Legends and Reality: The Wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald

"The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitchee Gummee.
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy."
- Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

November 10th marks the 39th anniversary of the sinking of the Great Lakes ore carrier, SS Edmund Fitzgerald. Ships have been sinking on the Great Lakes for as long as mariners have plied the waters of the big lakes. Some ships sink with only a passing mention in the news. Others become legends.

My great-grandfather, John McPherson, sailed on many small vessels on Lake Superior while working for the Booth Fishing Company which sold the abundant Lake Superior whitefish to restaurants all over the country. In 1922, he was returning to his home port in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan (also my home town) on a wooden tugboat named - ironically - Reliance. The tug had taken shelter in a protected bay on the north (Canadian) shore of Lake Superior to wait out a December storm.  They had no radio or radar. They did have a wireless telegraph to keep in touch with the home office. But in stormy weather, they were on their own. They waited days while food supplies dwindled and finally decided to make a run for it when the storm abated somewhat.  The Reliance had not gone more than twenty miles when the gale-force west winds pushed them onto the rocky shoals of Lizard Islands, a mile from the Canadian shore.

The propellor sheared off on the rocks.  The captain, crew and passengers of about twenty men and one woman decided to abandon what seemed to be their foundering ship and try to use the two lifeboats to get to Lizard Island. My great-grandfather went up to the top deck to help release the life boat davits (booms that hold the lifeboat). Just as they unlashed the davits, the Reliance was hit by a particularly strong wave and lurched violently sideways. The davit that John McPherson was working pivoted around and crashed into his back throwing him off the tilted deck and into the icy water. He was most likely unconscious immediately after he was hit in the back because he never reached for the life ring that was thrown to him. He disappeared under the waves. Two other men were also lost while trying to get to the island. But to the surprise of those still on board, the Reliance did not sink. The sturdy little tug was slowly pushed by the waves towards the Lizard Islands. Finally, the remaining crew and passengers were able to escape to the island and then get to the mainland another mile beyond. All survived despite a harrowing overland journey through waist-deep snows. 

The wreck of the Reliance made headlines in newspapers both locally and nationally - perhaps as much for the dramatic survival story that followed the wreck. And then it was another footnote in the history of Lake Superior shipwrecks. 

Unlike the Reliance, The Edmund Fitzgerald would not become another sad, but brief, part of Great Lakes lore. The reason, of course, was Gordon Lightfoot's hit song celebrating the "crew and good captain well-seasoned." It is a powerful ballad that pits the great ship manned with experienced seamen against the pitiless brunt of a November gale. It makes for good music. But it isn't quite true. 

There were other ships of comparable size and age on Lake Superior that day. None of those sank. Bad luck for "The Fitz"? Multiple inquests were held by authorities including the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board.  Their findings pointed to many mistakes and deficiencies that contributed to the disaster. 

The Fitzgerald and her sister ship, the SS Arthur B. Homer, had welded (rather than riveted) steel joints and both ships had reported structural failures in some of those joints. The Fitzgerald's scheduled repairs to the weld problems were canceled earlier in the year because, like the Homer, she was going to have her hull lengthened to carry more cargo. The repairs could be made at that time.

The captain of the Fitzgerald, Ernest M. McSorley, was known in Great Lakes maritime circles as a "heavy weather" captain, meaning that he would bull his way through storms rather than take shelter when he encountered severe weather. The captain of another large ship (the Wilfred Sykes) on Lake Superior that night sought shelter in Thunder Bay. Upon learning that the Fitzgerald had just been lost, The Sykes captain commented to lawyers who went on his ship that night to inform him of the sinking, that it was due to McSorley's negligence. McSorley was not held in high regard by some of his peers. 

There was plenty of blame to go around. The Coast Guard had inadequate standards for the amount of freeboard (the distance from the deck to the water) that a ship could safely maintain. There were no instrumentation or sensors for the crew to know if the cargo holds were flooding with water except that the ship would sit lower. The lower it sat, the more vulnerable it became to the thirty-five foot waves. The Coast Guard had no lifesaving personnel within any reasonable distance of the wreck site to help, even if there had been survivors. Watertight compartments were not required on Great Lakes ships prior to the sinking. Nor was relatively straightforward instrumentation such as a fathometer (to determine the depth of the water) installed on the Fitzgerald. The only way the crew could know the depth was to throw a lead line overboard (a rope with a weight on one end and knots at regular intervals to measure depth). Such readings were not going to happen in a raging storm. The nautical charts in the area of the wreck were found to be in error.   One of the shoals extended a mile further than was recorded on the charts. 

Overall, the Marine Board found that there was an attitude of complacency in the operators of Great Lakes vessels. The smaller size of the Great Lakes, as compared to the ocean, gave a false sense of security that in times of trouble, safety was never far away. Their concluding remarks begged to differ:

The nature of Great Lakes shipping, with short voyages, much of the time in very protected waters, frequently with the same routine from trip to trip, leads to complacency and an overly optimistic attitude concerning the extreme weather conditions that can and do exist. The Marine Board feels that this attitude reflects itself at times in deferral of maintenance and repairs, in failure to prepare properly for heavy weather, and in the conviction that since refuges are near, safety is possible by "running for it." While it is true that sailing conditions are good during the summer season, changes can occur abruptly, with severe storms and extreme weather and sea conditions arising rapidly. This tragic accident points out the need for all persons involved in Great Lakes shipping to foster increased awareness of the hazards which exist.

But "the legend lives on..." thanks to the power of Lightfoot's song. (It's funny that no one writes songs about airplane accidents. Maybe they are still too new in our pantheon of technology to take on the mantle of myth.) The gales of November will once again be blowing this week across Lake Superior as the first superstorm of the winter makes it way east. Let's hope that this time the "good ship[s] and crew" know enough to take shelter.

Reference from Wikipedia here.

