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34 TAE MARINE REVIEW turbine work, and I am quite sure that in these twenty pages, which I think Mr. Baxter would allow, he could compress a great deal of information and make his report one of the most notable papers of recent years. President Bowles: I believe that the Society is obvi- ously under great obligations to Mr. Speakman for plac- ing before us his very interesting and valuable paper, and while no doubt we should all be pleased to see him add to it in many respects, it seems only fair that in the case of one, who has already been generous, to point out that in new development work there are obvious business reasons for not telling all that you know. (Applause.) Amongst others, we do not care at this particular time to have Tom, Dick and Harry designing turbine engines. (Laughter.) In view of these remarks, I shall not give utterance to the one point in which I wanted more information (Laughter) ; and I will only tell you that I think we will all get it with- out asking for it in the next three or four months (Laugh- ter). One of the speakers has reminded me of something which it seems desirable to say, and that is in regard to the author who has read his paper here (meaning Curtis). He has one remarkable failing for an inventor, and that is, he is apt to discourage the use of his own apparatus. Now, I consider that if I had had the grip on the Curtis turbine at the time the Staten Island Ferry boats were designed that I have now, there might have been quite a different kind of service going on. It seems to me obvious that a machine consisting of a single drum on a continuous shaft and containing within itself a number of wheels that would operate that boat at full speed in either direction and with equal efficiency by simply shutting off the steam from one end and turning it into the other, has obvious advantages over a vessel containing two complete triple-expansion . engines with a number of various moving parts. It has also appeared to me that the control of such an apparatus for ferry boat work has an enormous advantage. I can conceive that within an appreciably short time it is possi- ble to control such a turbine engine from the pilot house and to place it absolutely under the control of the man at the wheel (Applause). It would no doubt be interesting to know all that Mr. Parsons knows; but it seems to me that in this turbine matter too much stress is sometimes laid on small things. The turbine has enormous advan- tages in practical use entirely apart from the exact econo- my that can be obtained at the present time. Whether the economy is Io percent less or 10 percent greater than that of the triple expansion engine will hardly weigh with the practical advantages, of the turbine for ma- rine propulsion. It seems hardly necessary to mention, but I believe that for merchant vessels that the very sub- stantial gain that can be obtained in'the carrying capacity of a vessel by the use of the turbine engine will far out- weigh any of the questions of relative economy that are being now brought up with regard to the use of fuel. You may not see now how that is going to be brought about, and I don't propose to tell (Laughter), but it will be shown, There are a number of collateral advantages in the use of the turbine which I will only mention. Its readiness for operation is an important 'one in many com- mercial services. That has been shown, and the results have been published, in the generator turbines in use in the work at Niagara. The troubles which infest boilers from the excessive use of lubricants will be vastly reduced. I believe that the labor and the attendance upon these engines will also be very considerably reduced over what. is now customary in our regular steamers. When we come to warship construction the turbine assumes even a different aspect. In securing high speed in war vessels, which now seems to be much emphasized in its importance, the question has largely resolved itself into securing the maximum supply of steam for a given weight, and now that the introduction of the turbine permits the efficient -use of all the steam that can be generated, that should very much facilitate the increase in speed in larger vessels, without corresponding increase in weight. It will permit and encourage in war vessels the introduction of oil fuel as a means of producing a greater quantity of steam with the same weight of boiler. In the same way it will encour- age the introduction of the mechanical stoker for the same pu:pose. And I believe that as the result of these three 'elements, that is, oil fuel, mechanical stoking, the water tube boiler and the turbine, we are about to see again a radical improvement in the types of war vessels (Ap- plause). Mr. W. D. Forbes: The silence which fell on this com- munity when the Chair offered a paper for discussion, I think, judging by my own feelings, arose from the fact that we felt as if we were assisting at our own funerals. But is seems to me that these papers are read to give us some instructions--not merely to tell us where we can go and get something; and I earnestly hope that those who have had actual experience themselves will, in their further discussion tell us a little about their troubles that they have every day, and the difficulty that they encounter in handling them. Now, I earnestly beg those who will discuss it to tell us something about the trouble. Mr. W. L. R. Emmet: My reason for asking to address this meeting is that I have had a wide experience with turbines of the type to which Mr. Curtis has referred and which are based upon his inventions. Some four or five years ago I became convinced of the practicability of this idea from certain results obtained on a very small expe- rimental machine which had not appealed forcibly to many others who had inspected it. And upon the strength of my conviction I committed my employers to many millions of dollars of expenditure in developments based upon that idea. The carrying out of that work involved the con- struction of many hundreds of turbines, and we have had a great amount of experience with the practical problems involved in our case and also with the problems which re- late to the turbine art generally. Our work is the appli- cation of turbines to the driving of electrical generators, and it is essentially a high speed problem; but in the course of our experiments and developments the possibi- lities with other speeds have also been developed to a very great extent, and furthermore, the mechanical problems and the construction possibilities have been developed to a very considerable degree, and we are, therefore, in a position to form ideas concerning what can be done. The turbine problem is one which involves a vastly greater number of variables than the problem involved in the application of steam engines to similar purposes, because turbines may be built in a great variety of ways. *The problem therefore presents theoretical complications with great mechanical simplicity. The turbines should not be condemned on the basis of any--on the performance of any one turbine or upon any one man's conception of what the turbine will do. The solution of any problem with turbines should be undertaken as an individual prob- lem, and everything should be made to conform. The Curtis turbine involves certain features which all other turbines--certain practical features which all other tur- bines, in my opinion, have lacked. In the first place it is a machine which operates without thrust. In the second place, it is a machine in which clearance is a mat- ter rather of indifference than of practical limits; and in the third place, it is a machine which can be built in very light weights, even where the diameter is extremely large,