time it took to cross the Atlantic shrank from a week to four days. And that was seen as a real advance. But in the construction a lot of these ocean liners a lot of things went wrong. I don't need to go over the Titanic. You had the issues of compartmentation. Were these ships attic for the compartment of the Titanic when she hit that iceberg, opened a third of her length. That was more than enough to sink the ship. The Lusitania had probably had either a coal explosion or a steam plan explosion. It might have been something else she was carrying during World War I but when that torpedo hit something blew up. But Gibbs when he followed these passenger liner disasters was particularly concerned with fire. He said there is no greater danger to a passenger ship than a catching fire because passengers and crew are trapped on board. In 1934 a cruise ship that sailed between New York and Havana the Morrill Castle which was designed by one of his rivals caught fire off the coast of New Jersey and was burning from stem to stern within half an hour the reason was that she was very luxuriously outfitted with woods and heavy drapes and when that ship caught fire she was basically within half an hour became a floating fire trap and passengers couldn't escape. The 600 people on board, 130 people died. The Normandy was probably the most famous passenger ship fire. This was a French liner that was the pride of France basically as an engineering and decoration and artistic marvel and in 1942 while being converted into a troop transport after she had been seized by the US caught fire only a few hours before she was set to set sail with her first load of troops and sank at her New York pier it was a total loss. And Gibbs inspected the Normandy in 1942 when she was lying on her side and he said if I ever get a chance to design my Superliner I want it to be as fireproof as possible I don't want this to happen the naval architect who designed the Normandy saw her burn and was in tears he was devastated. But what really made the construction of the SS United States possible was the use of these types of big ocean liners in wartime this is footage of the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary the two great Cunarders that would sail back and forth between Europe and America during the Second World War these ships were built to carry 3,000 passengers the biggest ships of their time they were able to smush 16,000 men onto these ships and they would sail them at full speed 30 plus knots no escorts could keep up with them so if something did happen and a submarine did get this ship in its sights it would have been a disaster in fact Adolf Hitler said he would give $250,000 the equivalent of that and an iron cross to any U-boat commander that sank the Queen Elizabeth of the Queen Mary when fully loaded thankfully their speed protected them now after the war in 1945 William Francis Gibbs meets up with officials from the US government especially the US Navy and says we need a ship just like the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary able to be used for wartime so here he is meeting with his brother around this time and the criteria for this type of ship was she must have a slim hull with a low prismatic coefficient very narrow in fact the prismatic coefficient for this ship was 0.59 which was almost the equivalent of that of a destroyer she had to have a low center of gravity so she would remain stable in rough seas and when fully loaded with troops and she must have a high margin of stability in case of flooding and there would be almost no wood used into her construction to prevent fire and how to achieve that well during the Second World War the use of aluminum had been pioneered in the construction of destroyers and cruisers so William Francis Gibbs said let's take all the upper decks of this ship and make them entirely out of aluminum that would add tremendously to the cost no wood at all in any of the furniture any of the paneling there would be no expansion joints which would cause problems and the ship would be able to remain afloat with any 5 or 20 watertight compartments flooded that is a standard yet to be matched in passenger ships if you might remember from the Titanic that ship was built with 16 watertight compartments any two of which could be flooded or the first four well that iceberg ripped open the first six and she went down and just one analogy I like to use is the construction of an ocean liner is like taking the Chrysler building turning on its side putting in a luxury hotel putting in a power plant that could power any major city and then pushing it through the Atlantic over 40 miles an hour the design and planning took five years to build this ship and she was the third she would be the third largest passenger liner in the world not as big as the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary but still pretty big and as I mentioned earlier one of the main design parameters was that she would be able to fit through the Panama Canal now these engines were later used the engines used in the SS United States were later used in the forest oil class aircraft carriers and able to generate 240,000 horsepower and four propellers basically very similar to aircraft carrier battleship design