Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/100

84

� ��Picture continued on next Some of the finished boats ready for inspection. Each boat was thoroughly tested in the St. Lawrence River before being accepted. Arranged as in the photograph the five hundred and fifty boats

��and wash basins, 11,550 ventilator cowls, 1,650 toilets, 325,000 ft. of wire rope of various kinds and 450,000 pounds of paint, varnish and putty.

Will Every Coast Dweller Own a Motor-Boat?

In the assembling operation alone more than 3,000 men were employed, and about 9,000 others were scattered in the various workshops fabricating the material before it was sent to the main plant. This is the first time that the principles of standardiza- tion, division of labor, and progressive assembling have ever been applied with any thoroughness to shipbuild- ing. There is no reason, however, as this success- ful experi- ment proves, why motor- boats cannot be turned out cheaply enough to make them as available to the aver-

���age citizen as is the popular-priced car. The movement toward standardization began in 1905, when Mr. Sutphen's com- pany built 120 twenty-one-foot mine-yawls for the United States War Department. The same company two years later built 33 thirty-foot mine layers on standard lines, and during the next six years turned out no thirty-six foot power life boats for the United States life-saving service. Probably the largest motor-boats ever built according to uniform design were two 98-foot yachts, made in 1910. Others who have made experiments along the same line are a company that turned out a number of thirty- footers, and another that has been building twenty- foot steel motor- boats in fairly large quanti- ties on stan- d.ard pat- terns.

It should not be imagin- ed that these

��About fifty operations were involved, each requiring a separate gang of men. Here is the "ribbing gang"

��subm a rine chasers built

�� �