Trains, Planes, Ships and Cars

By James Hamilton-Paterson

A lavishly illustrated celebration of the golden age of aircraft, cars, ships and locomotives from 1900 to 1941 by the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds.

This dazzling book describes the flourishing of transport and travel, and the engineering that made it possible, in the years before the Second World War. It is an homage to the great vehicles and their mechanisms, their cultural impact and the social change they enabled.

James Hamilton-Paterson explores the pinnacle of the steam engine, the advent and glory days of the luxury motorcar and the monster vehicles used in land speed records, the marvellous fast ocean liners and the excitement and beauty of increasingly aerodynamic forms of passenger aircraft. These were the days when for most people long-distance travel was a dream, and the dream-like glamour of these machines has never been surpassed.

Hamilton-Paterson has an unrivalled ability to write evocatively about engineering and design in their historical context, and in this book he brings a vanished era to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789542356

James Hamilton-Paterson

James Hamilton-Paterson is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose books defy easy categorisation. Gerontius won the Whitbread Prize; Cooking with Fernet Branca was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His acclaimed books on the oceans, including Seven-Tenths, have been widely translated, and his books about aviation have set new standards for writing about aircraft. Born and educated in England, Hamilton-Paterson has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.

Book preview

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TRAINS,

PLANES,

SHIPS &

CARS

ALSO BY JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON

NON-FICTION

Playing with Water

Three Miles Down

Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds

America’s Boy

Empire of the Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World

Marked for Death: The First War in the Air

Eroica: The First Great Romantic Symphony

Blackbird: The Untouchable Spy Plane

What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain

FICTION

The View from Mount Dog

Gerontius

The Bell Boy

Griefwork

Ghosts of Manila

The Music

Loving Monsters

Cooking with Fernet Branca

Amazing Disgrace

Rancid Pansies

Under the Radar

TRAINS,

PLANES,

SHIPS &

CARS

The Golden Age

1900 – 1941

James Hamilton-Paterson

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK by Head of Zeus Ltd in 2020

Copyright © James Hamilton-Paterson, 2020

The moral right of James Hamilton-Paterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781789542363

ISBN (E): 9781789542356

Cover Images:

Train: Flying Scotsman © National Railway Museum/SSPL/Getty Images

Plane: Sikorsky S-42 Flying Boat © PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Ship: SS Normandie © George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

Car: Bugatti Type 35 © Heritage-Images / National Motor Museum / akg-images

Design: Steve Leard

Author photograph: Danny Lau

Head of Zeus Ltd

First Floor East

5–8 Hardwick Street

London EC1R 4RG

WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

Contents

ALSO BY JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

SHIPS

PLANES

CARS

TRAINS

AFTERWORD

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AN INVITATION FROM THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

Speed, Style and Streamlining

Speed and elegance must have been associated in the human mind from the very beginning, surely for tens of millennia. Certainly cave painters appear to have revered and even fetishized the swift and powerful animals they hunted. Tens of thousands of years later we still admire a racehorse or greyhound at full stretch, a cheetah closing on its prey, the folded raptor as it stoops with a shriek of air. It is an atavistic pleasure that can bring with it a momentary, almost superstitious, chill.

In her book The Living Mountain, the late Scottish writer and hill-walker Nan Shepherd muses startlingly on the swiftness of the eagle and the peregrine falcon, the red deer and the hare, wondering why grace has been added to the severely practical necessity of speed. Perhaps ‘the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings’ become lovely through their obedience to function so that ‘Beauty is not adventitious but essential.’¹ In 1934 and in a wildly different context, the copywriters of Madison Avenue made the same point about Chrysler’s new streamlined car. ‘Old mother nature has always designed her creatures for the function they are to perform. You have only to look at a dolphin, a gull, or a greyhound to appreciate the rightness of the tapering, flowing contour of the new Airflow.’² Lyrical copy, even if the car failed to sell.

Nan Shepherd probably need not have wondered why ‘grace’ accompanies speed. We must be genetically engineered to view litheness as admirable, implying a pared-down, unencumbered quality. Even though the word ‘streamline’ dates from around 1870, the earliest hunter-gatherers would have observed how hawks gain speed by streamlining themselves when diving, wings folded and beak foremost. (The peregrine falcon has claims to be the fastest animal on earth, having been timed in a dive at 217 mph [349 kph].) Supposedly ‘primitive’ fisher-folk would have noticed that predator fish (sharks, tuna, mackerel, etc.) are shaped for speed rather than for cunning methods of camouflage in order to catch their prey. They might not have been able to measure a swordfish’s top speed as 80 mph (129 kph) but they would have noticed a correlation between shape and velocity. It seems beyond argument that a respect and admiration for speed in nature should be hard-wired into the human psyche. As a burst of speed demands energy, it always contains an element of competitiveness – the quicker you are, the less likely you and your family are to go hungry. This basic truth undoubtedly lies behind our continued fascination with any form of speed, such that we have always stylised our instinct for predation by means of races. Being a kind of proxy hunt in which the winner might take over as the new tribal leader, racing each other soon extended beyond mere running to take in skill on horseback or in sailboats. In case anyone thinks there is something modern about a yacht or speedboat owner boasting of their craft’s speed or elegance, they should remember the Roman poet Catullus:

