Figure 24. Queen Mary at full steam ahead, with a great wave cresting up from her bow. Compared to her rakish rival Normandie, her hull and superstructure were blocky, her interiors traditional. Yet she was the only big liner of the 1930s to earn a profit. During World War II, she and her running mate Queen Elizabeth were painted gray and converted into troop carriers able to carry fifteen thousand soldiers each. The Cunard flagship held the Blue Riband of the Atlantic from 1938 to 1952. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 25. The first-class lounge aboard Queen Mary, decorated in a British interpretation of Art Deco. The Queen s boasted wood paneling from every colony in the British Empire. Such spaces were criticized for their “mild but expensive vulgarity.” Corbis Images.
Figure 26. The delivery of a model of the United States Lines’ new flagship, America, completed in 1940. Neither large nor fast enough to be in the same class as the European giants, this medium-sized liner was Gibbs’s practice run for the much larger SS United States. The Frank O. Braynard Collection.
Figure 27. The Liberty ship William A. Richardson. These “ugly duckling” cargo steamers, with plans adapted for mass production by William Francis Gibbs, played a pivotal role in victory at sea. A total of 2,700 Liberties were produced during World War II. The Frank O. Braynard Collection.
Figure 28. The burned-out, capsized hulk of the troopship USS Lafayette, formerly the French Line’s Normandie, on February 10, 1942. The fire cast a dark pall of smoke over all of Manhattan Island. She would be righted and then sold for scrap. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 29. William Francis Gibbs, hailed as a “technological revolutionist,” on the cover of Time, 1942. By then he had swapped his derby hat for a floppy brown fedora. Two years later, he would be exonerated of wartime profiteering charges. Courtesy of Time Inc.
Figure 30. William Francis Gibbs (left) and Frederic Gibbs in the “Glass Menagerie” at 21 West Street. The Frank O. Braynard Collection.
Figure 31. Pine models of Gibbs’s superliner designers. The top and middle models are from the 1940s hull design for United States. The bottom model is of his S-129 prototype from 1916. The Frank O. Braynard Collection.
Figure 32. Brigadier General John M. Franklin returned to the presidency of the United States Lines in 1946, prepared to transform the company into a world-class passenger and freight company, crowned by the world’s fastest and most modern superliner. Courtesy of Laura Franklin Dunn.
Figure 33. Elaine Scholley Kaplan, the only female engineer on the United States design team. A brilliant mathematician, Kaplan was in charge of designing the ship’s propellers. Courtesy of Susan Caccavale.
Figure 34. Decorator Dorothy Marckwald aboard the Grace Lines’ Santa Rosa, next to company president Lewis Lapham. Marckwald believed that the interior of United States should be crisp and modern, yet she found Gibbs’s obsession with fireproofing to be trying at times. Courtesy of Gordon Ghareeb.
Figure 35. Laying the keel of United States, February 8, 1950. William Francis Gibbs is sixth from the right, standing along the railing. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 36. Workers assembling the ship’s double bottom. The Frank O. Braynard Collection.
Figure 37. Cars lined up against one of the two aluminum funnels, before it is hoisted onto the top deck of the ship. These were the two largest stacks ever placed on a passenger ship. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 38. The installation of United States’ top-secret rudder. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 39. United States’ two starboard propellers. The five-bladed configuration for the inboard propellers was meant to reduce cavitation and vibration at high speed. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 40. The control panel in one of the ship’s two engine rooms. Unlike other liners, no passenger tours were permitted of any of the machinery spaces aboard United States. The Frank O. Braynard Collection.
Figure 41. Gibbs watches the dry dock flood the day before United States’ christening. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 42. General Franklin addresses a crowd of twenty thousand at the United States christening ceremony, June 23, 1951. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 43. The newly christened United States is towed to the fitting-out pier, where over the next year her interior appointments will be installed. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 44. The Duck Suite aboard United States. It boasted two bedrooms, a living room, and three bathrooms. The most luxurious suite on board, it was occupied four times a year by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Mariners’ Museum.
Figure 45. The first-class observation lounge aboard United States. The concave gesso and gold-leaf mural depicts the underwater topography of the North Atlantic Ocean. The Mark Perry Collection.
Figure 46. The first-class ballroom aboard United States, with its domed ceiling, circular dance floor, gold-leaf walls, and etched glass panels depicting undersea life. The Mark Perry Collection.
Figure 47. The first-class dining room aboard United States, which seated four hundred passengers at a time and had a two-deck-high center section. The Mark Perry Collection.
Figure 48. The cabin-class dining room aboard United States, with aluminum line sculptures by Seymour Lipton. The Mark Perry Collection.