The Ultimate Container Ship

How big can they build a container ship? Big enough so it can't dock in any U.S. port. Check out the video from the New York Times below. The Mary Maersk requires only 27 crewmen to operate the 1300-foot behemoth.  The automation on the bridge and in the engine room is a key part of why so there are so few crew. I can imagine a lot more unemployed seamen as ships of this size become more common. But as consumers, we love the low prices we get from cheap transportation of goods from the manufacturer to the market.

http://nyti.ms/1mZkgjM


Video: Behemoth at Sea

USS North Carolina(s)

Military technology has an amazingly short life for the amount invested to develop it. I was reminded of this fact when a couple of days ago, some friends and my wife and I visited Wilmington, NC for a quick getaway. We poked around the historic Old Town on the Cape Fear River. My friend and I decided to tour the USS North Carolina, the World War II battleship which is now a National Historic Landmark and floating museum.

We started our tour in the informative shore-side museum. I was surprised to learn that there had not been one USS North Carolina but four ships bearing that name. There was also one CSS North Carolina to add to the complement. These ships span the eras of naval technology as a startling-clear indication of just how quickly naval technology has changed.

Model in Museum

The first USS North Carolina was a sailing frigate commissioned for duty in 1824. The ship usually carried 74 cannons but was designed to handle as many as 102 guns. She (ships are always referred to in the feminine) was considered the most powerful naval vessel afloat at the time of her commissioning.  The ship spent most of the middle 1820s in the Mediterranean, showing the U.S. colors to demonstrate the strength of the country and to open trade with the region. She also spent time in the Pacific in the late 1830s defending American trade routes. By 1839, she was taken off the line and converted to more mundane duties as a receiving ship to house young naval recruits. Her time of active duty amounted to only 15 years. The reason she was considered to be obsolete was that she was too large and bulky for the nimble duty needed in naval maneuvers of the day.

The next North Carolina was a Confederate ironclad of the Civil War era. Already, fighting ships were converting from sail to steam and armor plating was the newest technology, even as cannons to pierce such armor grew ever larger. The CSS North Carolina was built in Wilmington, NC in 1863 but the new marine engineering of ironclad ships was not the long suit of the local builders. The ship was unstable and the hull was riddled by sea-worms within a year.  It sank in the Cape Fear River leaving an inauspicious record but it did demonstrate that the era of the sailing ship had passed and steel armor and steam were the technology of the future.

In 1905, the keel was laid on the next USS North Carolina, a cruiser of the era of the Great White Fleet. The ship was enormous by previous standards. It was over 500 feet in length and displaced 14,500 tons.  The cruiser carried a powerful array of cannons with the largest being 10-inch bore main guns. The cruiser (also known as ACR-12) saw combat service in World War I escorting convoys of ships across the North Atlantic. From the time she was commissioned to decommissioning amounted to 13 years.

Model of Bridge and 10-inch guns of ACR-12 in Museum

By far the largest of the ships bearing the name USS North Carolina was the battleship BB-55. This was the ship we were about to tour. The BB-55 was commissioned in 1940, just before the beginning of America's involvement in World War II. The new North Carolina was 728 feet long and displaced over 40,000 tons - three times what her predecessor had displaced. The battleship was on sea trials in the Caribbean when Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. She spent the first part of 1942 hunting for the German battleship Tirpitz before being deployed to the Pacific Theater in the middle of that year. For the rest of the war the ship was engaged in protecting aircraft carriers in virtually every campaign across the Pacific islands. She was torpedoed once and left with an enormous hole in her bow but it was not enough to sink her. When the war ended in August of 1945, she sailed back to Boston and was decommissioned in 1947 - a service life of six years and eight months. Her undoing? Aircraft. The modern aircraft found on ever-larger aircraft carriers were easily capable of destroying even a hardened battleship.

The Navy kept four of the World War II-era battleships in the reserve fleet for years and the USS Missouri actually participated in the shelling of Baghdad during the Iraq War. But the North Carolina's days of service were over. She stayed in mothballs for 14 years and was going to be sold for scrap when the enterprising citizens of Wilmington and North Carolina decided to try to save her as a memorial and museum. She was moved to her present berth in Wilmington in 1961 and opened as a museum.

But this was not the end of the ships named USS North Carolina. The latest in the long line of ships is the most advanced class of atomic submarines. The new sub, which is configured to be able to deliver not only missiles and torpedos, but complete Navy Seal teams to trouble spots, was commissioned in 2008. She is now stationed at Pearl Harbor.




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Side View Looking Towards bow

It was a beautiful fall morning with crisp, cool air as we strolled the teak decks of this state-of-the-art (for 1936) battleship. Even today, some 75 years later, she is still impressive.

Aft 16-inch Gun Turret

The massive 16-inch guns, three mounted in each of the turrets, one aft and two forward are the heart of the battleship's armament. We scrambled inside the aft turret and I was astounded to see the amount of hardware and control systems needed to make these guns work.

Inside Aft 16-inch Gun Turret

What we saw in the turret was only part of a huge support system that went down five decks from the main deck. These 16-inch guns could propel a 1200 pound shell out of the barrel at over 1500 mph, with a range of 20 to 25 miles!

Diagram showing multiple levels in gun turrets

The tour below decks was visiting a city - bakery, laundry, doctor, dentist, operating rooms, soda fountains, sleeping quarters, shoe repair - it was all there to maintain the crew of 2400 sailors.

GE Turbine powering one of four propellors

The ship was propelled by four main steam turbines that each powered a propellor, moving the ship forward at almost 30 mph. In places, the ship's armor was 16-inch thick steel plate. In fact, about 40 percent of the total weight of the ship was accounted for in the armor alone.