but unlike other passenger liners where if you were traveling on the ship and you wanted to see the engine room you couldn't do that on this ship because everything below the water line the bedrooms, the hull design was all government classified well a problem comes up during the early 1950s when the ship is under construction because the Korean war breaks out just as soon as her keel plates are laid and a ship is already being built in the slipway designated for her this is the aircraft carrier USS United States which they'd be instructing in early 1950 and this was the first to be the first flush deck aircraft carrier and here the keel plates being laid in Newport News Virginia for the USS United States the problem was that there was the Truman administration began cutting back on military funding around this time this led to these famous revolts of the admirals in which the secretary of the navy resigned along with many other naval officials so the keel plates for this ship were scrapped and in its place they began laying the keel plates of the ocean liner, SS United States construction began in February of 1950 and because so many sections of the ship were prefab she was finished pretty quickly and she was christened and floated out of dry dock on June 23rd 1951 there was a bit of a financial problem however with this ship there was a bit of a scandal a typical passenger liner of this size cost around $50 million well because this ship had so many military features built into her the aluminum superstructure, double electrical wiring, the extra compartmentation cost skyrocketed and they ended up totaling more than $78 million the company that was to be operating her, the United States lines was only paying for $28 million of this so some people in congress began investigating this and the president himself got involved and said we think the U.S. lines which is run by such powerful men as Vincent Astor and other New York capitalists has been belking the government to build this ocean liner so this fight over the ship's construction lasts all the way of the maiden voyage here's some construction photos of the SS United States in Newport news you get a sense of the scale of this ship these propellers were made out of a manganese bronze alloy they're 19 feet in diameter and could turn it over 160 rpm so that's this is a pretty impressive setup for a ship like this and each of these four propellers was designed to take 60,000 horsepower so that's a lot of torque on those propellers and one of the concerns with this design was vibration a lot of passenger liners suffered from very bad vibration at high speed so the trick was how do you design propellers that minimize vibration well the design team for the SS United States from William Francis Gibbs's firm consisted of 49 men and one woman Elaine Kaplan was the woman engineer responsible for designing these propellers which proved to minimize vibration this shows one of the aluminum smokestacks of the ship these are 10 1950 Fords lined up against the smokestacks they give a sense of scale those fins were meant to deflect smoke from blowing onto the afterdecks this shows the SS United States being floated out of dry dock in June 1951 unlike previous ships which slid down the ways and into the James River because the ship's underwater hull was classified she was built in dry dock and already floating when she was christened by the wife of Texas Senator Texas Senator John Connolly Best Truman First Lady of the United States was offered to christen the ship but her husband said no because of the scandal of what's going on with the ship's construction you're not allowed to launch it now if you can't use wood you have to be very creative with your interior decorations the ship was divided into three separate and very unequal classes she was one of the last of the transatlantic landers to be divided into first, second and third and first class was located in the center of the ship where you felt the least motion and to go first class in a ship like this was expensive it cost maybe the equivalent of $5,000 to $10,000 per person one way 800 people in first class and as you can see when you have very little wood you have to use a lot of aluminum, you have to use a lot of steel those sculptures you see in the first class dining room are actually made of a kind of styrofoam so a lot of people walked on board the ship for the first time and either thought it was supremely modern and really liked it or they thought it was really ugly this is second class located in the back of the ship and if you get seasick you don't want to be back here this is tourist class or third class in the front of the ship this is where you feel the most motion now the maiden voyage took place in July of 1952 it was a major media event everyone was wondering whether this ship had enough horsepower to take the record for the first on our first crossing from the queen Mary usually transatlantic liners did not go for the transatlantic record on their first trips because the engines had not been broken in the crews weren't ready but Commodore Manning who was captain of the SS United States on this voyage was pretty confident in fact he had a meeting with William Francis Gibbs the day before the ship was set to