Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/724

 Exit the Mississippi Stem -Wheeler; Enter the Motor-Barge

���Motor-barges equipped with traveling-cranes, wireless apparatus and other modern apparatus, are to supplant the romantic Mississippi stern-wheeler

��THE old, picturesque stern-wheel Mississippi freighter and passenger boat has a rival in a new type of barge.

The first of these boats is two hundred and forty feet long, forty-three feet wide and has a cargo structure two hundred feet long, forty feet wide and twelve feet high. The roof of this box-like structure can be removed in its entirety or in sections so as to permit access to any part of the cargo. The stowage of the cargo is facilitated by the use of an electrically-operated traveling-crane, which is capable of sending a boom on either side of the barge a distance of sixty-eight feet, which can travel along the whole length of the barge and which has a lifting capacity of three tons.

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tLEVATIOM AND PLAN VIEW

��Diagrams showing structural details of the motor-barges

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��These two-thousand-ton barges have a steel hull divided into four watertight and airtight compartments, with no hatches. Hence the boats are practical- ly unsinkable. A puncture of the bot- tom will not permit water to enter faster than it will compress the air in each compartment to a given point. Should any accident puncture a com- partment at any other place, powerful electric bilge-pumps, capable of dis- charging eight thousand gallons per minute, can be operated by a switch located in the pilot-house.

Another commendable emergency ma- chine is a bow-pump, with suction and discharge at port and starboard at will. By turning a switch the pilot can suck away the water at one side and discharge it at the other with a resultant pull of twenty-five horsepow- er, which enables the vessel to turn from the dock against a forty-mile wind.

As the illustrations show, the living quarters, engine- rooms and pilot-house are en- tirely separate from the hull proper and the cargo spacing. Forward on the main deck are located the dining-room, the galley, and the large kitchen,

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