If you are ever near one of these large World War II battleships, I would certainly encourage you to go. While the BB-55 remains, Her sister ship, the USS Washington, was scrapped. A very similar class of battleships (known as the Iowa class) has several ships still in existence.  The USS New Jersey is berthed in Camden, NJ. The USS Missouri is part of the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii and the USS Wisconsin is now a museum in Norfolk, VA.
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Each generation of vessel carrying the name of USS North Carolina was an example of state-of-the-art naval technology in its day. None of these vessels remained at the cutting edge for even a decade. The enormous investments in design and development for most weapons systems has a very short half-life.  It would be pleasant to think that a day might arrive when such investments are no longer necessary. Until then, the ever-evolving technology of war will be part of the price of peace.

I wonder what the next ship that carries the name USS North Carolina will look like? Given the brief lives of these vessels, we might not have to wait that long to find out.

Floating Palaces

 [Note to readers: with this post, I am now offering images that can be enlarged by clicking on them. Often, the detail in the enlarged image greatly enhances the beauty of the picture. If the image can be enlarged, the mouse arrow will change to a hand when hovered over the image.]

Floating Palace: you don't hear the term much anymore but at one time it was the supreme compliment for a passenger-carrying ship.  Rich paneling, gilded fixtures, lush carpeting, detailed Corinthian columns supporting a dome or skylight, grand staircases - a Floating Palace had all of these and more.   Often (but not always), the words were used to describe an ocean liner. The steamboats which plied America's lakes and rivers in the 19th century also cultivated business by offering sumptuous furnishings and decor.

Scanning the fascinating photographs in the Library of Congress archives, I came across this photo which seemed filled with a melancholy for the past. The image was entitled, "Old Boats Beached to Rot Away, New York City."

Old Boats Beached to Rot Away

This photo is part of the Detroit Publishing Company archive at the LOC.  The date could only be determined to be sometime between 1900 and 1910.  The large steamboat in the left background can be easily seen to be the the Drew in this enlargement of a segment of the picture below:

 

Steamer Drew

 The poignancy of the image captured my imagination and I wanted to know more.  I did a little googling and learned that the Steamer Drew was built in 1865-66 for the People's Line, a company that operated steamboats on the Hudson River between New York City and Albany.  The line specialized in so-called "night boats", steamboats with sleeping cabins to accommodate overnight trips. The Drew might have been named for Daniel Drew, one of the shrewdest steamboat operators and Wall Street investors of the 19th century but I couldn't find documentation for this and there was already an earlier steamboat named the Daniel Drew sailing the Hudson.

The Drew cost $800,000 to build, an enormous sum in the closing days of the Civil War, and was equipped to handle the tastes of even the wealthiest of clients. The ship was almost 400 feet in length and had 284 staterooms on three tiers of decks.  The ship was powered by a vertical walking-beam engine having an 81 inch cylinder with a 14 foot stroke.  That is a massive single-piston engine!  Steam to feed the engine was supplied by two boilers mounted out on the external edges of the ship behind the paddlewheels.  In the photo above, the boilers and side-mounted paddlewheels have already been stripped off the old ship.

Ad from 1900 magazine

The Drew sailed without incident for over 30 years with its sister ship, the Dean Richmond. In the fall of 1896,  the new steamboat, Adirondack, was added to the People's Line. The Drew continued to carry passengers for a few more years but was finally retired in August of 1901.  The ship was sold to J.H. Gregory of Perth Amboy, New Jersey to be scrapped.  Unfortunately, the retired steamship burned to the waterline from a fire of undetermined origins on July 2, 1902.  The picture above must date from sometime between August 1901 and July 1902. If you look closely at the image, you can see some men in the wreckage near the bow of the ship.  Were these workmen or were they vagrants looking for something to plunder and were perhaps the source of the fire?

Further searching of the Library of Congress archives turned up a beautiful Currier and Ives print of the Drew that was published in 1876 at the height of her glory.

 The external boiler is clearly visible on the near side of the ship behind the paddlewheel.  In fact, the semi-circular box that enclosed the upper half of the paddlewheel was a work of art in its own right.  As you can see in the magnified view below, the paddlebox was painted to mimic the interior ceiling of the Pantheon in Rome, complete with painted sculptures on either end of the arc.

  The Drew was only one of hundreds of steamboats that sailed the Hudson in the century following Robert Fulton's steamboat, North River (often called the Claremont), which first sailed in 1807.  Many of these ships, including the Drew, became legends in their own time.  We have nothing like them today except perhaps the ever-bigger oceangoing cruise ships that have become small cities on water. They, too, are Floating Palaces but somehow they seem to lack the grace of the old steamboats of the Hudson.  The real Queens of the Waters are gone forever.

Outside the Box

Ships have been with us for a long time. We all know what they look like - a long rectangular box with a pointed bow and rounded stern. A few structures somewhere on the top of the long box to provide a place for the crew to live and to operate the ship.  A smokestack sticks up somewhere - usually towards the rear of the ship.  What could be more ordinary?  But why does it have to be that way? Why not think, if you allow me the little pun, outside the box?

Take a look at the ship in the picture below.  Something just looks... well... different about this ship, doesn't it?  Whose slightly delirious dream was this?

Steamer A.D. Thompson
Library of Congress Collections

The ship in the picture is the A.D. Thompson and it is a class of ship known affectionately to those who sailed them as a whaleback.  Whalebacks were never used for whaling.  Most of them (but not all) sailed on the Great Lakes.  The name (nickname, really) came from the shape of the hull which looked like a whale's back sitting low in the water when the ship was fully loaded.  The name was intended to be descriptive, even complimentary.  If you look at the way the bow comes to a little flat point, you can immediately understand the origin of the other, more derogatory nickname - the pigboat.

The whaleback design was the brainchild of ship's master, serial-entrepreneur, and inventor, Alexander McDougall. McDougall was born in Scotland in 1845.  His parents emigrated to the Lake Huron region of Ontario when he was a young boy.  His father died when McDougall was only ten and he took up a variety of odd jobs to help feed his family. By his late teen years, he had signed on as a deckhand on a Great Lakes freighter.  Being talented and hardworking, he rose rapidly and got his ship master's license when he was just 25, one of the youngest captains on the Great Lakes.