sail and William Francis Gibbs said please if you're going to break the record of the queen Mary do not do so by very much we do not want the British to know and above all we don't want the Russians to know what this ship can do because she's a military vessel well on July 3rd 1952 the ship is fully booked with 2,000 passengers including oddly enough the daughter of of Harry Truman Margaret Truman's on board you have David Sarnoff the president of CBS Fritz Reiner the conductor of the Chicago Philharmonic you have various members of the Aster family on board and it's interesting to note out the Aster he was the chairman of the board of the United States lines he was the biggest investor in the company Vincent Aster always wore he was a very dour eccentric individual he wore a gold pocket watch at all times now this gold pocket watch had a great sentimental significance to him because that gold pocket watch was recovered from his father's body floating in the North Atlantic in 1912 his father Colonel John Jacob Aster IV died on the Titanic so the ship is set to sail in New York it is one of these great occasions this was a time when friends of passengers and family of passengers could come on board and drink champagne there was no security you could just wander on board if you wanted to and at 12 noon on July 3rd 1952 as streamers were flying from her promenade decks and crowds were waving goodbye she backs into the Hudson River by tugs and sails out the Statue of Liberty and the question is is Harry Manning going to keep a moderate degree of speed on this ship what do you think he does as soon as he clears Verrazano he's making 35 knots with 3,000 people on board the William Francis Gibbs is not amused the president of US lines is really nervous what if something goes wrong you're really pushing this ship on her maiden voyage well she behaves wonderfully she does not have any technical problems then as she's approaching on her third day out as she's approaching the English coast they hit a 60 or 70 mile an hour gale blung right in their faces what do you think he does well he increases speed to 37 knots and he is really pushing this ship and the ship is rolling back and forth I mean she's built very much like a military vessel unlike other passenger ships which are built for stability she is a very sharp roller and she's definitely scaring some of the passengers but Manning keeps on pushing her at 6.15 in the morning on July 7, 1952 the SS United States sweeps past bishops rocks on the coast of England and takes the record away from the Queen Mary with a top speed of 35.59 knots and makes the crossing in 3 days 10 hours and 40 minutes smashing the Queen Mary's record by 10 hours she drops off her passengers in La Havre France that night spends the night in La Havre France and sails over to South Hampton, England and makes a triumphant arrival into that port and the reporters gather around Commodore Manning and William Francis Gibbs and say gentlemen how do you feel about this triumph an American passenger ship has not held the record since 1852 Commodore Manning says very confidently I really don't see what the big deal is just to let you know we were only doing four Commodore Manning is fired on the next voyage for when he leaves South Hampton Harbor on that second voyage he pulls up rather close to the Queen Elizabeth and zooms right past her it was considered very bad manners for if one passenger ship is passing another to go up close you did it from a respectful distance well Commodore Manning said let me show you what I can do and I think that might have been a response to the British newsreel saying oh we don't know what the Queen Elizabeth can do she has not been opened up to full speed and Commodore Manning was saying oh yeah well watch this and this picture down here shows Margaret Truman at 6.15 in the morning shaking the hands of a very tired Commodore Manning on the bridge of the SS United States the very moment she breaks the record Commodore Manning in this newsreel footage basically stumbles off in the distance she had not slept for about two days and had lost 10 pounds so here's footage of her pulling into Le Havre France showing all the crowds of French well-wishers watching her coming through the Le Havre breakwater and this very beautiful image I think shows her coming into New York on her return the return leg of her maiden voyage and last to her mast is a big blue pendant to symbolize the Bloor Band as are two brooms painted silver to show a clean sweep so what was it like to travel on the ship in the 1950s and early 60s when she was the most popular transatlantic liner of her day well once again even though this was the 1950s propeller planes are starring across the Atlantic at regular intervals most people were on board to go from point A to point B among the wealthy people on board the Hollywood stars going to film shoots here's John Wayne on the bridge of the ship with her second captain Commodore Anderson Judy Garland here is shown with her I forgot which husband it was and one of many Salvador Dali was a very frequent passenger on the SS United States and he was known to walk his pet ocelot on the promenade deck when he was traveling on transatlantic ships and passengers and he saw him walking