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VOL. 39. CLEVELAND, AUGUST, 1909. NEW YORK No. 17 Shallow Draught River tS - generally conceded that, in many respects, the present-day river passenger steamer is much behind those of 40 or 50 years ago in speed and comfort. In fact, if isa -com- mon remark that while there has been tremendous improvement in deep-wa- ter and trans-Atlantic steamships, lit- tle improvement has been made in our river steamers. This is partly true and partly untrue. The _ conditions of today are entirely different from those of 50 years ago, and call for facilities of another character. Under any circumstances, the west- erm river steamer stands in a class alone, and cannot be judged by the same standards as deep-water craft. It is the purpose of this paper to present the peculiar character of our river steamers in a general way; tak- ing up each part--that is, the hull, the machinery, and its performance, as far as possible, so that its merits, from an engineering and navigating stand- point of view, may be considered in detail. The production of the river steam- er has not developed in the ratio of Our engineering knowledge, as applied to other up-to-date steamers. There are few yards where two or three Steamers are under construction at the same time. They are frequently built on the river bank, and, when the hull is finished, it is slipped or launched sideways into the river. Generally the hull is built by one man or firm, the engines by another, and the cabin by a third party. In this there is seldom any accurately- eee "Abstract of a paper read at the summer Meeting of the Society of Naval Architects and a Engineers, held at Detroit, June 20, in western river parlance. made design, drawing or calculation of weights and _ displacement. En- gines do duty on three or four hulls, and sometimes the cabins are moved over onto a new hull. Quite re- cently, a very fine new hull has been built of creosoted wood and a new cabin put thereon, but the engines, 16 ins -by 54 ft. arid doctor, 'said to have been built during or before the war, have been re-installed on the new boat, it being the third hull on which they have done duty. From an engineering standpoint it is regrettable that very 'little data of the actual performance of western river steamers are available. No speed and power trials are ever run, so far as the writer's knowledge goes. A boat's speed is estimated by ther progress up-stream (seven, eight, nine or ten miles up-stream, with no defin- ite agreement as to what the stream is, which, in fact, may be from one to three or four miles as an average current and from four to eight or nine miles in certain places), still there is a general average of speed up-stream, which the western boat- man appreciates, that is by no means intelligible to an engineer. Horsepower is seldom considered A. boat's power is, in its vernacular, 10 in. by 30 in., 12 in. by 48 in., 16 in. by 5 8,14 in. by 7 ft., 20 in. by 8 ft, etc., all of which are accepted proportions of the engine's cylinders. Work done by a western towboat is rated by the number of empty coal barges she will tow up stream, which is sometimes fined down by giving the time from one point to another up-stream, with a given tow of so many empty barges. Steamers By Charles]Ward The writer has been asked to sub- mit a proposal for a towboat to take so many 'barges up the Mississippi river at four miles an hour, when there was stated to be a current of four miles, and at certain points }a current of eight miles. No data could be found as to the horsepower fe- quired to push a given tow at any speed. Most of the loaded tows are simply floated and _ steered down- stream, but by figuring the displace- ment of the tow down and the cor- responding calculation of the return barges, I found that in this section a towboat could bring back one-sixth of the displacement she took down the river, but to get a horsepower ton-mile is out of the question. With such. conditions, it is difficult to handle a subject of this nature in a manner comparable with engineering standards. I shall, therefore, now pre- sent, very briefly, the general features as they exist today, commencing with the hull. Hulls. In perhaps 90 cases out of 100 the hulls are of wood. There has been a prejudice that a wooden hull stands the service better than an iron hull. In some cases the hull and main deck have been of steel, but the bottom sheeting has been of 4-in. oak. Steel,. however, is here asserting its superi- ority as elsewhere, and now there are several steel steamers on the west- ern rivers. To further consider the hull, I may say that they are invariably flat bot- tomed, with vertical sides and a more or less modeled bow, having consider- able flare with a view to get the cur- rent rather under the boat than around