In the latter decades of the 19th century, the Great Lakes were the Northern highway for bulk freight traffic as lumber, iron ore, and grain were shipped from the western regions to the population centers in the East. The Great Lakes were home to hundreds of ships.  At first, these were schooners and other forms of sailing ships, but steam engines rapidly took over as the means to power these ships.  The size of the ships wasn't initially limited by the steam engines, it was limited by the small canals, channels, and locks that the ships had to navigate.  To increase the amount of tonnage that could be hauled on each trip, smaller ships began towing small barges (sometimes called consorts). McDougall was an experienced captain and he knew the difficulties of pulling these unpowered hulls, often through large waves and high winds.  Towing a barge could be a decidedly tricky task, more-so as the weather got bad.

McDougall began thinking about how to design a better barge. He wanted the most volume for the least perimeter, the least resistance to winds and waves, and a shallow-draft design that could be moored at docks with only a limited depth of water.  His innovation was his patented hull design, later dubbed the whaleback.  McDougall built his first consort, named simply Hull No. 101, over the winter of 1887-1888.  It was a technical success. But when McDougall tried to raise capital to build more consorts using his novel design, he was met with derision by the experienced businessmen around the Great Lakes.  Undaunted, he headed to New York where he enlisted the financial backing of several Eastern capitalists including John D. Rockefeller.

Two whaleback consorts in tow out of Poe Lock
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan
Library of Congress Collections

McDougall founded the American Steel Barge Company in 1889 and began building his cheap, efficient barges in Duluth, Minnesota. After he had built five whaleback consort vessels, McDougall moved his entire shipbuilding operation next door to Superior, Wisconsin.  In 1890, McDougall built his first self-powered whaleback steamer, the Colgate Hoyt (named for one of his first financial backers).  This ship cost just a little more than twice the cost of one of his unpowered barges and could steam at 16 knots - very respectable for its day.

In 1893, McDougall built his only whaleback passenger ship, the Christopher Columbus.  The ship was used to ferry passengers from downtown Chicago, six miles south to the World's Columbian Exposition.  Following the Exposition, the passenger ship was placed in regular service between Cleveland and Chicago.

S.S. Christopher Columbus
Only Whaleback Passenger Ship Ever Built

While McDougall's innovative vessels proved themselves to be workable, the design never caught on.  Whalebacks suffered from a few practical limitations: the curve of the hull made the hatch openings smaller than on conventional ships and barges. This also made the hatches more prone to being bent in the loading and unloading process.  The hatches were expensive to repair. The design also lacked a protected passageway below decks from the front to the back of the ship making it difficult for the crew to communicate in rough weather (remember that this was before radio was invented).  Mostly though, the design just didn't look good to the more established shipping company owners.  The American Steel Barge Company was eventually absorbed into the American Ship Building Company in the late 1890s.

McDougall, ever the entrepreneur, didn't limit himself to ship design.  He operated a company that managed over a thousand stevedores on various Great Lakes docks. He owned an insurance company that wrote policies on Great Lakes shipping. He sat on the board of directors of several electric companies. And in 1899, after selling the whaleback company, he bought the Collingwood (Ontario) Shipbuilding Company, reorganized it, and ran it successfully for many more years building conventional ships.

McDougall died in 1924.  While his vision of a new type of hull did not have the impact that he had hoped for, he was able to demonstrate that his technical ideas were highly workable.  The whaleback ships were gradually scrapped out over the years.  One, the Thomas Wilson, lies at the bottom of Lake Michigan just outside the Milwaukee harbor entrance and is a popular diving destination.

Now, only one whaleback remains in existence.  The S.S. Meteor has been slowly rusting away as a museum ship in Superior, Wisconsin, where it was built in 1896.  When she's gone, none of these daring and innovative ships will remain.  But the old photos still tell the tale of the days when the whalebacks were the talk of the Lakes.

S.S. Meteor
Superior, Wisconsin

Charles W. Morgan

In 2007, I wrote a post about the Charles W. Morgan, the only remaining American whaling ship from the days of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.  Since 1966, the ship has been docked at Mystic Seaport marine museum in Mystic, Connecticut.

I visited the ship that summer and saw a remarkably well-preserved vessel that had made over 37 voyages during its long career. The ship looked good sitting at the dock - as you can see from some of my photos below:

The ship looked fully functional, but it had only the outward appearances of being in good shape.  The ship's internal structure had deteriorated to such an extent the Morgan would like sink if it ever tried to sail again.

I read this morning in the Science Times section of the New York Times that the Morgan has been hauled out of the water and is being completely rebuilt to make it seaworthy once more.  The goal is to have it under sail in three years.

This restoration is taking advantage of every high-tech tool available.  The ship has been completely laser scanned and x-rayed to reveal the subtleties of how it was built and what parts of the internal structural elements have rotted or corroded to a dangerous point.  The $10 million dollar restoration is also adding a great deal to the knowledge of how ships were built during this era.  No plans, models, or documentation remains on the original construction of the ship so this is a chance to get a better understanding of ship construction technology.

At one time, the American whaling fleet consisted of 2700 ships like the Morgan.  Now, the Morgan is the only representative of those times.  While our views on whaling have changed dramatically in the ensuing 150 years since the heyday of whaling, boats that serviced the whaling industry are a part of our culture and deserve to be preserved - if only to remind us of how insensitive we were to the natural world.

The meeting of new technology tools and the old marine technology gives me some curious feelings.  What would those original shipwrights have thought if they could see their handiwork being analyzed by sophisticated portable x-ray scanners? What would it mean to them to know that their ship would still be with us 160 years later?  My guess is that they would have felt a great deal of pride in their workmanship. No digitization needed for them to build a ship.  They built it with their hands and their know-how.

