SS Great Eastern

On 25 March 1852 Isambard Kingdom Brunel sketched a steamship in his diary and wrote beneath it: Say 600 ft x 65 ft x 30 ft. Those figures were six times larger by volume than anything then afloat. He wanted a ship that could reach Australia without taking on coal, carrying so much that the papers called her a floating city and the Crystal Palace of the sea. John Scott Russell, an experienced naval architect, calculated a displacement of 20,000 tons needing 8,500 horsepower for 14 knots, thought it possible, and took the plan with Brunel to the Eastern Steam Navigation Company.

Her keel was laid at Scott Russell's yard at Millwall on the Thames on 1 May 1854. She measured 692 feet long by 82 feet wide, and displaced 32,000 tons fully loaded, against SS Persia of 1856 at 390 feet. She was the first ship built with a double skin: two layers of 19-millimetre wrought iron in plates 2 feet 10 inches wide, ribbed every 1.8 metres, with two longitudinal bulkheads 107 metres long and transverse bulkheads dividing her into nineteen compartments. Some 30,000 iron plates, each a third of a ton, were cut over individually made wooden templates and rolled to curvature.

Brunel did not believe a single shaft could transmit enough power, so she carried three means of propulsion. Paddle wheels 17 metres across were driven by four engines; a four-bladed screw 7.3 metres across had its own; ten boilers supplied steam at 172 kPa, for perhaps 8,000 horsepower and a maximum of 13 knots. Six masts, said to be named for the days of the week from Monday forward to Saturday aft, carried her sails, but they could not be set under steam because exhaust from the five funnels set them alight. Six workers were killed during construction.

She was to be launched sideways into the Thames on 3 November 1857 before a large crowd that included the Comte de Paris, the Duke of Aumale and the Siamese ambassador. She stuck on her rails. Two men were killed and several injured, and people began calling her an unlucky ship. Brunel spent the winter assembling chains, jacks, hydraulic rams and windlasses from sympathetic engineers, returned favours and, increasingly, hard cash. The engineer Richard Tangye made enough hiring out gear to found his own firm the following year, remarking that we launched Great Eastern, and she launched us.

High winds stopped the attempt on 30 January 1858, but she went into the water around ten the next morning. The cost had already destroyed the Eastern Steam Navigation Company; she had lain unfinished for a year, was renamed from Leviathan, and was sold on for £800,000, a loss of some $3,000,000 to the original investors. Fitting out ran to another $600,000, and shareholders openly proposed selling her to the Royal Navy, one arguing in The Times that as a ram she would cleave through any warship afloat.

In early September 1859 she sailed from her dock for the Channel with spectators lining the banks. Off Hastings a valve left shut after a pressure test caused a steam explosion that killed five crewmen and destroyed the forwardmost funnel. Brunel was not aboard. He had collapsed from a stroke after being photographed on her deck and died ten days later, four days after her first sea trials. Of her he had said that he had never embarked on any one thing to which he had so entirely devoted himself, and on the success of which he had staked so much reputation.

Her maiden voyage began at Liverpool on 17 June 1860 with 35 paying passengers, eight non-paying and 418 crew, and ended in New York eleven days later. Tens of thousands came to look at her, but the company charged a dollar to come aboard where local excursion boats charged 25 cents, and New Yorkers stayed away. The American venture took $120,000 against overheads of $72,000, when the owners had expected $700,000, and daily interest of $5,000 ate whatever was made. At Halifax the lighthouse service levied a tonnage toll of $1,750; the governor refused to waive it and she turned for home without embarking a soul.

The one clear success came in 1861, when the War Office chartered her to reinforce Canada. She sailed for Quebec with 2,144 soldiers, 473 passengers and 122 horses, which with her crew of 400 may have been the largest number of people carried in a single ship to that date, and made the crossing in a record 8 days and 6 hours. The military officers praised her, but the contract was discontinued soon after her return. That September a hurricane held her for three days out of Liverpool, tore off both paddle wheels, stripped her sails and bent the rudder to 200 degrees until her own propeller tore it up.

An American engineer aboard, Hamilton Towle, jury-rigged a means of steering and she limped to Queenstown on her screw alone, only to be refused entry for three days for fear the wind would drive her from her anchorage. The storm cost some $300,000 in damage and lost revenue. On the night of 27 August 1862, drawing 30 feet off Montauk Point, she struck an uncharted rock needle eight metres below the surface. It opened a gash 2.7 metres wide and 25 metres long in the outer hull; the transverse bracing kept the inner hull whole. No dry dock in the world could take her, so the repair was made in a cofferdam for $350,000.

In January 1864 four of her directors bought her at auction for $125,000, let the ship company go bankrupt, and chartered her to the American financier Cyrus West Field to lay submarine cable. It was the one trade her size suited. Salons and cabins were torn out for tanks to hold 22,450 kilometres of wire, and in July 1865 she began paying out from Valentia Island at about six knots. The work went smoothly for weeks until the cable end was lost in mid-Atlantic.

She came back in 1866 with a new line, and her first officer Robert Halpin located the lost end as well; the unbroken cable came ashore at Heart's Content, Newfoundland, on 27 July 1866. Halpin went on to command her. She laid cables off Brest in early 1869 and was then painted white to keep the heat off her cable tanks for work in the Indian Ocean, most of it funded by the British government and Indian banks who wanted an alternative to the unreliable overland link. She reached Bombay 83 days out, then laid to Aden and on to the island of Jabal al-Tair.

Her owners had built the arrangement so that she could pay them even when she could not pay herself: rather than a fee, they took shares in the cable companies, wanting $250,000 in telegraph stock for the 1865 charter and only if the laying succeeded. The Suez Canal, opened the same decade, was the one door closed to her. The channel was too shallow to take her, and going round Africa she could not compete with ships that could use it. A famed Arab navigator, Ali Rischdi, proposed taking her through anyway. It was never attempted.

Cable laying ended when the purpose-built CS Faraday appeared, and a refit back into a liner failed as every earlier scheme had. She lay at Milford for eleven years, in the way of a harbour board that wanted dockyards, until an engineer named Frederick Appleby built a dock around her and used her hulk as a station for driving pylons. The naturalist Henry Lee, studying her fouled bottom, calculated some 300 tons of marine life attached to it. She was sold at Lloyd's on 4 November 1885 for £26,200.

What followed was a showboat, a floating concert hall and gymnasium, and finally an advertising hoarding sailed up and down the Mersey for Lewis's department store. She was sold again in 1888 for £16,000 as scrap and broken up at New Ferry by Henry Bath & Son between 1889 and 1890, in an early use of a wrecking ball. It took eighteen months, the double hull proving especially hard to cut, and the workers, paid by the ton, went on strike over the slow going.

Pieces of her survive. Her top mast stands at the Kop end at Anfield, moved there by Everton before their departure in 1892. The funnel blown off in the 1859 explosion was salvaged, bought by a Dorset water company as a filter, and now sits at the SS Great Britain museum beside Brunel's earlier ship. The rumour that a riveter was found entombed in her double hull spread after the breaking; L. T. C. Rolt dismissed it, noting such a discovery would have been recorded and reported, but Sting still sang it in 2013, and Jules Verne set a novel aboard her in 1871.