SS Great Eastern

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General Characteristics
Image:Great Eastern 1866.jpg Great Eastern at Heart's Content, July 1866
Owners:	Great Eastern Ship Company
Builders:	Messrs Scott, Russel & Co. of Millwall yards in London, England
Laid down:	May 1, 1854
Launched:	January 31, 1858
Christened:	Not christened
Maiden voyage:	June 17, 1860
Fate:	Broken up on 1889-90
Gross Tonnage:	???
Displacement:	~32,000
Length:	692 feet (211m)
Beam:	83 feet (25m)
Power:	four steam engines for the paddles and an additional engine for the propeller. Total power was estimated at 8,000 hp (6 MW)
Propulsion:	sail, paddle and screw
Speed:	13 knots
Number of Passengers:	4000
Crew:	418

Image:Great eastern launch attempt.jpg

This article describes the ship the Great Eastern. For information on the Great Eastern Railway please see Great Eastern Railway.

The Great Eastern was a ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refuelling. She would only be surpassed in length in 1899 (by the SS Oceanic II) and in tonnage in 1901 (by the SS Celtic II).

She was built in partnership with an experienced ship designer, John Scott Russell. Unknown to Brunel, Russell was in financial difficulties. The two men disagreed on many details. It was Brunel's final great project, as he collapsed after being photographed on her deck, and died only ten days later, a mere four days after Great Eastern's first sea trials. She was built by Messrs Scott, Russell & Co. of Millwall, London, the keel being laid down on May 1, 1854.

She was finally launched —after many technical difficulties— on January 31, 1858. She was 692 feet (211 m) long, 83 feet (25 m) wide, with a draft of 20 ft (6.1 m) unloaded and 30 ft (9.1 m) fully laden, and displaced 32,000 tons fully loaded. In comparison, SS Persia, launched in 1856, was 390 feet (119 m) long with a 45 foot (14 m) beam. She was at first named the SS Leviathan, but her high building and launching costs ruined the Eastern Steam Navigation Company and so she lay unfinished for a year before being sold to the Great Eastern Ship Company and finally renamed SS Great Eastern. It was decided she would be more profitable on the Southampton–New York run, and outfitted accordingly. Her eleven-day maiden voyage began on June 17, 1860, with 35 paying passengers, 8 company "dead heads" and 418 crew.

The hull was an all-iron construction, a double hull of 0.75 inch (19 mm) wrought iron in 2 ft 10 in (864 mm) plates with ribs every 6 ft (1.8 m). Internally the hull was divided by two 350 ft (107 m) long, 60 ft (18 m) high, longitudinal bulkheads and further transverse bulkheads dividing the ship into nineteen compartments. She had sail, paddle and screw propulsion. The paddle-wheels were 56 ft (17 m) in diameter and the four-bladed screw-propeller was 24 ft (7.3 m) across. The power came from four steam engines for the paddles and an additional engine for the propeller. Total power was estimated at 8,000 hp (6 MW). She had six masts, providing space for 18,148 square feet of sails, but the sails turned out to be unusable at the same time as the paddles and screw, because the hot exhaust from the five funnels would set them on fire. Her maximum speed was 13 knots.

After only a few passenger voyages and a series of accidents, including a bizarre incident in which an overheated boiler launched a funnel like a rocket, killing a crewmember in the process, she was sold for £25,000 (her build cost has been estimated at £500,000) and converted into a cable-laying ship. She laid 2,600 statute miles (4,200 km) of the 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable and took part in other similar operations before being broken up for scrap in 1889–1890 —it took 18 months to take her apart. While it's rumored that a skeleton was found inside the double hull, the same thing has been said of the Titanic and the Hoover Dam (among others); there is no evidence of its truth in this or any other case. (Specifically, there was no remark about it in the press at the time, nor any investigation into related disappearances. In addition, inspection hatches in the inner hull would have provided an easy escape.)

The ship was the subject of one of the programmes in the BBC documentary series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World which repeated the rumour about the dead bodies in the hull, but did present it as a rumour, rather than claiming it to be an established fact.

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References

James Dugan, The Great Iron Ship, 1953 (regularly reprinted) ISBN 0750934476
Jules Verne, A Floating City (fr:Une Ville flottante) (1871) -- describing his 1867 transatlantic voyage on the ship.

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