Imagine someone in the year 2170 getting their hands on, say,  a Toyota Prius.  How primitive it would have seemed to them. How simple the times in which it was built.  An internal combustion engine hybridized with electric motors and storage batteries?  How quaint!  So... 21st Century.  But even if our future restoration team was successful, I don't believe that the Prius would never ever look as beautiful as a 19th Century, square-rigged whaling ship under full sail.

Photo Credits:

Whaling engraving from Wikipedia
Laser scan from New York Time article
All others taken by the author

More to Explore:

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville at Google Books
In to the Deep, American Whaling and the World, PBS American Experience

Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.

Transportation Systems: Centralize or Decentralize?

I have commented from time to time on these pages about transportation.  Most recently, my musings have been about the well-understood insight that speed collapses distance. It also increases our sensitivity to time.  We have the railroads to thank for the first modern example of this phenomenon.  The network of rails which crisscrossed the country in the middle of the nineteenth century united the country in a way that would have been impossible just a few years earlier. With the increased speed of transportation, the whole trajectory of the country's development shifted westward and took on an east-west orientation as opposed to the north-south orientation that had dominated the earliest days of independence.

What I hadn't fully appreciated was how the railroads tended to be a centralizing force in the development of the United States.  The huge capital investments and the need to maximize the amount of freight carried on every train led to some cities growing to dominance as the railroad lines coalesced on regional hubs.  Chicago is probably the best example of a city that grew from virtually nothing to a metropolis due to this centralizing effect.  Farmers wanting to get their crops to market needed railroads.  The railroads that fanned out west of Chicago provided just such a transportation network.  The produce (especially grain) from the Western farms was then transported on trunk railroads to the East.  Like Chicago, those cities which had some early advantage in the developing railroad network in a region tended to grow much more rapidly.

Highway transportation networks of the twentieth century had just the opposite effect.  Farmers and manufacturers were no longer governed by the fixed schedule of the railroads.  Trucks could be scheduled to pick up and deliver freight at any time and in any location, even those far removed from the railheads.  As a result, the earlier concentrations of industry began to drift away from the small number of hub cities.  Manufacturers moved their operations to be closer to their sources of supply, or nearer their markets, or to access cheaper labor.  The result has been a rebalancing of the differences between some of the earlier metropolitan leaders and their former junior cities.

Technology creates patterns and just as easily an even newer technology can fundamentally change those patterns.  Over the last twenty to thirty years, we have been living in a different pattern yet again: globalization.  Now the patterns of transport and connections span the globe.  The lure of cheap labor, capital incentives, and the low cost of ocean transport has resulted in industry after industry moving their operations offshore.  And as already mentioned, transportation is again at the heart of some of those influences.  This time, the transportation revolution has been in container ships which have dramatically lowered the cost of shipping manufactured goods of all kinds.

What new patterns will emerge next?  Surely, we will continue to see changes.  Perhaps these changes will span decades and hence be less immediately apparent.  But it is impossible to imagine that we are now living in a static world.  If I was trying to predict what the future patterns might be, I would put some of my money on watching innovations in transportation systems.  No matter how much we move into the Knowledge Economy, we still need physical products and they have to arrive where we can purchase them.

The Erie Canal

Erie Canal at Lockport, NY

I just finished reading a fascinating book on the Erie Canal entitle, Wedding of the Waters, by Peter L. Bernstein. I knew a little about the Erie Canal. Everyone knows a little about the Canal even if it is only the old childhood song with the line, "Low bridge, everybody down, low bridge for we're coming to a town." But the story is much more interesting than a simple song lyric and Bernstein does a great job telling the reader about the political and technical problems that had to be solved before the Erie Canal was completed in 1825.

From the earliest days of this country, knowledgeable leaders knew that the future of the country depended on creating an economical link with the frontiers to the west. Given the state of technology in the late 18th century, that link was obviously a water route. The problem was the Appalachian Mountains, which effectively closed off the lands on the far side of the mountains from trade with the east. One of the earliest proposed river routes was to build a canal and locks based on the Potomac River being connected to the Ohio at Pittburgh. A company called the Potomack Canal Company undertook this task and after a quiescent period during the Revolution was headed up by none other than George Washington. As Bernstein writes in his book:

In 1785, after completing a trip all the way from Mount Vernon to Pittsburgh and then down the Ohio River, he [George Washington] expressed his urgent concerns to the governor of Virginia:

“I need not remark to you, Sir, that the flanks and the rear of the United States are possessed by other powers - and formidable ones too: nor need I press the necessity of applying the cement of interest to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds - especially of binding that part of it which lies immediately west of us, to the middle States. For what ties let me ask, should we have upon those people, how entirely unconnected with them shall we be, and what troubles may we not apprehend, if Spaniards...and Great Britain...should hold out lures for their trade and alliance? That will be the consequences of their having formed close commercial connexions with both or either of those powers?...The western settlers (I speak now from my own observations,) stand, as it were, upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way.”

The effort to open the Potomac went on until after Washington's death in 1799 but was a failure. The company even had to resort to slave labor when the low-paid immigrants deserted the dangerous and difficult job in droves.

In contrast, the New Yorkers saw the perfect opportunity to build a canal connecting the Hudson River with the Great Lakes by using the Mohawk River valley, the only northern valley running east and west through the Appalachians until you go as far south as Georgia. Years of proposals, surveys, and acrimony went by trying to get people behind the building of a canal. The State of New York finally proposed building such a canal with federal government money and was turned down, not once, but twice -- the first time by Thomas Jefferson who virtually laughed at the absurd idea and later by James Madison. So like good citizens, the State of New York decided to pay for it themselves.



Image: Profile of topography of Erie Canal

Imagine digging a 363 mile long, 40 foot wide by 4 foot deep ditch with only hand shovels, horse-tools, and a little blasting powder. And what was known as Clinton's Ditch (for De Witt Clinton, champion of the Canal and governor of New York) had to go up and down 675 vertical feet using 83 locks. The kicker to me is that at the time, there were zero civil engineers in America. Two of the men who took leading roles in designing and building the canal were judges who had a little surveying experience to help them settle boundary disputes.

