Floating Palaces: The Great Atlantic Liners

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Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Floating Palaces by William H. From the mids a race was on between the merchant navies of the recently unified Germany, Britain and France. That race was to make the most luxurious and fastest ocean liners, starting with the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The large vessels that followed each tried to outdo the previous one in terms of size and interior design.

Using many famous interior designers, ever From the mids a race was on between the merchant navies of the recently unified Germany, Britain and France. Using many famous interior designers, every part of the new ships was designed , from the cutlery and china to the bedrooms to the boat decks.

The process continued into the s, with the Empress of Britain and the fabulously Art Deco Normandie, the finest and most expensive liner ever built, and the Queen Mary, a rather more traditional vessel, but one, nonetheless, which pushed the boundaries of design away from the traditional country house look of the Edwardian era. Each new vessel brought with it the finest of interiors and even today, the influence of these floating palaces can still be seen in vessels such as Cunard s Queen Mary 2 and the multitude of new cruise vessels, all vying for the public s interest and affection.

The large liners were truly floating palaces, and here, William H. Miller brings together a collection of fabulous images of the finest ships ever built, showcasing the style and elegance of a time when getting there was half the fun. Kindle Edition , pages.

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Published September 22nd by Amberley Publishing first published March 19th To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Floating Palaces , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. A short, beautifully illustrated book about the fabulous transatlantic liners, from the late nineteenth century to the modern Queen Mary 2. The majority of the book is a carefully chosen collection of images - photographs, posters, mementos - that evoke the glory days of the liners, but also the sad consequences of the Depression when many ships were broken up.

These are linked by short chapters detailing the history of the liners. There are some facts and figures, passenger numbers, tonnage a A short, beautifully illustrated book about the fabulous transatlantic liners, from the late nineteenth century to the modern Queen Mary 2. There are some facts and figures, passenger numbers, tonnage and the like, but also plenty of description of life on board and the history of the shipping lines.

The Great Atlantic Liners

Ships that are floating palaces and monstesteamers of fifty years ago, the " record holders" of today, and the racers of the future. THE ocean greyhound of today, with its luxuries, its marvelous speed, its spacious quarters, its comparative stability, makes a run over to England or.

Every year people who have a short holiday spend it in taking a round trip on one of the great steamers, knowing that they will be nearly as well served as in the best hotel, and practically as safe -- for serious accidents on the Atlantic ferry are less common than hotel conflagrations on shore -- with the additional advantage of the invigorating sea air, and that exhilarating sense of movement that comes from flying through the waves.

It is almost entirely due to Americans that the Atlantic steamship has grown to its present estate from the modest beginnings of half a century ago; for of the hundred thousand cabin passengers who annually land at the New York docks, not more than twenty thousand are strangers.

Floating Palaces: The Great Atlantic Liners

The rest are Americans coming home. When the Cunards opened their line between Liverpool and Boston, in , they started with four ships. Today there are fourteen or fifteen steamship lines sailing out from New York alone, and something like ninety ships that carry saloon and passengers between European ports and the gateway of the New World. The first steamship to cross the ocean was an American boat, the Savannah, fitted out in New York by a Mr.

Scarlborough, of Savannah, Georgia.

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This was in It is difficult to realize now what a venturesome undertaking the voyage seemed in those days, only a dozen years later than the Clermont's pioneer trip from New York to Albany. The doubters who had sneered at Fulton's new fangled monster were positive that the Savannah would never finish her voyage.

To a certain extent their predictions were justified. Eighteen days out, her engines burned the last of her pitch pine fuel; but she made the rest of the distance with her sails, entering the Mersey on the thirty second day. The river's banks were lined with crowds eager to see the American wonder, and the captain had to turn his vessel over to the sightseers for a week.

But financially the experiment was a failure, and it was not repeated for a dozen years. Then, in , the Royal William of Quebec, using both steam and sails, crossed to England, where her owners sold her to the Spanish government to be turned into a warship. The regular Atlantic steamship service dates from , when two English vessels made the first race across the ocean. The Great Western started after her from Bristol on the 8th, and nearly succeeded in overtaking her, both ships reaching Sandy Hook on the 23d of April.

The Sirius would have had to be ignominiously towed up the bay if her captain had not been on his mettle to the extent of burning his spars and part of the cargo. The arrival of these ships made about as much stir as the settling down of two flying machines would make today. There were long editorials in the New York newspapers over the " excitement," and it was seriously debated whether the volume of travel would ever be great enough to make such ventures profitable.

