Others were less than enthralled of this elegant yet sinister-looking liner. When Bremen swept past Leviathan at full speed in the English Channel, the crew of the aging American flagship realized that indeed a new era had dawned. “We consoled ourselves in the thought that, after all there was a 20-year development in marine propulsion,” recalled one of Leviathan’s officers, “and ‘just wait, some day’ but it was hard to take, nonetheless.”24
The great British and French shipping lines were quick to act after the debuts of Bremen and Europa. In 1929, the French Line began developing a new contender for the Blue Riband. The ship featured a radical new hull design by Russian-born naval architect Vladimir Yourkevitch. His liner, initially called T-6, featured a bow with a big bulb at the base like Bremen and Europa. Above the waterline, the prow curved sensuously forward like the bows of nineteenth-century clipper ships. And unlike the full, rounded hulls of older vessels, the hull would be fine and tapered. The ship would weigh 79,000 gross tons, stretch 1,029 feet long and 117 feet wide, and could maintain a service speed of 30 knots. She would be powered not by geared turbines, but by a turbo-electric plant that men like William Emmet had pushed for use in large liners since the early 1900s. Her designers aimed for an output of 150,000 horsepower.
Yourkevitch had brought his design to Cunard first, only to be turned down by the conservative company. But the French loved Yourkevitch’s vision. In 1931, workers at Penhoët–St.-Nazaire on the Loire River laid the keel of what would become the great liner Normandie.
Word of the new French ship shook self-satisfied Cunard out of its lethargy. Its grand trio of Mauretania, Aquitania, and Berengaria, all built before World War I, was fast becoming obsolete. After Mauretania lost the Blue Riband, Cunard’s passenger revenues declined rapidly. Cunard started a snobby advertising campaign: “Whole families of America’s highest type would rather miss Ascot, or the first day of grouse shooting, than cross in any other ship afloat, but the Mauretania.”25 But to no avail. The old ship, with her stuffy Edwardian décor and lack of private bathrooms, was commercially doomed.
So Cunard too began to plan a superliner, one that would sail with a sister ship to create a two-ship weekly service between Southampton and New York. Like Normandie, she would have three funnels. At 1,019 feet long, 118 feet wide, and at 81,000 tons, she would be larger than the French vessel. Her engines would be traditional Parsons steam turbines, not turbo-electric.
William Francis Gibbs could only watch in frustration as the German, French, and British lines forged ahead, while the United States Lines floundered under Chapman’s bad management. The promise of a Blue Riband–winning American superliner seemed to be slipping away.
And then, in late October 1929, the American stock market crashed. The catastrophe wiped out the fortunes of millionaires and the savings of ordinary tourists. Ticket sales slipped that winter, and then spiraled rapidly downward as the economy soured. Companies fought over a shrinking pie of passengers, and many of the older ships began to struggle when faced against the modern Bremen, Europa, and Ile de France.
As the Great Depression paralyzed the nation, a chastened Paul Chapman discovered that operating a big ship like Leviathan required not only money, but also expertise and judgment. On December 11, 1929, six months after Bremen’s Blue Riband triumph and six weeks after the stock market crash, Leviathan was traveling eastbound with 845 passengers aboard. As the ship approached the British coast, a northwestern gale began viciously pounding her. The old liner creaked and groaned ominously. From his observation perch ninety feet above the ocean, Second Officer Sherman Reed grew anxious about the ship’s speed. Reed telephoned Commodore Harold Cunningham requesting that he slow Leviathan down.
“Maintain your speed,” the captain snapped at Reed. “This ship will get in on time.”
A few minutes later, a forty-foot wave came barreling straight toward Leviathan’s bow. The officers on the bridge braced themselves for impact. With a roar, the bow buried itself in the swells, tossing up a great cloud of white spray. The entire ship resounded first with a gigantic boom, then a loud crack.
Leviathan’s upper decks had split open just in front of the midship expansion joint, a vulnerable area where a double bank of elevator shafts and the ship’s split funnel uptakes cut through the superstructure. Her hull took the blow and remained intact. Though the ship was in no immediate danger of sinking, a large part of her superstructure was now open to the elements.
At the ship’s forward end, the crack had skewed walls and jammed stateroom doors shut. “Great confusion!” all over the ship, Reed recalled. “Bridge telephones ringing like mad.”26
Somehow Leviathan stayed in one piece and limped into Southampton, where workers plated over the yawning gap. She returned to New York on December 16 and spent the rest of the winter undergoing permanent repairs at the Boston Navy Yard. The accident cost Paul Chapman nearly half a million dollars.27
Aware of this structural flaw, Gibbs knew that Leviathan’s structural integrity had been put at risk for the sake of grand passenger spaces. His chief electrical engineer, Norman Zippler, said that after learning of this accident, his boss made it a rule never to use split funnel uptakes in any future passenger ship design.28
Almost as soon as Bremen won the Blue Riband with her four-and-a-half-day crossing, others were looking beyond the achievement. Waldemar Kaempffert of the New York Times posed the question Gibbs was also asking: “Is a three-and-a-half day ship possible?”29 Gibbs believed it was—if designers could advance the mechanics of propulsion. Efficiencies would not be enough. Revolutionary technologies were required.
The deciding factor for speed, many engineers thought, lay in the untried domain of something known as high-pressure, high-temperature steam. This could drive small turbines at tremendous speed. Bremen, which used British-licensed Parsons turbines, was driven by steam at 338 pounds per square inch putting out 100,000 horsepower, the highest ratings yet achieved in a passenger liner, but some argued that steam pressure could be doubled or even tripled, resulting in smaller, more efficient engines. “By increasing the steam pressure to, say 735 pounds per square inch,” a German naval architect wrote, “and by further increasing the turbines revolutions to, say 2,300 to 2,500… it might be possible to install from 150,000 to 170,000 horsepower in a ship even smaller than the Europa or Bremen and attain a service speed of more than 30 knots.”30 With such engine efficiencies, the space not taken up by engines and boilers could be used to carry revenue-generating items: mail, expensive cargo, and passengers.
High steam pressure was tried in experimental power plants. One small engine, produced by Germany’s Wagner Hochdruck turbine company, produced 400 horsepower at 21,000 rpm with a boiler pressure of 735 pounds per square inch.31 But no naval architect dared to use it in a merchant vessel. It was untested and thought to be much too dangerous. It also meant that shipyards could no longer simply build engines according to British designs licensed by Parsons, the inventors of the marine steam turbines. New engines would have to be relicensed.