FIFTY YEARS OF NAVAL ENGINEERING IN RETROSPECT. PART III: 1908–1921
Herbert M. Neuhaus · Journal of the American Society of Naval Engineers · 1938
In marking its golden anniversary of existence, the American Society of Naval Engineers scans the panorama of its past in this series of four articles. Created in October, 1888, shortly after the birth of the “New Navy” of the United States, the Society almost immediately began the dissemination of information of interest in the form of its Journal. This Retrospect, briefed and abstracted from the Journals of the past, tells the story of the change from double expansion to triple expansion engines; from the old horizontal and vertical engines to the giant vertical inverted four‐cylinder triple expansion engine mounted in the U. S. S. Oklahoma; the change from fire‐tube boilers to water‐tube boilers; the appearance of the steam turbine and its displacement of the reciprocating engine; the appearance and development of the modern submarine; and the creation of the all big gun battleships, popularly called the Dreadnoughts from their prototype. That these changes have occurred in less than a half century is nothing short of amazing when one considers the centuries of possible development that had gone before. If mechanical developments have been outstanding, electrical progress has been more so. In the field of communication, wireless telegraphy has come into its own, the telephone is in common everyday use on shipboard, and the use of electrical controls plays an ever‐increasing part. In short, the United States Navy by 1908 has become a gigantic laboratory for machinery experiments of every kind on a full scale.