The canal was completed on-time and essentially on budget. The entire bond debt that the State incurred was retired in 1836, years ahead of schedule. The cost of shipping wheat and other bulk materials from the west dropped by 95 percent. It not only made commercial trade with the west economically feasible but it also opened the gates to settling cities like Cleveland and Chicago. It would be hard to find a single project that had as much impact with the possible exceptions of the Transcontinental Railroad and the Panama Canal. I am not sure these even measure up.

Bernstein goes on to make the point that the Erie Canal not only connected the regions within the United States, but it also connected the United States to Europe through vast grain shipments that allowed Britain in particular to feed the hungry workers of the industrial revolution cities.

Given all the noise of late from some quarters about the inefficiency of government spending on infrastructure, I found it ironic to read what Bernstein had to say in his epilogue.

Suppose we had to bet today on which project would turn out to be the more successful effort, geography aside: a profit-seeking venture controlled by one of the great executives and administrators of all time [Washington], or a state-financed project managed by a committee of politicians. The choice would be an obvious one. Thomas Jefferson had reminded George Washington in early 1784, “Nature then has declared in favor of the Potomac, and through that channel offers to pour into our lap the whole commerce of the Western world. [Moreover] public undertakings are carelessly managed, and much money spent to little purpose.”

Yet the privately owned and operated Potowmack Company ended up a financial failure and finished way behind schedule, while the committee of politicians who managed the construction of the Erie Canal would oversee their novel, complex, and gigantic project with high success, bringing it to completion on schedule, at a mind-boggling level of expenditure that came close to the original estimates, and without a single significant blunder or failure along the way. The long odds would have come out the winner on that bet.

Today, the Erie Canal is finally quiet, having been superceded by the New York State Thruway and the St. Lawrence Seaway. A much-modernized version of the canal still carries an occasional load of small freight and pleasure boats. At many places, you can still find the archeological remnants of the original structures. I find it encouraging to realize what people can do when they set their mind to a task. It is also a reminder that even the greatest of endeavors comes laden with naysayers and politics.

The Idea For the Steamboat

John Fitch is not a name that immediately springs to mind if asked to name a great American Inventor. In fact, he could reasonably claim to have invented the steamboat decades ahead of Robert Fulton. If you visit the U.S. Capitol you will find a painting of John Fitch decorating one of the arches of that building. In fairness, Fulton never claimed to have invented the steamboat. But he and his partner, Robert Livingston, made it the first economically successful steamboat company by operating the North River steamboat (later called the Claremont) on the Hudson River between New York and Albany.

John Fitch was the complete opposite of Fulton in almost every way. Fulton was a learned man, a successful artist turned entrepreneur. Fitch was poorly educated, a sometime-clockmaker, button maker, and surveyor. But they shared a vision of how a successful steamboat could forever change commerce by allowing water navigation that was freed from the constraints of either currents or winds.

I am interested in Fitch because I am interested in how inventors and innovators think. How do they come up with their ideas? Is there anything in common between these influential creators that we can apply to today’s problems? Are these people somehow gifted with insights beyond the abilities of the rest of us? If we understood how the “Aha’s!” occurred, maybe we could learn how to be more creative or maybe even teach creativity.

John Fitch was born in 1743 and grew up in Connecticut, the fifth child of six in a poor, religiously-strict family. He went to school until he was ten after which his father pulled him out to work on his farm. He was a very bright child and devoured whatever books he could get his hands on. He taught himself advanced math and geography from books he read outside of school. Fitch was apprenticed at a young age to learn clock-making and he fulfilled his apprenticeship despite the fact that the clock maker only used John to work his farm fields and never taught him any of the skills of the clock-making trade. Fitch taught himself about clocks later by taking clocks apart to clean and repair them. He was taught a little about brass founding which he later used in a small successful business making and peddling buttons.

Fitch comes across in the histories as a cantankerous man who bickered his way through life. He was married just a year when he left his wife and newborn child because he couldn’t get along with his spouse. During the Revolutionary War, he tried to serve in various New Jersey militia units and was voted out of various officer positions by other people who took a dislike to him. He turned to surveying the lands west of the Appalachians after the war and was captured by Indians who sold Fitch and his companions as hostages to the British in Detroit. Along the way during the long enforced march to Detroit, he fought he fought with his fellow captives and later on with his captors. Eventually, he was released back in New York and returned to Pennsylvania where he had lived before his western adventures began.

None of this would suggest what came next. According to his own autobiography, Fitch and a friend were walking home after church one Sunday in the spring of 1785. Fitch was on foot because he had rented out his horse to help pay for the feed to keep the animal. Fitch was now in his forties and getting arthritic. His knee was hurting and they stopped for a moment to let him rest when a horse-drawn carriage whisked past them. According to Fitch, not having his horse he was suddenly struck with the idea of creating a horseless carriage. Not only that, and this is the part that I find hard to believe, he thought the power for this machine should come from steam. Why does this amaze me? Fitch had never even heard of a steam engine, let alone seen one. When he later described his idea to the minister, Fitch was chagrinned (his words) to have the minister show him a picture of a Newcomen steam engine in a book. At the time, there were only three steam engines in the whole of the United States and all of these engines were the large, stationary engines that were used to pump water.

Fitch went furiously about trying to work out the details of his horseless carriage idea for a few weeks. The details of what he came up with are missing but he apparently quickly came to the realization that the horseless carriage had bigger problems in terms of poor roads and other impediments to its success. Fitch did have direct experience with taking rafting boats down the Ohio River. These boats only made a one-way journey as it was just too difficult to row them back up the river against the current. They were broken up for timbers when they reached their destination. Fitch knew that a boat that could travel up-river easily would be of tremendous commercial value. Fitch also realized that it was not enough to come up with the idea. He had to have a way to protect it. He sought patent protection for the idea from state legislatures before there was a national patent law. He was locked in a furious battle with another independent inventor, James Rumsey, who also claimed to have invented the steamboat. For a fascinating account of all of this I would suggest you read Andrea Suttcliffe’s excellent book entitled Steam.


