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TELESCOPE July 149 IN THE TRIPLE'S WAKE the propeller shaft, and the steam was put to work successively in three stages before being considered spent. The package freighter Susquehanna of 1886 had the lakes' first three-cylinder engine, but it used steam only in two stages (i.e., the two larger cylinders were the same size). A year later came bulk ship Cambria with the first triple-expansion engine. Quadruple-expansion engines appeared in 1894 in the fast passenger liner North West and the river steamer Unique. Cambria and her triple-expansion engine were built just when iron ore was replacing grain as the lakes' roost important cargo. Anything from schooners to package freighters could carry grain, as long as they could keep it dry. On the other hand, a specialized type of ship was needed to carry iron ore at minimum cost, and Cambria showed what a modern ore ship might look like. Cambria was built 1887 at Cleveland by Globe Iron Works for the Mutual Transportation Company. At the time, she was considered quite fast, having once beaten the package freighter Tioga, then deemed the lakes' fastest, soon after she came out. Cambria passed to the Pittsburgh fleet when U. S. Steel was formed in 1901, and was sold again in 1909 to Port Huron and Duluth Steamship Company. They converted her to the passenger and package freight steamer Lakeland, with a single deck of staterooms above the main deck. Lakeland foundered in Lake Michigan near Sturgeon Bay in 1924. By 1910 the six-hundred-foot bulk freighter, twice the length of Cambria, was becoming common. Iron ore could now be delivered from Lake Superior ports to those on Lake Erie for seventy cents per ton, of which fifteen cents was eaten up in unloading costs. Grain could make the same passage for a cent-and-a-third a bushel. Engines of the six- hundred- footer were of relatively low horsepower, usually about two thousand. These engines could push a loaded laker about 11^ m.p.h. and a "light" one about lT'A m.p.h. Such a ship, travelling downbound loaded and upbound light, could make perhaps thirty-five round trips each season. By season's end, it might have hauled perhaps 475,000 tons of iron ore. For a brief time in the late 1890s shipowners tried more powerful engines for greater speed, and quadruple-expansion engines briefly found favor in bulk freighters. The two fore-and-aft stacks once borne by Douglass Houghton of 1899 testified to that trend. But shipowners begrudged the extra fuel spent on extra speed, and the slower ships became the rule. In the present century, the "triple" became almost universal for lake bulk freighters. Of today's fleet, about 190 have or originally had triple-expansion engines. Less than twenty have or once had quadruple-expansion engines, and these usually belonged to ships built before 1900 or to a handful of larger ships of the twenties. Six more are four-cylinder compound engines--for Maritime Commission Class lakers built in 1943 at Lorain by American Ship Building Company (see cover). The last lakers built with triple-expansion engines were the other ten of the 1943 Maritime Commission program, those built by Great Lakes Engineering Works at River Rouge and Ashtabula. Only about fifteen other war-built or prewar lake bulk carriers existing today had any other kind of engine--turbines or diesels. 2. Enter the Diesel The diesel engine came to the lakes shortly after Rudolph Diesel's invention became commercially practical. To attempt an oversimplified description, a diesel engine works