The Last Victorian Leviathan Steam Ship

The More-Than-Great "Great Eastern"
- one of the most spectacular ships ever built!

Take a good long look at this ship. Built in 1858, it was capable of bringing 4,000 people around the world, without ever once needing to refuel...

An Iron Monster, framed in a cloud of billowing white sails, or looming through the hellish black smoke - this was the ultimate Victorian luxury Trans-Atlantic liner, affectionately called the "great babe" by its eccentric designer:

An introduction to Victorian grandiosity:

The Victorians - and so you don't have to look it up, means the British and U.S. during the reign of Queen Victoria, from about 1837 to 1901 -- did some truly great things. Theirs was an glowing-brass and crusty-iron era of chugging, whistling, hissing wonders. Nothing, they seemed to think, was impossible: the answer to every question, every engineering challenge, was just the matter of finding the right kind of steam engine for the job.

One of their greats was the legendary Crystal Palace


Although the Palace wasn't powered by coal, it was certainly fueled by Victorian mechanical audacity. Originally set up in Hyde Park in 1851 for the Great Exhibition, though later expanded and moved, the Palace was a transparent monster of a building, a huge greenhouse made up of 900,000 square feet of glass supported by an iron framework.
900,000 may not sound like much but keep this in mind: the Palace was home to more than 14,000 exhibits. The Palace was something no one had seen before, a precisely engineered celebration of British innovation. The future had arrived in Hyde Park, and it was a tomorrow of crystal and steel.

Another Victorian great was ... well, it might not have been as spectacular as the Crystal Palace but it was still something that made the people of London sit up and take notice. Or perhaps sit down and take notice. We take sewers and such for granted now but back then it was a true technological miracle, especially when executed on giant Victorian scale. Before Joseph Bazalgette began his work, London was a filthy nightmare. Decades, and more than 1,000 miles of pipe and connections later, the great city had become a marvel of cleanliness: a tomorrow of (mostly) clean streets and sweet smells.

An iron-riveted mountain, a black-smoke metal volcano

Like with those 900,000 square feet of glass or 1,000 miles of sewer pipe, just prattling off the numbers doesn't do Brunel's Great Eastern justice. Its true scale can be better appreciated from these construction photograph




The Cable Ship

But the Great Eastern's most famous job wasn't shuttling passengers across the Atlantic. The Victorians had a great fondness for boilers, condensers, pistons, furnaces, and the stacks of steam power, but they'd also begun to harness the power of lightning -- or at least enough of it to send dots and dashes across a wire.

The telegraph was a revolution but it was mostly limited to the continents. If you wanted to write Aunt Joan in New York you still had to put pen to paper and trust the post. Until the Great Eastern laid the transatlantic cable.
Time for numbers again: 2,600 miles of cable is what the Eastern carefully laid out across the Atlantic and later, across the Indian Ocean. Twenty-six-hundred miles when one kink, one break, would mean having to start all over again. That's a tremendous endeavor to try even today, let alone when men wore stovepipe hats and horses were still the preferred method of traveling on land.


Two great ships: the "Great Eastern" & the "Titanic".
Both suffered a damage to their hull.
One sunk, one didn't.

SS "Great Eastern" was also incredibly modern, boasting double hull construction (far ahead of its common use) and even gas lighting. It is this DOUBLE HULL that kept her afloat in the same circumstances that sent the "Titanic" to its doom. Here is a comparison with the Titanic:

- Both the Titanic and the Great Eastern were the largest ships of their time.
- Each suffered nearly the same accident, with utterly different results.

- The Great Eastern featured fifty water-tight compartments, and a maze of bulkheads.
- The Titanic's hull had only a single wall on each side!.. And even though the hull was divided in fifteen sections, which were designed to be sealed on a moments notice, "the bulkheads between those sections were riddled with access doors to improve luxury service".
The Great Eastern suffered a huge 83-foot-long, 9-foot-wide gash, after the encounter with an uncharted rock in Long Island Sound in 1862. But the inner hull held, and the ship remained afloat.

The Titanic did not suffer anything like the huge continuous gash in the side of the Great Eastern:
Titanic's hull "had not been gashed at all, but had been punctured in six of its forward compartments with a series of thin slits amounting to no more that 12 square feet."