The Engines of the Titanic

Harland & Wolff, Belfast, 1912

The largest reciprocating engines ever put to sea: two four-storey triples flanking a low-pressure turbine that drank their exhaust — the piston age and the turbine age sharing one engine room. Each triple ran about seventy-five revolutions on steam at two hundred and fifteen pounds from twenty-nine boilers, fired by a hundred and seventy-six men. The Works’ patterns stop far short of her 97-inch low-pressure cylinders, so our specimen keeps her pressures, her revolutions, and her proportions — the practice, not the acreage. She needs no bar and no flywheel: three cranks at 120 degrees see to that.

Two engines of some 15,000 ihp each at 75 rpm, cylinders 54, 84, 97 and 97 inches on a 75-inch stroke — and a coal bill of six hundred tons a day.

On our bed she holds seventy-four revolutions at near three hundred horses, fourteen pounds of steam to the horse-hour — her own recorded economy, at a museum’s scale.

One of the cabinet’s specimens, each ready for the test bed.