Every large town in the country which is near water has its local pride in speed boats. Some of them have made practi cally sixty miles per hour on a short course. This is P. D. Q. V. and eating up thousands of dollars each year in coal and crew. There are only ten thousand such yachts in the whole world; yet right here in the United States we have three hundred thousand motor boats and motor yachts-vessels within reach of the average man. Thus, the AN AMPHIBIOUS MOTOR BOAT It runs on ice or water. millionaire no longer holds a monopoly on the pleasures of independent cruising. You can get a splendid little water runabout for a hundred and fifty dollars; for twice that sum you can get a staunch steel craft that will take you and your family all the way down the Mississippi or let you buck the swift currents of the muddy Missouri. For a sum ranging from one to two thousand dollars, you can get a motor boat that will carry you and a half dozen others out to sea-across the Atlantic if you have the nerve-and show a clean pair of heels to the average millionaire's big sail or steam yacht. In this motor boat you can race all around the winner of that giant bottomless silver vessel called "America's Cup". If you are fond of racing, you can add a few dollars to the thousand or two you have already spent and buy a dainty high-powered boat that will beat the express trains running north of St. Louis along the Mississippi banks up to Mark Twain's old home; or that can play all around the swift liner Aquitania as she speeds up off Sandy Hook for her race against wind and tide or German cruisers to England. Of course, if you are a W. K. Vanderbilt, Jr., you can invest a sum ranging from five to fifty thousand and buy yourself a big Tarantula that can roam the POPULARIZING THE MILLIONAIRE'S SPORT 189 world. Thousands of rich men, of whom one rarely hears, are doing this very thing. Some of them build themselves big river houseboats, some speedy river cruisers, some comfortable roomy yachts that can travel anywhere. For instance, H. A. Parsons, of Cleveland, Ohio, son-in-law of the late Mark Hanna, owns the Mahapa II, 84 feet long, used for Great Lakes cruising. Carl G. Fisher of Indianapolis owns the Shadow, a sixty-six-foot express cruiser, that can travel at twenty-eight miles an hour. One of the fastest yachts in the world is the Winchester, two hundred five feet over all, two hundred tons displacement, six thousand horsepower developed by two Parsons engines, owned by P. W.. Rouss. C. H. Foster, of the Chicago Yacht Club, is owner of the Natoma, a fine onehundred-nineteen-foot, three-hundred-horsepower twin-screw power yacht. Yes, decidedly, that number of three hundred thousand has a big commercial import. There are today eight hundred firms, scattered over the United States, engaged in manufacturing marine motor engines alone. This summer a little fire on the Blue Bird, a one-hundred-foot power yacht of J. Palmer Gavit, lying off the New Jersey coast, incurred five thousand dollars' damage. Two hundred thousand dollars' damage was done to motor yachts in a small fire on the Harlem River, New York, during the same season. An index of the commercial value of these pleasure boats is the fact that two million dollars' worth of them are exported each year to foreign parts. Three hundred thousand dollars' worth are sent by American manufacturers to be used on the inland waters and seas of British Oceania. Canada buys motor boats in a like sum from us. Argentina takes another hundred thousand dollars' worth. One shipment of ten boats to Belgium once averaged two hundred thousand and a shipment of fifteen boats to Germany reached the tidy sum of three hundred eighty-two thousand dollars. Consular reports show that the American motor boat goes to the Euphrates, to the Tigris, to the Amazon-to every river and sea on the map. Outside strictly motor-boat circles, the motor boat has until lately been looked upon as a fancy sporting luxury chiefly designed for speed com petition. Therefore most of the public interest has been centered in the spectacular side of these speedy thirty SHOWING THE LONG DRAWN-OUT LINES OF VINCENT In spite of her capabilities for speed, she is a comfort The Disturber IV of Chicago has eighteen hundred horsepower, or more than any other racing boat, and her owner, who took her to England to race for the International trophy, claims over sixty miles an hour as her speed. POPULARIZING THE MILLIONAIRE'S SPORT 191 and forty-foot boats of high-power extensive Atlantic voyage in one deefficiency. But out of these wild races at Monaco, off Cowes, for the Harmsworth Trophy, off Chicago, New York, and in southern water, has developed a practical use for the motor boat. If fishermen do not fish in motor boats, they put kickers in their sailing schooners