The Model of a Ship

Editor's note: The following excerpts are from the Rockland County Messenger, January 4, 1894. Thank you to Contributing Scholar George A. Thompson for finding, cataloging and transcribing this article. The language, spelling and grammar of the article reflects the time period when it was written.

Hudson River Maritime Museum

THE MODEL OF A SHIP BUILT FROM BLOCKS OF WOOD AFTER DRAWINGS ON PAPER.
Some of the Details of a Very Interesting Operation as Told by a Famous Constructor - England Behind the Other Leading Nations Until Recently.
           
Who would ever have imagined that a great ship — a modern wonder of the sea like the Paris or the Camperdown — is built as a woman makes a dress or a tailor cuts out a suit of clothes? That is the fact. Ships nowadays are built from patterns, and those patterns do not greatly differ in appearance or in fact from those which enable American women to copy the fashion in dress. To be sure, a tailor's and dressmaker’s patterns are made of paper and are laid upon cloth or dress goods, while a shipbuilder's patterns are of wood, and steel and iron are made to follow them. That is perhaps the greatest difference between the methods of high grade tailoring and high grade shipbuilding, so far as their first steps go.
           
The English have only lately begun to value the model as the basis of shipbuilding. A famous American shipbuilder says that the model of the yacht America was the first model he ever saw in England. That accounts for the absence of beauty in English ships, which even to this day possess varying degrees of ugliness, but no beauty. For, though they make models today, the mere making of them does not suffice. The art and appreciation of model making must be instinctive.
           
The French and Spanish from the earliest times made beautiful ships and models, and when one of these ships fell into the hands of the English they adopted and used her if possible, or if she was too much damaged they took her apart, piece by piece, and built a new ship like her by copying the exact shape of each part of her in new material. Curiously enough, we Americans have always made beautiful ships — well proportioned, artistic in every line, while satisfactory in an equal degree for all practical purposes.
           
A model is made in a way that seems queer to the average layman, who doubtless suspected that it was whittled into shape out of a block of wood, as we boys used to whittle our blocks at the age when all of us were shipbuilders. It is not done so. After an order has been received for a certain kind of ship the plans of it are drawn upon paper. Mr. Lewis Nixon, the famous constructor for the Cramps, tells me that very early in the process he makes a picture of the ship as he wants it to look, but though he does so others may not consider it essential.
           
At all events, apart from any drawing, the needed dimensions and lines are developed upon paper, and then the model is made, and the president of the company begins to take very active interest in the work. The model is made in the shape of a block, formed of a number of pieces of wood glued together. These pieces represent the different curves of one side of the ship, from the keel to the gunwale — the different water lines is how the builders express it. To understand this the-reader most imagine a ship made of solid wood. Imagine that cut in half lengthwise, and then imagine one half laid on its side and cut into slices.

Hudson River Maritime Museum

The pen and ink calculations and plans produce the shape of the ship, and from these it is possible to obtain the outline and dimensions of every slice or plane between the bottom and the top. Each plane is measured and drawn in outline on a board, and the outline is word unclear] or cut in the board with a [word unclear] tool. All the boards or pieces of wood are then glued together, and a simple looking block is made — a block that shows nothing of its true nature except that the top of it bears the graven outline of the top deck or gunwale line of a ship. Out of that simple square block will come the egg which is to hatch the splendid ship that is to be.
           
That block, made up of slices, each with its dented outline of a different plane of the ship, is now cut away, much as we boys used to cut our block, but with this difference: Each board is cut exactly to the dented or graven line upon its surface. The shape the block will have when all the superfluous wood is cut away will be the model of the ship that was designed by the engineer on paper to fill the requirements of the customer’s order, but will that model stand? Will the master builder be satisfied with its lines?
           
Will it do to be enlarged in steel and sent around the world as an example of what the Cramps consider the most beautiful and artistic and useful shape such a ship should have? No. Such a first model next to never suits the modeler, who in this case is Mr. Charles H. Cramp. He hacks into it with fervor. He tapers the bow. He digs away the stern. He shaves the whole model with the nice and dainty touches of a sculptor at work upon a statue on which is to rest his boast that he is a true artist.
           
The fate of the wooden block alters the figures of the engineer’s plans. Perhaps the alteration is such that new drawings and a new model follow. Thus, by borrowing and lending, the two soon agree, and upon the two — the model and the plans — the ship will be built. Sometimes a model is on the scale of a quarter of an inch to each foot of the ship, but the scale differs with different builders. ​

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Hudson River Maritime Museum

The pen and ink calculations and plans produce the shape of the ship, and from these it is possible to obtain the outline and dimensions of every slice or plane between the bottom and the top. Each plane is measured and drawn in outline on a board, and the outline is word unclear] or cut in the board with a [word unclear] tool. All the boards or pieces of wood are then glued together, and a simple looking block is made — a block that shows nothing of its true nature except that the top of it bears the graven outline of the top deck or gunwale line of a ship. Out of that simple square block will come the egg which is to hatch the splendid ship that is to be.
           
That block, made up of slices, each with its dented outline of a different plane of the ship, is now cut away, much as we boys used to cut our block, but with this difference: Each board is cut exactly to the dented or graven line upon its surface. The shape the block will have when all the superfluous wood is cut away will be the model of the ship that was designed by the engineer on paper to fill the requirements of the customer’s order, but will that model stand? Will the master builder be satisfied with its lines?
           
Will it do to be enlarged in steel and sent around the world as an example of what the Cramps consider the most beautiful and artistic and useful shape such a ship should have? No. Such a first model next to never suits the modeler, who in this case is Mr. Charles H. Cramp. He hacks into it with fervor. He tapers the bow. He digs away the stern. He shaves the whole model with the nice and dainty touches of a sculptor at work upon a statue on which is to rest his boast that he is a true artist.
           
The fate of the wooden block alters the figures of the engineer’s plans. Perhaps the alteration is such that new drawings and a new model follow. Thus, by borrowing and lending, the two soon agree, and upon the two — the model and the plans — the ship will be built. Sometimes a model is on the scale of a quarter of an inch to each foot of the ship, but the scale differs with different builders. ​

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