this big cat and ran away in terror but this picture on the lower right shows that even in the winter this ship was meant to keep a schedule and this shows the ship caked in ice after a very rough transatlantic crossing but the ship did not just carry wealthy people she had two she had three classes and you had a lot of people who came over to the ship as immigrants traveling in tourist class and for them this was the start of a new life one of the gentlemen who immigrated to America on the SS United States was a very famous artist called David McCauley the author of Cathedral Castle The Way Things Work he traveled over on the SS United States as a 10 year old with his family who was immigrating over from a very battered post war England they were seeking a new life and he is now currently working on his own book on the SS United States along with his characteristic illustrations one of the great joys of this project has been interviewing all the former crew members or not all of them but many former crew members who for them this ship was their home their employment their college all rolled into one and Bill Crudner and Joe Rota have been especially helpful in this project and Joe Rota told me a very interesting story that involved a great navy man the father of nuclear navy Admiral and Joe Rota was a radio bell boy he would deliver messages from the radio room to passenger state rooms and one day he was walking along the deck carrying messages and he sees six officers on the bridge all with binoculars and he looks at that that's interesting I haven't seen that before and then he sees a submarine conning tower pop up and this submarine is not your ordinary diesel submarine it is keeping speed 32 knots with the SS United States and she's circling the SS United States and then she goes down after flashing her lights and then goes down and then Joe Rota goes to the radio operator and says what was that the radio operator says oh you didn't see anything you didn't see anything well about six hours later Joe Rota says he met with the radio operas oh I could tell you who that was Admiral Rickover in the USS Nautilus and she was doing a little military exercise on us and also she was signaling from the morselamp to wish Mrs. Rickover who was on board the SS United States a happy birthday what Admiral Rickover was really doing was he was trying to find out what the top speed of the SS United States was and trying to compare a steam driven ship with a nuclear powered ship and Admiral Hyman Rickover marched up to one of the Gibbs and Cox designers soon after this voyage and said you know who I am tell me what the top speed of the SS United States is well the designer had the very unfortunate news to report Mr. Admiral Rickover you're not on the need to know West those of you know Admiral Rickover he had a bit of a temper and that guy almost lost his job well William Francis Gibbs never traveled on the SS United States again and he only made that one voyage until he was a very old man he would continue to watch this ship come in until he got very ill in 1967 and he died at the age of 81 the day after that the SS United States sailed past his offices in lower Manhattan and blew a salute and dipped her flags in tribute and thank God William Francis Gibbs never got to see what happened to his ship because by the late 1960s the transatlantic era was over in 1958 the first transatlantic jet flies from New York's Idlewild airport to Paris Orly and cuts the flying time a propeller plane took 10 hours to fly across the Atlantic bumpy uncomfortable noisy you might have to stop in Ireland to refuel not very economical or very comfortable but the jet changes everything in 1958 you can fly seamlessly from New York to Paris in 6 hours 6 hours versus 3 days, 10 hours, 40 minutes what would you rather take well first the jet planes take away they're very wealthy all of a sudden the ships like the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mary, the Ile de France, the United States many others their first class areas grow empty and then by the mid 60s jet travel becomes cheap enough that anyone can travel on board and all these ships suffer they're pulled out of service some are repurposed as cruise ships most, especially the ones built before World War II are sent to the scrap heap in 1969 the United States Congress announces that they are no longer going to provide any sort of operational subsidy for the United States lines and specifically the SS United States because by that time there was no need to have a big troop ship we were now flying our troops to theaters such as Vietnam so they cut the subsidy the United States line said we can't afford to operate this ship anymore by this time a ship built to carry 2,000 passengers in three classes is now regularly carrying maybe only 6 to 700 so the riding was on the wall no matter how fast she was so in 1969 she is laid up in Newport News, Virginia mothballed, hermetically sealed completely intact and let to sit for years and years and years until in 1979 the U.S. Navy declassifies all the ship's once top secret design aspects her hull design her engine design it's all revealed people were always wondering what was the top speed of the SS United States there are people on board during