have the opportunity of speaking upon them. I have been connected with shipbuilding all my life, and having built some of the largest ships in our service, it was my special wish to speak on this Paper. I throw out the above observations in the hope that a more convenient arrangement may be made in future.

The PRESIDENT: Owing to the very numerous attendance there is a scarcity of Papers, but we will take care to have more copies printed at our next Session.

Mr. H. J. BOOLDS: I was hardly able to follow Mr. Barnes. Sometimes I thought he was in favour of my cellular plan, and he winds up at last by condemning it. I must say I have not been able to follow him sufficiently to thoroughly understand him. With respect to Mr. Reed's remarks upon my Paper, and the great consideration he has given the system of sub-divisions for a number of years, all I have to say is that if the advantages of cellular sub-division have been recognised at the Admiralty for so many years, it is curious that we see no evidence of it beyond the intercostal divisions between the inner and outer skins of the bottom, and the wing passages, which have been part of every official design since the Warrior period, and all of which seem to have been carefully enumerated to make up the number of compartments stated by Mr. Reed. The hold divisions for which I contend as my “cellular แ system" have not yet received any official consideration whatever. I will ask one question, and that is, Why did the Vanguard sink if the system has been so long thought of? Allow me to say that it is no new subject to me, although it may be to a great many here, and there is the drawing that was submitted to the Glasgow Institution eleven years ago, and I have not altered the system one bit. I have only adapted the same principle to the Vanguard, to show that if she had been built upon that principle she would not have sunk as she did. With all due respect to the great consideration which the naval gentlemen here have given to this subject, allow me to ask again, Why did the Vanguard sink?

Mr. REED: You have asked the question twice, will you allow me to answer it? The reason the Vanguard went down is quite obvious. The very large doorways which exist between the engine room and the boiler room were never closed at all after the accident.

Mr. BOOLDS: In my ship I propose, distinctly, to have no openings below the load line. Now, you must understand that thoroughly. If I have openings below the load line, then I consider my system fails. I can prove to you, Gentlemen, that we can have the ship, and do all the work necessary with coal bunkers and everything else, and still not require to have any coal-bunker openings below at all; and I will do my coal trimming in a very much easier way than in nine-tenths of the ships in the present Navy. The cellular system which I advocate is, to have the only openings into the cells from the deck. As far as ventilation is concerned, in the pamphlet written by me, eleven years ago, I proposed to have ventilation by blast pipes from the engines-the pipes to be brought under the deck into these cells. But I do not look upon that as the principal object in my Paper. My object is to keep a ship of war afloat, if struck in any way. Mr. Reed said that the reason the Vanguard sunk was because they happened to leave the doors open. I say the only way in which you can insure safety is to have no openings below at all; and I can prove to you how I can do it without openings.

The PRESIDENT: It only remains for us to express our thanks to Mr. Boolds. I must say that what has passed to-day has only strengthened my opinion that Mr. Boolds has been touching on a very important subject. When he proposed to have no doors it excited so much merriment, that I cannot

refrain from saying-I speak under correction if I am wrong-I believe that now in building French vessels they are extremely particular to have no openings, just as Mr. Boolds says, in order that there may be no risk of leaving them open; and they prefer the extra trouble of going up and down, and having their vessels maintained in safety on the seas. I am afraid I must request you to excuse me from presiding at the Evening Sitting, on account of public business in the House of Lords. I am very happy to say that my friend Mr. Scott Russell has consented to take my place.

ON CERTAIN AUSTRIAN IRON-CLADS.*

By E. J. REED, Esq., C.B., F.R.S., M.P., Vice-President.

[Read at the Seventeenth Session of the Institution of Naval Architects, 6th April, 1876; the Right Hon. LORD HAMPTON, G.C.B., D.C.L., President, in the Chair.]

HAVING recently had occasion to ask my friend, Herr Romako, the Chief Constructor of the Imperial Austrian Navy, for some particulars of certain iron-clad vessels designed by him, and having received from him some interesting information respecting them, I have thought it would be useful to the Members and Associates of this Institution if I placed an outline of the same before them, for record in our Transactions. I do this the more readily as I have the sanction of that distinguished officer, Admiral Baron Pöckh for taking this step, and also because Herr Romako has for a long time been a Member of this Institution. It will be seen, I think, from the few remarks I propose to offer on these vessels, that in their case, as in many previous designs, Herr Romako has displayed that conspicuous ability and originality which some years ago induced us to record his name upon the roll of our Institution with much pleasure.

The first ship which I propose to mention, and very briefly to describe, is the new iron-clad Tegetthoff, now under construction at the works of the Stabilimento Technico, at Trieste. This large and admirable establishment took the contract for the hull, engines and boilers in August last.. I will first give the general dimensions and particulars of the ship, and afterwards make a few observations upon the more marked features of the design. The following figures give her dimensions, calculated elements, &c. Length between the perpendiculars, 286 feet 11 inches; length, total, 303 feet 1 inches; breadth on the water-line, 62 feet 9 inches; extreme breadth to the outside of armour, 71 feet 1 inches; depth of hold, 34 feet 9 inches; draught of water, aft, 26 feet 71⁄2 inches; draught of water, forward, 23 feet 1 inch; displacement with the half of provisions, 7,390 tons; area of the midship section, 1,301 square feet; area of the load water-line, 14,308 square feet; height of metacentre above centre of gravity of displace

* Received 4th April, 1876.

