Over the weekend, the fam and I paid a visit to the Museum of the City of New York, primarily to check out the exhibit on our fair city’s stab at going green. But the exhibit that really drew me in was “Trade”, an overview of New York’s heyday as a bustling port. As noted yesterday, Microkhan has enjoyed a lifelong fascination with polyglot commercial centers—or, as the Obi-Wan might put it, “hives of scum and villainy.”
Among the gems at “Trade” was a mock-up of Norman Bel Geddes‘s proposed luxury liner. Geddes’s big idea was to completely get rid of deck space, so that transoceanic passengers wouldn’t breath a lick of fresh air between New York and points far afield. He didn’t mean this to be cruel, but rather to increase speed—his theory was that deck’s caused massive drag, and that getting rid of them going with the torpedo design would increase speed by upwards of 50 percent. Guess we’ll never know if that man was correct, since this beauty never even got into beta.
More on Geddes’s prototype here.
(h/t David Szondy)
Jordan // Mar 24, 2009 at 10:16 pm
I can’t imagine that it would show that kind of improvement. Water creates much, much, much more drag than air at the speeds ocean liners travel at.
Brendan I. Koerner // Mar 24, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Good point. Given that NBG was best known for making cocktail shakers and theater sets, I remain skeptical of his engineering chops.