her sea trials who claim they're on board and she did 50 knots well that is actually physically impossible it turned out her top speed the top sustained speed was 38.32 knots during her trials in 1952 but by that time it had become an academic exercise design a ship like that in 1984 she was sold to a real estate developer who planned to operate her as a floating and cruising condominium development well he ultimately sells off everything inside the ship to quote-unquote raise money for this development he goes bankrupt in the mid 90's the ship begins to really deteriorate in 1992 she is sold to another operator who tows her across the North Atlantic to Turkey now one of the dirty secrets of the SS United States was in order to make her fireproof instead of using wood they used asbestos she was the world's largest use of asbestos up to that time wallboards everything was loaded with asbestos she took her across the Atlantic and ripped out all that asbestos tons and tons and tons of it and unfortunately Greenpeace labeled the ship the ship of death she was no longer the pride of the American merchant marine she was towed back across the Atlantic in 1996 after being thoroughly stripped and was docked in Philadelphia and she's been there ever since as I said the interior contents of the ship have been scattered to the four winds and have been sold at auction this stuff, this mid century modern stuff now sells for lots and lots of money there was a time when people didn't like this sort of stuff but now chairs, tables, furniture silverware now sells for astronomical prices a lot of it is in private collections some of it is in the Mariners Museum in Newport Newers, Virginia in 2010 she was again up for sale on cruise lines who had planned to redo the ship as a modern U.S. flag vessel but then the great recession hit and devastated the world economy and they put up for sale and put up for sale for scrap miraculously just before all bids were due for the ship to be sent to maybe India just like the SS France shown here in 2008 a Philadelphia philanthropist called Jerry Lenfest whose father had been a naval architect who designed portions of the SS United States's watertight doors he was a multi-billionaire who had made his fortune in cable and was also a navy veteran he offered 5.8 million dollars for the SS United States to be saved and she was sold in 2011 to the SS United States Conservancy who now plans to redevelop her as a stationary attraction this shows are all lit up for the first time in years when that announcement was made well unfortunately that Jerry Lenfest money has now been has now depleted because it was used for maintenance costs and now the future of the ship is now up in question again I hope she's saved I think it would be like losing Penn Station all over again considering how much effort and love and attention went into the ship as one maritime historian said this ship was built like a European cathedral she's built to last forever she's 63 years old and her son is about 30 and she's still in considering the rust beneath that rust she's structurally in very good shape now I'd like to touch briefly on the rest of this presentation on the book I'm now working on tentatively entitled Full Sail another alternative title is American Speed going back from the 1950s to the 1850s when the American merchant Marine was truly preeminent on the world stage the envy of England especially not trying to catch up to England like we were during the transatlantic era this is the great clipper ship Great Republic designed by the great Bostonian naval architect Donald McKay this ship was over 300 feet long and grossed at 4500 tons and she was built entirely on speculation either to sail around Cape Horn for the California gold trade or to sail to Australia for the Australian gold rush it was a time of absolute exuberance in the American merchant marine people often ask me what's the origination of the term clipper well the first literal use of the term clip appears in one of the English poet John Dryden's poems describe how a falcon clips through the air and the definition of a clipper ship sailing ship with at least three mass that is built where speed is the primary function and often at the sacrifice of cargo capacity the book that I'm working on will focus very heavily on the development of New York City during the early and mid 19th century where the Erie Canal transforms New York into the nation's foremost shipping port and basically allows all the goods of the American heartland to flow through New York at the expense of Boston and Philadelphia and most of the great clipper ships sailed out of New York City a lot of them were built in Boston but most of them were registered and built and owned by New Yorkers one important innovation that the New Yorkers came up with and these ships were predecessors to the clippers with the transatlantic packet ships these are the ships that sailed in 1917 a group of four Quaker merchants and the Quakers play a very important part of the story a lot of them were formerly in the whaling business and then began investing in transatlantic ships they launched a line of packets called the black ball line named for the black ball on their topsole four topsole and these ships would