Some old, insightful articles on boats
Article by the economist David Zetland citing other articles about boats during the time period of 1875-2020 as taken from The Atlantic. Like myself, David is a subscriber. It provide some interesting reads on a variety of topics.
Some old, insightful articles on boats, The one-handed Economist, David Zetland
The Atlantic has been publishing since 1857. As a subscriber, I can access their archive, which is full of interesting tidbits. To focus my “plunge into the past,” I queried articles that mentioned sailing or sail boats, and found some really interesting stuff. The links on years go to PDFs.
1860: Boats turn from sidewheels to screw propellers, amid much skepticism.
1875: Mark Twain’s recollections on his time as a steamboat pilot (the basis for his 1883 book, Life on the Mississippi) in parts: one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. One good excerpt:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
1895: Much more historical fact on the week of battles between the English and “Spanish Armada” that took place before storms sank so many Spanish ships (=saved by the Atlantic) in 1588.
1897: The US Constitution is now America’s longest serving (active duty) ship, but it was already a legend in 1897. Read how it got its reputation.
1899: Why America needs a bigger merchant marine. Contrast the promises in this pre-Jones Act (1920) perspective to the actual harm resulting from Jones.
1904: The story of a skipper who set sailing records with a clipper ship and then was killed in the Civil War.
1909: Another call to rebuild the US merchant marine (see 1899 above), with some useful and useless “logic.”
1910: How railroads replaced canals for inland shipping, everywhere.
1922: Ferries in the SF Bay Area — before the bridges.
1950: A poseur yachtsman is forced to actually buy a yacht
1965: Two boating guys go crazy when they form a “Yacht Club.”
2011: Plastiki: Sailing Across the Ocean on a Ship Made of Plastic Bottles
2020: Four Dutch teens on a “study aboard” cruise in the Caribbean are forced to sail home across the Atlantic. It went well.
2015: The Dutch try to help New Orleans reconnect with its delta geography, which was altered in many detrimental ways since Twain’s 1875 reflections.
I was reading the 9/1937 issue of Fortune which discussed US shipbuilding and maritime affairs. The US never handled the transition from wooden ships to metal hulls all that well. The British and others could build ships much more cheaply. All through the 19th century, the US was playing catch up and losing its maritime capabilities.
When the US joined World War I the US launched a crash ship building program that took forever to crank out its first ship. By then, the war was almost over, and the recriminations were awesome. Despite this, the US decided it needed to be able to build and operate ships, hence the Jones-White Act. You can say what you will about the Jones Act, but it did save our bacon during World War II. Our ship building might not have been as cost efficient as that of others, but we had some ship building capacity and something of a native merchant marine which meant ships, sailors and related infrastructure.
We’re still terrible at building ships. I’ve been watching the struggle to get a new generation of Washington State Ferries, and the US is down to one supplier in the non-union South. They’re rounding up the money even now as the aging fleet isn’t getting any younger.
Kaleberg:
Terrible is not the word for it. The ships are going obsolete well before their time mechanically. The new designs are limited. I do not believe going all techie is 100%. When the system fails what do you do? Need a combination of resources.