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January, 1914 Re Ge avi Mr. pressed Robinson:--In reading Dickie's paper I im- with the am quite his water- much the same proposed by Marsden Niles, who was formerly a naval of- ficer, who presented a the committee at the time of the investigation, the only difference being that he wanted one of idea that tight deck is very thins as was paper before senate Titanic these decks to be on every deck, and the result was very much exag- gerated. [cannot help but agree en- tirely with: Mr. Gatewood in his belief that the amount of protec- tion should be pro- portional. to the number of lives involved. It seems to me that if we put the sanre amount of expense, for the safety of the ship, in a ship which carries only Care oOo, aud, "m which the crew must naturally as- sume the risk of the trade, that that is quite a different thing from pro- tecting the lives of a large number of passengers. I sup- pose practically all the ideas in these papers have been taken up by the International Com- mittee that is now sitting in London, and ff ima eine that asa result of that International Conference there will be certain laws proposed in America. It seems to me that this society should take (a very. act ive interest in the any laws that may be proposed as affecting the building of ships, the de- sign of ships, and the operation of ships. I have no doubt that the de- partment of commerce will probably be charged with the preparation of these laws, and will be glad of any suggestion from the society, and I think the society should take it on itself to offer its services in connec; tion with that matter, because any laws that may be passed will be of very great importance. There is one thing nobody which preparation of THE MARINE REVIEW has touched on here, which seems to me in many cases would contribute very largely to the safety of ships, and that is the installation of a com- pressed air system. difficult thing to This is not a very do; particularly on a passenger ship, where there are nu- merous decks. Something of that kind been put in several of our battleships, and it is a matter of such great simplicity. it -can has be combined GEORGE W. DICKIE with the fire protection feature and you can utilize the pipes, to a great extent at least, that are already in the ship. Probably on a single deck cargo carrying ship it would not be easy to put in, but on a'ship with several decks, where the pressures could be graduated from the bottom' up, it seems to me to be such a large step toward a_ solution of the problem. Mr. Gatewood's suggestion of the ap- plication of steel hatches for fire pro- tection would tend to make this thing even more easy. Prof, H. C. Sadler:--The question is . 23 really a rather complicated one be- cause we can attack it from so many points of view. In any ship we have varying permeabilities, as it has been called--that is, when a compartment is flooded, that compartment may contain machinery, engines and boil- ers or cargo, of different densities, or passenger accommodations. We can average up these permeabilities and make our flooding calculations accord- ingly. After we fix the permeabil- ity of different compartments then we ought to al- low. a margin of safety, to be de- termined by the experience of peo- ple who are hand- ling ships, naval atLCHiILeC tS and others, but the margin of safety must. be fixed in connection with the permeability, the space varying, or, as has been done, we can as- sume the vessel will go down to about the middle, under any condi- tions, and then we can vary the per- meability accord- ing to the type or size and speed of the vessel. All these are factors which come into this question of floating. The size of the vessel, of course, is also im- portant, amd in general a larger and higher speed vessel, should have a greater percent- age of freeboard than the smaller and lower speed type; xo ny amy own point of view I feel that it is the more rational thing to fix an average permeability in the cargo space, and then allow a percentage of depth as freeboard, or a margin of safety line, below which the vessel should never go under any conditions of flooding. With regard to the bulkheads them- selves, it is. absolutely essential, if you are going to put in bulkheads, to have them do their work, and I think, perhaps, more attention will be 'paid to the strength of bulkheads in the future than has been paid in the past. There is no tse putting® in a