L

ment, 14.623 feet; height of metacentre above water, 4·770 feet; distance of the centre of gravity of displacement before the midship-section, 3.356 feet; depth of the centre of gravity of displacement below water, 9.853 feet; co-efficient of displacement, 0·582 feet; co-efficient of water-line, 0·782 feet; co-efficient of midship-section, 0.82 feet; displacement of an inch immersion at the load water-line, 34:47 tons; weight of armour and backing, 2,160 tons. The armament consists of six 11-inch Krupp guns. Area of sails, 12,165 square feet. Cost of hull, estimated, £172,790; cost of engines and boilers, estimated, £81,715. Nominal horse-power, 1,200. Number of cylinders, 2; diameter of cylinder effective, 125 inches; length of stroke, 4 feet 3 inches. Griffiths' propeller, diameter 23 feet 6 inches; pitch, 24 feet; number of blades, 2; revolutions per minute, 70. Number of boilers, 4. Area of fire-grate, 850 square feet; heating surface, 25,500 square feet; superheating surface, 1,800 square feet. Pressure of steam, 30 pounds; number of furnaces, 36; mean indicated horse-power, 8,000; speed, estimated, 14 knots.

it

From these figures it will be seen that, although we are not dealing with a ship of the Inflexible (English), or of the Dandolo (Italian) type, in which armour of excessive thickness is placed over a central citadel of extremely limited extent we nevertheless have a very powerful ship indeed, with armour of apparently about 13 inches to 14 inches thick, and with a concentrated battery of six 11-inch Krupp guns, each weighing, I presume, about 27 tons. The ship has a belt of armour extending from the stern to within about 30 feet of the foremost perpendicular, where it terminates in a transverse armoured bulkhead, and a stout iron deck going forward to the stem at about 7 feet below water. It would appear from this that the Austrian authorities consider that a strong iron stem, supported by a stout deck near the point of the ram, is sufficient for ramming purposes; whereas in our Navy we have thought it better-beginning, if I remember rightly, with the Rupert and Hotspur-to keep the bow armour, and carry down at the stem to considerably below the ram point. We may take it for granted, I think, that the latter, or English, arrangement would at least have the advantage of protecting the ram bow from much local damage in ramming iron vessels, and this is no doubt very desirable where ships are designed primarily as rams-as were the Rupert and Hotspur—while, on the other hand, where the ram is a subordinate feature—as in the Tegetthoff-it may be unnecessary to burden the bow with so much armour protection. It is worth while to observe in this connection that the Austrians, who have had practical experience of the effects of ramming in actual warfare, have in this, their largest and most powerful ship, preserved a very great length of under-running or spear projection, as shown in the diagram. The projection is 9 feet from the stem at the load water-line, and 19 feet from the stem head.

I observe next in this ship the Austrian Admiralty have adopted an improvement in armour to which I have for a long time past attached great importance: I refer to the getting rid for the most part of great curvature. Of course armour plates, if carried round the ends of a ship, must be bent to the curvature of the water-lines, and when embedded, so to speak, in the sides of a ship of ordinary form and curvature—as has been usual in sea-going ships-they must also be bent crosswise. Now this double curvature of the plates is not only an expensive process, but it is also injurious to the armour plates in some degree. To Foreign Governments which do not make their own armour plates, and especially to the Governments of countries very remote from England, the system will further be attended by extreme difficulty in replacing plates injured in battle. This could hardly be accomplished by the slow and expensive process of sending accurate moulds to England for the guidance of the manufacturers. By so designing the ships that the armour plates have only to be curved in one direction, all these disadvantages and difficulties are practically got rid of; and therefore, in recent ships which I have had occasion to design for Foreign Powers, I have carried out this principle, and Herr Romako, in a letter to me, says :-" With your encouragement I have under"taken to give the stern a form which enables the bending of the plates to be performed "in only one way." I believe I am right in saying that Mr. Barnaby and his colleagues at the Admiralty, as far as practicable, attend to the same thing, although it is, of course, of very much less importance in our Navy than in navies which depend upon foreign supplies of armour, and which are without machines for bending armour plates.

The next feature to be remarked in this ship is that the battery is of the projecting type, which so greatly facilitates the obtainment of direct fire ahead and astern from a midship battery without excessive recession of the unarmoured parts of the ship before and abaft the battery. The Admiralty Constructors and myself introduced this arrangement in many cases of upper-deck batteries in ships designed while I was at the Admiralty (most notably in the case of the Audacious class), but I do not think the same thing has been done at the Admiralty in the case of the main-deck battery. I have, however, done it myself in several ships for Foreign Governments, since I left the Admiralty; and I give examples in Figs. 1 and 2 (Plate IV.), which represent outline sections of the Kaiser and Deutschland (German), and the Almirante Cochrane and Valparaiso (Chilian) armour-clad ships. I cannot recal to mind any previous cases in which this has been done, or even proposed, for main-deck batteries; but it probably was at least proposed before, and I have a vague recollection or impression that Captain Symonds or Captain Scott once suggested it. My present object is, however, simply to say that in adopting the system I consider that the Austrian Admiralty have acted wisely, for it has many very great advantages, and no disadvantages of any moment that I have been able