Building a Leviathan

Conceived in 1851 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the idea behind the Great Eastern was that she could steam virtually around the world without refuelling. The intention was that this would give the Great Eastern the commercial edge over the lucrative immigrant trade to India and Australia. Construction of the Great Eastern started in 1854 at John Scott-Russell’s ship building yard on the Isle of Dogs in London. 30,000 iron plates, each one weighing one third of a ton, were used to build her hull. Each plate was shaped to a unique curvature using huge iron shears and rollers with each one marked with its own number. Then, like a giant jigsaw, the plates were winched into their place, as marked on the ships plans. The two main engines had the potential of generating 11,000 horsepower. Along with Brunel’s new idea of using skylights to illuminate inner cabins, air-trunks provided air-conditioning, enabling Brunel to place cabins deep inside the hull of the ship. Until then most cabins were placed on the deck and so seriously reducing the deck area but these two designs enabled Brunel to radically change the layout of the ship by providing a great many more cabins than any other ship could offer whilst keeping the deck clear. The deck was 698 feet long and 120 feet wide. Complete with gaslights, the deck was soon nicknamed Oxford Street. The Great Eastern was to have 100 feet long steam ships called lighters strapped to either side of her hull but due to financial constraints these were never built. She featured 6 masts in total, all named from Monday consecutively through to Saturday, after the days of the week. When asked where Sunday was, a sailor onboard would explain that whilst at sea sailors never had a Sunday! She relied on a new double hull concept for the design of her hull. The hulls were constructed with a 3 feet wide compartment between the hulls. The double hull system enable 16 huge watertight cells to be placed around the ship, increasing the Great Eastern’s stability considerably. Legend has it that a riveter became accidentally sealed alive in one of the hull's water tight cells and couldn’t make his shouts and bangs heard above the din of 1000 riveters working outside. His ghost was said to have brought bad luck upon the ship. It took 3 million rivets to build the hull. Each rivet was 1 inch thick and was hammered home by 200 rivet gangs. Each rivet gang consisted of 2 riveters (each hammering the rivet from either side) and a work boy who held the white-hot rivet in place with iron tongs. The paddle-engines weighed 836 tons and the paddles wheels themselves were measured 58 foot in diameter. The screw shaft was 120 feet long and weighed 60 tons terminating in a cast iron propeller that measured 24 feet in diameter and weighed 36 tons. The ship could carry enough coal for a 22,000 mile voyage. To achieve this Brunel utilised every available space in the ships hull for the storage of coal. Coal was bunkered so tightly into the ships hull that the crew had to use a 6 feet wide iron tube buried in the coal to move from engine room to engine room. When complete the Great Eastern weighed over 15,000 tons and would be the heaviest object ever to have floated on the world’s oceans at the time. Brunel also designed a steam powered steering mechanism, which due to increasing debts, was never included in during her build. However, the steering mechanism was included much later, in 1867, when the Great Eastern was lavishly refitted by Napoleon the Third. It took 7 years to build and launch the Great Eastern and by the time she was launched she had missed the majority of the emigrant trade she was initially designed for. A worker fell to his death during the building of the ship, whilst another died between the Great Eastern’s hull. A riveter fell onto another whilst a work boy fell head first onto a standing spike “after he was dead, his body quivered for sometime”. A visitor had his head crushed whilst he was looking around the construction of the ship, bringing the total of deaths that occurred during the construction of the Great Eastern to 5.