sail on a regularly scheduled departure twice a month before that if you wanted to catch a ship to England you had to wait around until the captain decided it was time to sail or you had to wait around until the cargo the ship was full of cargo the black ball line said no for predictability we want our ships to sail twice a month and that way people who are shipping freight or passengers could plan their schedules around this departure but in the age of sail you couldn't depend on regularly scheduled arrivals it would take anywhere from six weeks to three months across the Atlantic especially in the winter I'm going to cover also some of the great merchants who built these these clipper ships and were involved in the age of sail they were strong personalities a lot of them were very very aggressive businessmen by today's standards a lot of them were interrelated one of whom I'm focusing on is a gentleman named Warren Delano from Fairhaven, Massachusetts he sailed to China in 1832 as a young man to make us fortune and eventually owned the first clipper ship to sail to California in 1849 he is the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt someone asked Franklin Delano Roosevelt by the way what is the secret to your political success and he quoted a very common and favorite phrase of his grandfather the clipper merchant Warren Delano I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing why is that? well the China trade was a very closed and often very shady operation in which young men from New England from cities like Newport from cities like Fairhaven, New Bedford would go and try their luck in the American and European foreign trading colony in Canton at that time in the early 19th century the only Chinese city open to trade and Americans wanted tea they wanted lots of tea they also wanted porcelain and other exotic exports from China and the godfather of all these Chinese merchants was a gentleman called Hukwa who at the time was the richest merchant in the world in the 1830s he was worth approximately $26 million which would make him the equivalent of a multi-multi-billionaire today and he trained a whole generation of American merchants like Warren Delano like Samuel Russell who later ended up founding Wesleyan University and Yale well he didn't found it but he funded a lot of Yale University and these firms were all Russell and Company, AA Lowen Brothers, Griswold, Grinnell and Mintern all interrelated New England families who moved down to New York married each other and were involved in the China trade now the key with tea especially was that tea needed to be shipped to America as quickly as possible or else it would spoil the faster a ship arrived in New York the higher prices it commanded the other things that we wanted to the Chinese wanted to buy so the Americans came up with something that the British had come up with earlier why not ship them opium so the British had cornered the Indian opium market that was closed to Americans so American traders like Warren Delano, like the Forbes family like the Lowes tapped into the Turkish opium market and would ship their drugs on, sorry this got out of order on these little ships ships that originated in the Chesapeake Bay known as Baltimore Clippers these were ships built entirely for speed very, very narrow hull sharp bows and opium was a very expensive cargo so you could make a lot of money with speed and these ships were meant to evade Chinese customs officials and pirates off Malaysia so these were kind of the drug running boats of their day now the typical merchant men of the time was definitely not built for speed they were built with what was called a codfish bow and a mackerel tail a very blunt bow to basically prevent the ship from diving into the water when going through high seas and this is a design that had been used since the 16th or 17th century and also offered a lot of cargo capacity well starting the 1840s a number of naval architects including this gentleman John Willis Griffiths came up with an idea of like why don't we take the opium clipper design and just make it bigger and create a faster China packet well the reason for this was the British had done some dirty work for us in the 1840s the British go to war with the Chinese over the opium trade and the Royal Navy steams into Canton Harbor and basically massacres thousands of Chinese and destroys the fortifications of Canton and basically forces open Canton and five other Chinese ports to Western trade and that basically the treaty that follows the Treaty of Nanking of 1842 which is the start of the so called century of humiliation as the Chinese call it the China trade greatly expands and a number of Americans are there during the final battle of the opium war including Warren Delano who watches it happen watches the Chinese get routed in their own city and Warren Delano writes in his diary he says well it's a shame that it had to happen this way but considering how arrogant the Chinese are they're getting their just dessert so and a number of merchants including Delano see this as a wonderful commercial opportunity so why don't we build bigger versions of these opium clippers that can carry tea faster to America and fetch higher prices so one of the first clipper ships that