So how did it turn out? Badly. Fitch went on to actually create a working steamboat that operated for a year out of Philadelphia on the Delaware River but it was a financial loser and Fitch eventually gave up. He moved to Kentucky, turned to alcohol, and, legend has it, killed himself in despair in 1798. Not a happy ending to our story. Rumsey, by the way, also came to naught, dying in England of a stroke after an attempt to build a steamboat there.

So what to make of this story about Fitch? I find it amazing that Fitch could have conceived of a steam-powered horseless carriage when he had never in his life to that point seen or heard of a steam engine. That would be the equivalent of me thinking of using, I don’t know, an ion transmission de-rectifier (ficitious...I think?) to produce ethanol when I had never seen or heard of one. I think the story that Fitch told is an apocryphal one that he later invented for his own glory. Somewhere along the line, Fitch knew something about steam and harnessing it for power. He had heard of the concept or seen the power of steam in some other context. His trade work might have given him the insight. He was a brass founder and the melting and cooling of metal certainly involved water and quenching which produces steam. Being skeptical of his self-reported flash of insight may not be fair. He might truly have had just such a vision in which case, Fitch really was a genius. Fitch spent the rest of his life trying to realize his idea and he almost made it. The Delaware River was much slower flowing than the Hudson and there were decent enough roads by the river so that travelers had a viable alternative to his relatively slow steamboat.

Back to my original questions. Can we learn anything about creativity from Fitch? First, he was very bright and inquisitive. He described himself as a child as “crazy about learning”. He was tenacious. He was constantly looking for some way to make a buck. He could visualize a different future and he could also foresee the need for protection for his ideas. And his flash of insight first came as an answer to his own personal need. Fitch was too early. The technology wasn’t there yet, the patent laws weren’t yet in place. If Fitch had been born twenty years later, school children for generations might have learned that John Fitch, not Robert Fulton, invented the steamboat. So the last lesson is that ideas have their time and place. But hats off to John Fitch, American Inventor.

The Art of Riveting

I was interested to read a recent article by William Broad in the Science section of the New York Times entitled "In Weak Rivets, A Possible Key to Titanic's Doom". The article summarized investigations by historians of science who have looked into the question of whether Harland and Wolff, builders of the Titantic and her two sister ships Olympic and Britannic, used sub-standard rivets on the Titanic (see my previous post about these ships). Deep submersibles investigating the Titanic's wreck site have seen that the plates in the forward part of the ship's plates sprung open from the impact with the iceberg. The bow and stern of the ship were put together with iron rivets while the center, higher-stressed, portion of the hull was riveted using stronger steel rivets. The evidence seems to suggest that poor quality material and poor riveting techniques lead to brittle rivets which fractured more easily when the ship hit the iceberg.

What caught my eye in the article was a description of the riveter's art:

In their research, the scientists, who are metallurgists, found that good riveting took great skill. The iron had to be heated to a precise cherry red color and beaten by the right combination of hammer blows. Mediocre work could hide problems.

This really speaks to my blog of a couple of days ago about defining what is technology? The Greeks would have easily called the art of riveting "techne". It was something that took a highly skilled and experienced worker to do correctly. Done right using good material, iron rivets were perfectly acceptable fasteners. But done poorly (the builder couldn't find enough qualified riveters for the massive project) and with inferior materials (the iron ordered was often of a lower grade), then the integrity of the rivets were very much in question.

The article went on to describe how iron gave way to steel in later riveted construction and hand riveters were upgraded with automatic riveting equipment to insure more consistent results. Certainly, these were steps in the right direction to insure the safety of structures. But somewhere along the way, another art died, the art of the hand riveter. We probably don't need many of them anymore but it is a great example of how so many other artisans have disappeared to progress. Stone masons, wood carvers, glass makers, steel workers, these occupations and more have become part of the "lost arts", part of the "lost techne". TItanic was lost for the lack of techne.

Cutty Sark

The clipper ship, Cutty Sark, was launched on November 22, 1869.

As a child, I joined the many people who thought this ship was akin to a work of art. When I was about 10 years old, I received a large Revell model of the Cutty Sark as a Christmas present. The model was a challenge to build (especially for a ten-year-old). I remember the lines of that ship as being almost sensuous.

In the summer of 2004, I was able to visit the Cutty Sark at her berth in Greenwich, England. She was even more beautiful than I remembered from my childhood memories. I could feel myself being drawn to her in a way my family didn't much understand.

The Cutty Sark was a ship built to sail the Horn of Africa in the China tea trade. Five days before she was launched, however, the world for which she was built changed forever. The Suez Canal opened on November 17, 1869. The Canal eliminated the need for the fast clippers to take the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope. The Cutty Sark plied the tea trade for only eight years before she was no longer profitable. She found later life in the wool trade between England and Australia. Later still, she sailed under the Portuguese flag.

The Cutty Sark was more or less an aging derelict headed into oblivion when in 1922 she was spotted by and English captain, Wilfred Dowman. Dowman had seen the Cutty Sark under full sail when he was a young seaman and never forgot her beauty. He bought the vessel from her Portuguese owners and completely refitted her back to her original condition as a clipper ship. Dowman used her as a training ship until he died in 1938. The ship eventually found a permanent home in a specially-built drydock at Greenwich in 1954.

But the Cutty Sark continued to make the news. In May of this year a terrible fire broke out on the clipper as she was undergoing extensive renovations. Fortunately, much of her original timbers had been removed for the renovation and hence were not damaged by the fire. The ship will be brought back yet again as the last best example of the extreme clipper.