so that neither wind nor tide can interfere with their work. Big trading schooners like the Eclipse and the Danneborg that go to the West Indies and to South America are fitted with auxiliary motors. The English ketch, Ceres, one hundred and two years old, lately was fitted with thirty-horsepower engines! The majority of the dynamite and torpedo transports about harbors like New York are propelled by motors. Motor boats are being used for ferrying passengers quickly and safely along the Tennessee and the Mississippi. Alaskan waters are alive with them. Then there is the motor lifeboat for coast and ocean work. The race of motor boats from Philadelphia to Bermuda, twice won by the Dream, has proved the signed and built by Mr. Sivard. His boat is made peculiarly effective because of the presence of the motor-a thirtytwo-horsepower gasoline engine. Without the motor it would have little or no value. In time, all United States government life-saving stations will be equipped with motor boats. So it is seen that the motor boat is anything but a racing plaything though it does change in style every season like a woman's hat. A motor boat expert lately proved that three hundred thousand motor vessels in the United States averaged a tonnage MONTE CARLO'S FAMOUS Mercedes-JUST A SPEED BOAT seaworthiness of such craft. Two years ago Captain Thomas Fleming Day crossed the Atlantic in the thirty-five foot motor boat Detroit, making the trip in twenty-four days. Big passenger liners like the Aquitania and the Vaterland have been equipped with two big motor boats each thirty feet long and having a ninefoot-six-inch beam, fitted with thirtyhorsepower motors and wireless, designed to tow any or all of the eighty lifeboats in case of disaster. The thirtyfoot nonsinkable Lundin lifeboat is possibly superior to these big motor boats of the liners. The quality of this latest type of lifeboat was tested this year by Mr. and Mrs. Einar Sivard, who made an equal to all the merchant steamers of the United States, around five thousand in number. Other experts in marine matters declare that the day is not far distant when the motor boat will not only supplant the steam yacht entirely but drive out the steam passenger liner and the steam freight carrier, and that then the United States will take her proper place as mistress of the seas. The peculiar maritime situation that has been brought about by the conflict of the powers should assist in bringing about this result. The Christian X is the first motordriven ship to be put in the transatlantic passenger trade. She is fitted with Diesel It is of the cruiser class and is capable of traveling at good speed and weathering almost any sea. The owners live in such boats for weeks at a time. engines, and to understand the marvelous work of these engines one must know something about the marvels of steam. and gas propulsion which are today making the whole world kin. The underlying principle of the operation of any engine, whether gas or steam, lies in the fact that gas tends to expand when heat is applied, and if allowed to do so the gas has the power of doing work. Any gas or vapor will absorb heat, and during this process it expands. If the expansion is resisted, say by a container with a piston, work is directly obtained. The advantage of the gas over the steam engine is that it is self-contained, with no cumbersome boiler, feed pumps, and piping, and that it works automatically. The big fight in the obtaining of power has been for nearly a century to get the most power at the least expense of the energy bound up in coal or oil. Theoretically an engine should get one hundred per cent of this energy, but it really only gets ten or twenty per cent. The power in oil is much more quickly obtained than in coal; hence the marvelous speed of the motor boat. But alcohol and gasoline are expensive. Therefore, of the many types of motors developed the Diesel is looked on with favor for big ships. It will easily handle crude oil that costs but a few cents a gallon, and it is said that it will get thirty-eight per cent of the energy out of the oil. A Diesel motor will produce one horsepower on one-half pound of fuel, whereas it takes a pound of gasoline or from two to three pounds of steam to produce the same power. In this engine there is no danger of preignition. The air only is compressed by the engine, the oil being injected into the highly heated area at the end of the compression stroke. When some of the hull construction and engine-building principles. now being developed in the motor boat are applied to larger ships, a new and faster and more efficient aid to ocean and river transportation will result; perhaps some other Hickman with some splendidly simple idea will thereby capture for us the commercial supremacy of the seas. |