Old inhabitants still talk of the day when the Great Western sailed out of the harbor, on her return voyage, with more than a hundred thousand people crowded in the Battery Park to see her off. Evidently New York curiosity has always held its present characteristics.

Floating palaces :the great Atlantic liners /William H. Miller. – National Library

The Great Western afterward improved her record to 12 days, 7 hours -- a great advance upon the speed of earlier boats. She was of 1, tons burden, and The builders of the Great Western next launched a still larger ship, the Great Britain, which was wrecked on its third voyage -- a disaster that ruined its owners.

The company to which the Sirius belonged was equally unlucky, being unable to survive the loss of a new steamer called the President, which left New York in March, , and was not heard of again. There never was a successful steamship line until Samuel Cunard, the Halifax merchant, conceived the idea of promoting a company which should receive a handsome premium from the British government for carrying the mails. His idea was carried out through English influence, an annual subsidy of sixty thousand pounds being granted to the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which we know today as the Cunard Line.

The Britannia, one of the four ships built to carry out the fortnightly mail contract, sailed front Liverpool on June 2, , carrying the unprecedented number of ninety passengers, and the regular mail route between England and America was opened. It was the Britannia that brought Dickens here in In American capitalists organized the famous old Collins line, to which the United States government paid nearly a million dollars a year to carry the mails and make better time than the Cunarders. The Collins ships were widely advertised as models of comfort and beauty.

Their owners were the first to pay much attention to interior decoration, and to give a foretaste of the beauty of furnishing which all ocean travelers know today. They made better time, too, than their English rivals, their average passage being from ten to eleven days, while the Cunarders could not do better than twelve days.

But the high rate of speed ruined the line by its enormous expense, and in the American flag disappeared from the Atlantic ferry. A curious incident in the story of ocean travel was the building of the monstrous Great Eastern, which still, forty years after her keel was laid on the Thames, remains the largest ship ever constructed. She was far too heavy for her engines, and proved a total failure as a passenger ship. Later, she did memorable service in laying the first Atlantic cable, and went all over the world as a bearer of submarine wires, until she was bought at a bargain by a dry goods firm in Liverpool, who used her for a time as a floating bazar, and finally broke her up in About the time when the Collins company sent its ships across the ocean, another line was founded in England -- the Inman, which has now hoisted the Stars and Stripes and become the American line.

But though the growth of competition led to increased attention to the comfort of passengers, accommodations were still primitive. A passenger who went to England in the early forties draws a picture of his experiences that makes us realize why our grandfathers considered a trip to Europe one of the terrors, as well as delights, of a lifetime. The state rooms were little more than closets, lit with smoky oil lamps, and provided with two berths, two feet wide, one above the other. They were situated in the after part of the ship, where the vessel's motion, and the noise of the machinery, made pandemonium in a sensitive brain, and rendered sea sickness almost inevitable.

And this misery had to be endured for ten, eleven, or twelve days. The clipper ships still continued to carry immigrants to America. It was the managers of the Inman line who first saw that room could be made for third cabin passengers on steamships, and tried the experiment with such success that the clipper disappeared from the seas.

Then the White Star company built the earliest steamers modeled upon lines that have since been more or less closely followed, with the state rooms in the center of the ship. The Baltic, a White Star liner, first brought the " record " below eight days, crossing from Sandy Hook to Queenstown, in , in seven days, twenty hours. From that date the contest of speed has been so keen that in twenty one years the record has been broken seventeen times. It was the Guion liner Alaska that marked an era in the struggle with time and space by bringing the voyage within a week, in Seven years later, after the Alaska, the ill fated Oregon, the America, and the twin Cunarders Etruria and Umbria, had successively reigned and been deposed as ocean monarchs, the Paris reached another milestone by crossing in less than six days.

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For three years more the Paris' only rivals were her sister ship, the New York, and the pair of White Star liners, the Teutonic and Majestic. Then the Cunard company launched its latest giants -- also twin vessels -- the Campania and Lucania, and the latter now holds the record -- five days, seven hours, and twenty three minutes. This wonderful progress has been achieved in the face of repeated assertions that no further advance was practicable. It is true that each slight addition of speed involves an expense that swells in rapidly ascending ratio.

To drive the Lucania and Campania through the water more swiftly than the Paris by one knot in an hour necessitated an increase of horse power from the latter's twenty thousand to the colossal figure of thirty thousand for the Cunard giants, the most tremendously powerful and costly machines ever built by the hand of man. It seems, today, as if the limit has been quite or nearly reached, at least for the present.

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