Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/225

 A Torpedo-Proof Ship With Six Hulls

��It is to solve the food problem by scooping up the fish from the sea

���THE one great aim of Germany is to cut off America from her Allies, pre- venting our giving them military assistance and our supplying them with food. With his radically new inventions, Nels A. Ly- beck, of New York, a sea- man of many years' experi- ence, hopes to thwart Ger- many in both of these aims. Lybeck's invention of a multiple- hull ship util- izes a sailing principle never before used on any ocean-going ship. Six hulls twelve feet wide, separated by twelve feet of distance, sup- port the rectangular decks of the ship. The hulls are slightly tunnel-shaped at the bottom, and when they speed over the sea, the water is packed in these tunnels, — they rise upward and slide through the water. This novel construction has still another virtue. The largest waves cannot roll this ship. The row of hulls makes the ship act just like a huge flat-bottom scow, longer and wider than the breadth of the largest wave. The boat virtually rides on the tops of the waves, rolling but slightly even in the most violent seas.

But what has this to do with submarines, you ask? Just this: With a rectangular, non-rolling ship it is possible to protect it from submarines by means of torpedo- proof shields. Where V-bow boats would violently pitch when speeding on the high seas, and thereby strain their nets until they snapped off from their supports, this ship would carry a continuous, submerged steel wall on each side which would have to resist only the slight traveling strains

��The scoop on the speeding torpedo-proof ship is a hun- dred feet deep and one hundred and thirty feet wide

��caused by the water's friction. At bow and stern, she could rig herself out with strong steel gratings, and thus defy the biggest enemy torpedo afloat.

It was not long after perfecting his sub- marine-proof ocean freight- er that Ly- beck further developed this scheme into his solu- tion of the food problem. There are suf- ficient fish scattered in the ocean to continuously and com- pletely sup- ply the Allies with food many times over. Wit- ness his truly twentieth century method :

Three searchlights are used on his mul- tiple-hull ship at night to send their power- ful rays ten miles ahead of the boat. As the ship draws on, the ray of light becomes ever narrower, so that the fish crowd densely together as they swim eagerly towards it.

Then the huge wire scoop, a hundred feet deep and a hundred and thirty feet wide, which can be readily suspended from the front of the Lybeck type of boat, is dropped in the water. The ribs of this scoop are made like whalebones, so that water and debris can easily seep through and the fish can slide up, but never down and out of it!

When the teeming crowd of fish reaches the darkened scoop, this onrushing trap quickly swallows it up. Once near the end of the scoop, an endless-belt conveyor car- ries the fish to the assorting deck. Here a hundred men distribute them into cross conveyors which carry each fish into its respective refrigerator.

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