is designed along the Baltimore clipper model she is about 160 or 70 feet long so bigger than your typical little schooner has three masses to see which this ship which is designed by Warren Griffiths and is owned by a gentleman named Aspenwall who is also an ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt she cuts the typical sailing time from Canton to New York from 120 days to 74 days she was able to at a time when a typical China packet could only maybe go around 8 or 9 knots she was able to maintain speeds of 15 knots secrets the very narrow sharp hull and you pile on as much canvas as you can build your masses tall as you can you know basically cost be damned this shows an underwater model of what an extreme clipper looks like from the early 1850's this is the clipper ship Young America these are the names of these ships by the way built by William H. Webb in New York who later would go on to found the Webb Institute as you can see she has a wide midsection able to carry a significant amount of cargo in a flat bottom but very sharp ends well another boost to the clipper ship trade takes place in the in 1848, 1849 one gold is discovered in California and a lot of the clipper ship operators who are already starting to operate some of these early clippers to and from China are like well wait a minute we can sell all sorts of goods to minors who are venturing out to California everything from dry goods booze cheese furniture you name it everything this need to build a great city that great city that became San Francisco so in 1849 Warren Delano takes his clipper ship the Memnon which is also designed by Griffiths and sails her around from New York around the infamous Cape Horn to San Francisco that clipper ship cuts the typical sailing time from 160 days to 120 days soon after that the races on other clipper ship operators begin building custom built clippers for the California trade ships that are bigger than the T Clippers bigger more powerful and to operate these clipper ships in the California trade you have some very colorful characters who serve as captains a lot of these captains are like bully Bob Waterman was one of the most infamous he was captain of the sea witch for many many years not a one to spare the lash and these ships were often manned by people who are just wanting to get a free passage to California then jump ship as soon as they can as soon as they land in San Francisco by the early 1850's you had a shortage of people that wanted to go to sea so how did you begin recruiting seamen well you basically the captain speaks to the local saloon operators in the New York waterfront the ladies that own and operate the houses of ill repute along the waterfront and say we'll pay you a certain amount of money if you slip some opium into their drinks they pass out next thing they know they're on a clipper ship bound for California and they have to climb up a mass 200 feet tall some of them have never been to sea before flogging by the way was outlawed by congress in 1850 on American merchant ships but that didn't stop these captains from doing it anyway some captains like captain Daniel B. Palmer who's a prominent figure in my story was known to treat his crew very well but many of them were not the records set by these ships around the coast around Cape Horn of California truly were astonishing you had many clipper ship races in which sure in which people bet huge amounts of money millions of thousands of dollars upon the outcome the flying cloud versus the challenge versus the clipper ship M. B. Palmer in 1851 one ship that James Baines did the impossible in 1854 she was able to log 21 knots per hour under full sail now considering that only a few years before a good sailing ship could only maybe do around 10 or 11 pretty amazing feet and another Boston clipper ship the Lightning of 1854 she logged 436 miles in a single day and here's a picture of the infamous Tierra del Fuego and often to sail around Cape Horn a captain would almost have to go all the way down to Antarctica to fight to catch a wind that can take him around the other way because you are going up against when you're going around the tip of South America you are basically strong westerly winds you're going against the winds you can get blown backwards so often it would take weeks if you were unlucky to go around but this shows the beautiful clipper ship red jacket trying to navigate around basically the ice flows of the Antarctic the most famous clipper ship of them all was the flying cloud designed by Donald McKay and Boston this gives a sense this painting by Jack Spurling shows how magnificent these tall ships were I mean these mats are almost 200 feet tall and flying cloud made the record passage of 89 days from New York to San Francisco now consider only a few years before 160 days was considered to be a good passage and if you were lucky enough to be like Captain Josiah Perkins Creasy to make a crossing like this a clipper ship could pay off her entire $50,000 to $100,000 building costs in a single voyage selling goods to California then sailing across to China picking up tea sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to New York one voyage well as many of you know this was a very short era just like the SS United