Extreme clippers like the Cutty Sark are some of the best examples of the intersection of technology and art. The perfection of form meeting function can stir the soul. It certainly stirred mine at a very young age. Perhaps we have lost something when function alone becomes the principle in technology. Technology is built to serve but it can also be beautiful. At least I think so.

Tragic Sisters

Today marks the anniversary of the sinking of the White Star Liner, HMHS Britannic, on November 21, 1916. Britannic was fitted out as a hospital ship during World War I. The ship was in route from Southampton to the Middle Eastern theater via the Mediterranean. The mission was to pick up casualties and bring them back to England.

Britannic's maiden voyage was on December 23, 1915. Eleven months later, she would be gone.

On the morning of November 21, the ship struck what has since been presumed to be a mine. She sank in less than an hour. Thankfully, the ship was on the outbound journey and carried no patients. Only thirty of the almost 1100 crew on board the vessel died that day. Most of those killed had hastily entered lifeboats against the captain's orders. The lifeboats were sucked into the still spinning but exposed propellers of the ship as she sank by the bow.

The Britannic was the ill-fated sister ship of the RMS Titanic. Titanic sank on April 14, 1912 from a breach in her hull after colliding with an iceberg on her maiden voyage. The "unsinkable" Titanic went down in just a little over three hours with a loss of 1,517 passengers and crew.

Britannic was redesigned following the Titanic disaster to allow Britannic to stay afloat with six of her forward compartments flooded (Titanic could survive only four flooded compartments). The mine explosion caused flooding of five compartments which should have allowed the ship to survive. She was flooded in her first four compartments and the watertight doors were ordered closed. But a door between engine rooms five and six jammed and failed to close allowing a fifth compartment to flood. The ship's fate was sealed from an unexpected source. Apparently, the portholes on the lower decks were kept open to allow ventilation into the stuffy spaces below deck. Water poured in through the open portholes filling Britannic beyond her safety limits. The ship hit the mine at 8:12AM. She was gone by 9:00AM, three times faster than Titanic's sinking.

What interested me about this story was that despite every effort made to improve the "unsinkability" of the Britannic, the best efforts of the engineers and builders of this great vessel were undone by a failure of a door closing and the unforeseen consequences of something as simple as open portholes. This was perhaps not as much hubris as bad luck and lack of contingency planning.

Engineering is an imperfect art. The engineers who redesigned the Britannic had a living laboratory to study how a ship sinks if the hull is breached. They designed the ship for safety and yet it was not enough. It was as though the gods were telling them that despite their best efforts, they were not in control.

Note: Britannic and Titanic had a third sister: RMS Olympic. Olympic was the first of the trio. She was launched in 1910 and served for 24 years before being retired and scrapped in 1935.

Robert Fulton, American Entrepreneur

Yesterday, I wrote about Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson was supposed to be an engineer but he became a writer. Today is Robert Fulton's birthday (born November 14, 1765). Fulton began his career as an artist at age 17 in Philadephia. He later moved to England to paint portraits and landscapes under the tutelage of he well-known artist, Sir Benjamin West. While artistically successful, Fulton was not satisfied with the living he could make from his art. He gave it up to become an entrepreneur. His early success was in devising more efficient means to dig English Canals. Later (1797), he moved to Paris to pursue his fortunes.

I mentioned Fulton in an earlier posting as one of the would-be developers of the submarine as a naval weapon. Fulton tried to sell his submarine idea to the French to defeat the English Navy. When they showed little interest, he tried selling the same idea to the English to defeat the French Navy. The English also declined and so he tried to sell the idea to the American Navy. The Americans were willing to underwrite his experiments and he continued to work in war armaments all the way through the War of 1812 (although none of his submarines, mines, or other ideas ever had much of an impact).

Fulton was nothing if not enterprising. Fulton met Robert Livingston while both lived in France in 1801/1802. Livingston was President Jefferson's minister to France and he was negotiating with Napolean for the Louisiana Purchase. But Livingston had long had an interest in steamboats on the Hudson and he and Fulton struck a deal to begin working on steamboat prototypes while both were in France. Fulton actually succesfully demonstrated a rough prototype on the Seine (about where the Eiffel Tower now stands) on Aug. 9th, 1803. At this same time, Fulton ordered a steam engine from Boulton and Watt in England for delivery to New York to power his Hudson River steamboat. He never told Watt his plans for the engine because Watt had a very low opinion of the use of steam engines to power boats and was unlikely to sell him one for this purpose.

Fulton arrived back in New York City in December of 1806 ready to begin building his Hudson River steamboat. Fulton installed his new Boulton and Watt engine his newly constructed boat and successfully steamed up the Hudson on August 17th, 1807. Contrary to middle school history classes, the steamboat was not named the Clermont. It was known simply as the North River Steamboat. Clermont was the name of Livingston's estate and the boat began to be known by that name in later years.

Fulton died at age 49 on February 23, 1815. He was returning from New Jersey to New York. When the ferry service across the river could not reach shore because of heavy ice, he and a colleague got out of the boat and started walking to shore. His colleague fell through some thin ice and Fulton grabbed him and pulled him out getting thoroughly wet in the process. He developed an infection which turned into pneumonia.

Fulton is often hailed as the inventor of the steamboat. Not true. There were many earlier steamboat inventors both in the U.S. and Europe. John Fitch operated such a boat on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania at least 20 years before Fulton. But Fulton was something that Fitch and the others were not; he was a successful (some would say ruthless) entrepreneur. Fame often goes to the those who name is associated with the commercial success of an invention. Fulton is a classic example. Robert Fulton, American Inventor, should be known as American Entrepreneur. And in America that can be a high honor.

[Much of what I know of Fulton comes from Andrea Sutcliffe's wonderful book, Steam, the Untold Story of America's First Great Invention. I highly recommend it as a complete story of the development of early steamboats in America.]

[Image from Wikipedia]