Lusting to design his own superliner, Ferris saw Gibbs not just as a competitor, but an enemy as well. The feeling was mutual. Unlike Gibbs, Ferris was a highly trained engineer who had spent his early years paying his dues in shipyards and drafting rooms rather than the grass courts of Merion Cricket and the halls of Harvard. The so-called Dean of American Naval Architects had designed nearly 1,800 ships, including yachts for European royalty. Tall and broad-shouldered, Ferris radiated a confidence and poise that his volatile, eccentric rival Gibbs lacked.
In addition to snapping up the United States Lines superliner project, Ferris picked up more good press notice by designing two new coastal steamers for the Ward Line, Morro Castle and Oriente. Both were intended for passenger and freight service between New York and Havana. The ships were relatively small, 10,000 tons each and 508 feet long, but they showcased many of the innovations that Ferris included in his proposed superliners. With a sustained speed of 21 knots, they were among the fastest vessels under the American flag.
The two “Havana ferryboats” debuted in late 1930 and were an immediate commercial success; a relaxation of Prohibition aboard American-flagged ships meant that her five hundred passengers could enjoy a nonstop drinking party. Both ships were luxurious, with public rooms adorned with exotic woods and plush fabrics. During hot tropical voyages, an elaborate system of vents and shafts funneled cool air into the passenger quarters.
The press reported that “every possible safety feature has been considered in the construction of these vessels to make them the safest ships afloat at this time.”12 Morro Castle was equipped with ten fireproof steel lifeboats and two fire detection systems. Fire doors, controlled from the bridge and placed at key intervals, would stop flames from spreading.13
But there were to be no heat or smoke sensors in the public rooms; watchmen making rounds were expected to see or smell any evidence of fire.14
Ferris’s triumphs must have been galling to Gibbs, who had lost his opportunity to move from being a ship designer to a ship owner. Not only that, but Germany had finally unveiled its two new contenders for the Blue Riband, ships that made Gibbs’s predictions of obsolescence come to pass. Other great ships, each faster and more advanced than the last, would follow in their wake.
On July 28, 1929, thousands of well-wishers lined the banks of Germany’s Weser River as the new Norddeutscher Lloyd flagship Bremen left her home port of Bremerhaven and sped toward Cherbourg, France. The company’s general manager boasted that Bremen was “the pulsating symbol of Germany’s comeback as a world economic factor.”15 After leaving France and steering a course toward New York with more than two thousand excited passengers under his care, Captain Leopold Ziegenbein was determined to take the Blue Riband away from Cunard’s Mauretania, holder of the prize for more than twenty years.
Looking more like a navy cruiser than a luxury liner, the 51,000-ton, 950-foot-long Bremen and her slightly smaller sister Europa were streamlined from bow to stern: two squat smokestacks, a low superstructure, and a rounded bridge front. Along with the world’s most powerful turbines yet built, Bremen incorporated an innovation pioneered by Admiral Taylor a decade earlier. For the first time, the drag-reducing bulbous bow first used on American naval vessels was employed on a commercial transatlantic liner.16 Her engines were also much more efficient than older ships’. Bremen needed only 20 boilers to achieve nearly 28 knots, using 20 percent less fuel and putting out nearly 50 percent more horsepower than Leviathan, which needed 45 boilers to make 23 knots.17
Even her whistles blared Teutonic superiority. Most liners of the time had three whistles. Bremen had five. “The only time the Bremen gets any real fun out of its five whistles,” a New Yorker writer commented, was when she was in her home port, when her captain would “let loose with all of them simultaneously in three prolonged blasts: their rough version of saying ‘Aloha,’ or ‘Farewell.’ They never do that on this side, however. Afraid the West Side folk wouldn’t understand.”18
Inside and out, Bremen was unabashedly modern. As described by writer John Malcolm Brinnin, “her designers took care to follow the lines of her structure and to make their interiors conform to all its sweeps and nuances… a marine look, a ‘shippiness’ that ran directly counter to the cozy house-in-the-country look of British ships….”19 Her designers took their cue from the French Line’s popular Ile de France, with her modern, sleek Art Deco interiors. Down in the engine room, New York Times reporter Ferdinand Kuhn stared at the whirring turbines and marveled at how there “was no outwards sign that she was making the greatest speed ever reached by an ocean liner.”20 Bremen’s mighty power plant, the seagoing equivalent of a supercharged Mercedes-Benz engine, packed over 100,000 horsepower, or one-third more power than the old Mauretania.
Bremen also carried a harbinger of the future between her smokestacks. At eight o’clock on July 23, as the German greyhound tore past the Nantucket lightship, passengers taking an early morning stroll heard the roar of an airplane engine, followed by a loud hissing sound. Looking up, they watched a Heinkel seaplane, thrust forward by a burst of compressed air, bank toward New York. The plane was carrying a portion of the ship’s mail. “If all is well,” Kuhn reported, “the cargo of mail should be landed at Quarantine about 11 o’clock, and 1,000 New Yorkers will receive letters and postcards before the ship docks. The letters will carry 65 pfennings postage and bear a vivid blue marker ‘Luftpost Avion.’”21
Four days, 17 hours, and 47 minutes after leaving France, Bremen swept past New York’s Ambrose Lightship, black smoke flying from her low buff funnels and a great wave shooting up and away from her bulbous bow. During the 3,164-nautical-mile passage, she had averaged 27.83 knots, soundly beating Mauretania’s 26.06-knot record of 1909. She had also bettered Mauretania’s sailing time by seven hours.
The next year, Bremen’s sister Europa averaged 27.92 knots along the same course, shaving half an hour off Bremen’s record time. For the first time in nearly two decades, the coveted Blue Riband was firmly back in German hands.22
Captivated by the speed and modernity of Bremen and Europa, the American public hugely admired the German achievement. “Behind those few hours lies a narrative of international rivalry for speed, of stupendous engineering effort, of scientific research and of courageous businessmen willing to spend $15,000,000 to build a ship capable of beating the Mauretania by a knot,” New York Times science writer Waldemar Kaempffert wrote.23 Avant-garde designers like Modernist Swiss architect Le Corbusier looked to the ships of the late 1920s as paradigms of a new, technology-driven aesthetic, in which function swept away all ornamentation.