States the clipper ships came along in a transitional time when steam began competing with the age of sail the transatlantic trade was quickly taken over by steam ships by the 1850s they were able to cross in 14 days the British ships of the Qunar line and in 1855 the Panama Pacific opens a small railroad across the Isthmus of Panama 48 mile railroad which allows passengers in cargo to basically be carried across the Isthmus sparing them that long voyage around Cape Horn and British ocean going steamers by the 1860s were able to sail to China economically so the era of the great American clipper ships is only last for maybe 1846 to 1855 maybe 1857 when the Panic of 1857 happens and the final blow to the American Merchant Marine was the Civil War in which Confederate commerce raiders wreaked havoc on clipper ships whalers all sorts of vessels this is a very sad engraving showing the Confederate steam raider built in England the CSS Florida capturing and burning the clipper ship Jacob Bell in 1863 the CSS Florida ends up making a shipment of tea worth around two million dollars and that tea is promptly delivered to the thirsty citizens of Richmond, Virginia so anyway I apologize for going on a bit longer but I really appreciate having you here and does anyone have any questions or comments you mentioned the Atlantic it set the speed record crossing in 1905 one of the Kaiser Wilhelm Cup that speed record held for about a hundred years for sail oh for sail okay across the Atlantic okay I did not actually know but no I only I was following the Cape Horn and China not the transatlantic by sail also just recently I saw the largest sailing ship ever built just came out of the origin in Germany called the White Pearl 468 feet long it's built for a wealthy Russian oil bag name I don't know if you've heard about that I have not no I'll look it up I'd love to see it yes sir the clipper ships quite a few of those were actually disappeared a while at sea any comment on what was behind that I realize the storms the vagaries of ocean transit and all that jazz but anything to research the surface that was interesting there one of the early clippers the rainbow which is basically the predecessor to the sea which was John Wells Griffith's first clipper she disappeared I think after three years she set out from New York going around Cape Horn and was never heard from again and the theory was that the early clippers were so sharp and so narrow they dove into the ocean and the rainbow had problems with that early on when they saw the rainbow on the stocks in 1845 a lot of people looked at the ship and said this is the ship that's inside out she's not like this she's like this and a lot of people thought that Griffith's had gone a bit too far in his copying of the Baltimore clippers to create a sea worthy ship so on our first few voyages people noticed that the rainbow in fact in fact did dive a lot and the danger of being swamped and the theory is that she disappeared with all hands no one ever heard from her again or anyone on board so that might have happened I think the other way that one of these ships would sink was that there was the expression pooped when a wave would come over the stern and swamp it that way so these ships were also any wrong turn if they ever carried too much canvas they would go over one captain of the he was almost his ship was almost sunk off the coast of Indonesia and she was over on her side for an agonizing long period of time thankfully she had just enough buoyancy to come back up but the crew had to cut away her mass so she would come back up so they had a crippled ship that it couldn't had no mass but she was able to go back up so it was a very dangerous thing yes sir as an old geezer I would like to express the gratitude of the other old geezers for having two eight bells lecturers it's a pleasure to be here thank you oh yes sir I went to sea with people who had sailed on the United States and one of them had sailed for the US lines on the America when my two came along he was sailing as second assistant and the Navy took the ship over and they cleaned house for people who were questionable and he was the only engineer with the first assistant left oh wow so then the first assistant was an ensign the naval reserve so they told him to get the ship ready he says I'm not capable and they threatened him with jail they were going to shoot him and he wouldn't do it well he sailed as a commander oh my gosh I read somewhere that the United States lines during the 30s and the 50s they hired a lot of German Americans on board and I think on the SS America when they found a number of German spies who were on board there was a big scandal of that but yeah I think in the 50s too I spoke with a number of the crew members and they said a lot of the crew members had trained in German ships they also hired some British people away from the QNR lines with higher wages when I was sailing also we had a mate on board who used to stand tech watchers and he said when he came out of a better terrain there was a lot of traffic and you didn't bother with the rules of the road he said this thing was like a speedboat he said you zoom around it was great to run it I hope you enjoyed it Steve, thank you thank you so much, appreciate it