Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/366

 man is solely indebted to the wonderful lamp for its discovery. The form of least resistance could never have been discovered by accident. The old ship-builders jumped at the conclusion that the fish's head and the duck's breast were the only perfect types of a vessel's bow; but the magical wave-line could not be introduced into naval architecture until science had revealed the true laws of fluid motion and resistance.

We have said that the hull of the Leviathan is formed of unyielding plates of inch iron; also that this gigantic hull has innumerable curves, which die away into each other by insensible gradations. At the first glance these two statements appear irreconcilable. How can these delicate curves be produced by any aggregation of rectilinear pieces of flat boiler-plate? In ordinary wooden ships the planking by its elasticity allows itself to be modelled to the ribs; but here there are no ribs, in the true sense of the word, and the form of the vessel must depend upon the inclination given to each separate piece of iron before the fastening process is commenced. And such in fact is the case. Every individual plate, before being fixed in its proper position, was the subject of a separate study to the engineer. Of the thirty thousand plates that compose the hulk of this great ship, only a few situated in the midship section are alike either in size or curve. For each a model in wood, or "template," as it is technically called, had originally to be made,