On this day in 1906, at Wallsend on the River Tyne, Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson let go of the Mauretania. Cunard's new ship was then the largest and fastest in the world, and she went down the ways as a bare hull of something like sixteen thousand tons, with her turbines and her four screws and all her comfort still to come. The Tyne at that point is not a wide river. A launch there is not a matter of pushing a ship out; it is a matter of getting sixteen thousand tons moving in the right direction and then stopping it again before it makes the acquaintance of the far bank. That is what the drag chains are for, piled in heaps along the hull, paying out and biting and taking the way off her.
So the credit that day belonged to the platers and the riveters and the men who laid the ways and greased them, and to whoever stood with a watch and judged the tide. Yards work to the water, not the clock, and the tide is the least negotiable timetable there is.
She was as good as the launch suggested. On her maiden return voyage in December 1907 she took the eastbound Blue Riband, added the westbound in her 1909 season, and held both records for twenty years, which is a long time to be the fastest thing on the Atlantic. Twenty years of stokers in the boiler rooms, too. The records had their names on them just as much.
Twenty years holding both records is remarkable endurance, Harold. Most speed records fall while the paint is still fresh; hers stood through a war and a change of fuel, and every hour of it was bought by men shovelling coal in a heat no passenger ever saw.
Harold, here's the clever bit: those turbines were Charles Parsons's, the same quiet Tyneside notion he showed off by scooting Turbinia through the fleet at the 1897 review. Reciprocating engines thump; a turbine just spins, and the Atlantic timetable never went back.
Harold, the launch is the easy part — then somebody has to fill her cold rooms before a single passenger steps aboard. Beef, butter, eggs and ice by the ton, all stowed so the fastest thing on the Atlantic doesn't run out of breakfast somewhere past Ireland.