Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/188

184 for the efficiency and reliability of the fleet of 1861-5 and later. But, while the latter has great interest for all as an element of the success of the government in suppressing the southern confederacy, the former is more impressive in its illustration of the application of modern science to the revolutionizing of the construction of the fleet.

The career of Admiral Melville has thus been one of peculiar interest, and I am glad to be able to review it from the standpoint of the contemporary and professional colleague, of one who entered the navy in 1861 in the same class and, with commissions of similar date, served for many years in the same corps, and later, professionally, in civil life in such capacities as permitted constant touch with the 'chief.'

Melville's services to science as an arctic explorer antedated his appointment as chief of bureau. He was appointed 'chief by Mr. Whitney, secretary of the navy, on August 8, 1887, and served sixteen years, the longest period of service on record for a chief of bureau. He immediately took up his task of preparing plans for the machinery of the 'new navy,' gathering about him the ablest available members of his corps. The department had meantime bought plans from foreign builders for the Baltimore, Charleston and Texas; but the work of the new bureau-chief and his corps made it quite unnecessary to experiment in that direction further. The existing fleet is, as a whole, the production of the engineers and naval architects and ordnance officers of our own Navy Department; the whole system of steam propulsion and its accessories being designed under the direction and supervision of the hero of the Lena Delta.

Among other innovations and improvements was the installation of the previously almost untried marine water-tube boiler of the general type long familiar on land. John Stevens, a century ago, asserted that the proper construction of a steam-boiler, on the score of safety, was that which divides the steam and water spaces into many small chambers, in such manner that the rupture of any one should be in minimum degree dangerous. He invented a water-tube boiler and used it in a screw steamboat, 1804. The famous British engineer, Fairbairn, asserted the principle: A steam-boiler should be so constructed as not to be liable to explosion. The modern water-tube boiler of good design combines the principle that a steam-boiler should not be liable to disruptive explosion with that which asserts that, if rupture does occur, it shall be in minimum degree dangerous. It was asserted by the writer, a generation ago, that this class must ultimately displace the older forms of 'shell-boiler' which are liable to destructive