Page:Walker - An Unsinkable Titanic (1912).djvu/46

AN UNSINKABLE TITANIC rapidly have we added weight to weight and horsepower to horsepower, that both the mass and the power have been quadrupled. The giant steamship of to-day, as she rushes through the black night and the all-obscuring fog, represents a potential engine of destruction, for which no parallel can be found in the whole field of human activity.

Do you doubt it? Then learn that on that fatal night when the Titanic bore headlong into the icefield, she embodied in her onrushing mass an energy equal to that of the combined broadsides of our two most powerful battleships, the Florida and the Utah. Which is to say that, if the two dreadnoughts had discharged their twenty twelve-inch guns, at point-blank range, against the iceberg which sank this ship, they would have struck a combined blow of less energy than that delivered by the Titanic. And every one of these guns, be it remembered, delivers its shell with an energy of 50,000 foot-tons—sufficient to lift either of these battleships nearly two and a half feet into the air.

Of the serious risk to a ship of collision with an iceberg, it is superfluous to say anything [ 24 ]