My bean-pod boat you see here

friends & guests

will tell you

if you ask her

that she’s been

the fastest piece of timber

under oar or sail

afloat.³

That elegance and speed often go hand in hand is an underlying assumption in this book, although the pairing will be moderated by what is technologically feasible at any given moment. Catullus’s ‘bean-pod’ boat is a good description of a design that even then must have been ancient. A craft that is long, pointed at both ends and with a rounded bottom is clearly better designed for speed than a raft or barge. This shape, classically that of a canoe, must originally have been the result of much trial and error, backed up by biomimesis: the copying of shapes from archetypes in nature – in this case swift predators like swordfish or porpoises. When the early British pioneer of flight, George Cayley, proposed an airship in 1804 he gave its envelope the profile of a trout, reasoning that the trout had the best-shaped body for slipping through the air. The legend of the young Icarus is equally about biomimesis, since his father Daedalus stuck feathers to their bodies with wax for their attempted escape from Crete by flying. Similarly, in one of his sketches for a glider, Leonardo da Vinci gave it bat’s wings. More recent examples of people hoping to fly also began with wings modelled on those of birds. This mimicry was quite conscious in Otto Lilienthal’s successful designs for early hang gliders in the 1890s. It appeared equally so in the early Austrian powered aircraft, the Etrich-Rumpler Taube (‘dove’) which became Germany’s first mass-produced military aircraft just before the First World War. Despite its remarkably birdlike appearance, it turns out that its wings were actually modelled on the seeds of a Javan cucumber that can cover considerable distances when dispersed on the wind. Even though the Taube’s wings were not inspired by birds, they were undoubtedly biomimetic. Despite being an early flying machine with a rattly engine, its lines had a certain primordial elegance.

img1.jpg

The Etrich-Rumpler Taube (‘dove’) became the world’s first warplane in 1911, when an Italian pilot in Libya dropped hand grenades from it. By the First World War the type was already obsolete. This one, with an enclosed cockpit, was Rumpler’s ‘Dolphin’ model.

© Alamy

*

Yet merely imitating nature is not enough. As industrialisation rapidly increased in the nineteenth century, engineers needed to know in detail how water, steam or air flows in pipes and around obstructions. The basic physics had been established by Newton, but in 1738 Daniel Bernoulli published Idrodinamica, or ‘Hydrodynamics’, in which he expounded what soon became known as Bernoulli’s Principle. This explained at length the behaviour of fluids – air as well as water – and was to become the basis of both aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. So important has his principle proved that, in 2002, Bernoulli was posthumously inducted into the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s Hall of Fame. It is this principle that explains why, when air moves faster over the curved upper surface of an aircraft’s wing than it does over the flat underside, the pressure above the wing is less than that below and thus generates lift. In countless bathrooms the inward ‘suck’ of shower curtains towards the fast-flowing stream of water is an even more familiar daily testament to Bernoulli’s insight.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, naval architects increasingly needed to know exactly what happens when a stream of water flows around a ship’s hull. By 1880 ‘streamlining’ (although the word itself had barely been coined) became a matter for serious study, where speed was essential and competitive for clippers or battleships, racing yachts, sculls and liners. If at a practical level this mostly concerned shipwrights it was simply because no land vehicles such as trains or the earliest cars were yet fast enough to make questions of aerodynamics relevant, and powered flying machines (as opposed to Lilienthal’s gliders) were still theoretical. Even so, George Cayley had built himself a machine with a whirling arm to measure the lift and drag of differently shaped wings. Its inherent drawback was that a simple revolving arm meant the model wing was always flying into the wake of its own turbulence. In 1871 two Britons, Frank Wenham and John Browning, built what was probably the world’s first proper wind tunnel using a steam-powered blower. An article written by Wenham was spotted by the Smithsonian Institution, who recommended it to the Wright brothers. It almost certainly influenced the design of the ‘Flyer’, for in 1901 the Wrights also built themselves a small but effective wind tunnel to conduct their own tests of wing and propeller shapes. It was already clear that the more speed an aircraft had, the more lift its wings could generate.

By 1900 transatlantic passenger ships had become big business and were already highly competitive. The lucrative trade taking the flood of European emigrants over the ocean to America was such that owners needed their liners to make the crossing in the shortest possible turnaround time. Speed was thus essential, and in turn the design of the hull and propellers became critical – although new ideas often turned out to be difficult to implement because shipbuilding was an ancient craft and yards tended instinctively to adhere to traditional styles and working methods. This was especially true in Britain since, thanks to its immense empire as well as to having pioneered the Industrial Revolution, it had the world’s biggest shipbuilding industry and merchant fleet. Any incentive for its shipyards to innovate was often frustrated by complacency and convention.

In both ships and locomotives everywhere steam still provided the motive force, but by 1900 the technology of steam power had largely peaked. Once it had developed enough for it to be clear that the internal combustion engine had superior power-to-weight ratio, smaller size and greater flexibility, it was merely a question of time before ships would also be driven by reciprocating engines. The one exception to this trend was that, following Charles Parsons’ demonstration of his fast launch Turbinia in 1897, the steam turbine was developed as a smoother alternative to reciprocating engines, although before long its steam would be raised by oil-burning rather than by coal. The turbine itself gradually went in a separate direction, most notably as the principle of the jet engine.

img2.jpg

In 1885 Karl Benz’s Patent-Motorwagen became the world’s first car to be driven by a petrol engine.

© Getty Images

Meanwhile on land the internal combustion engine was refined into a novel source of power. If we date the first automobile with an internal combustion engine to the Benz Patent-Motorwagen of 1885, it is extraordinary how rapidly the efficiency of this type of engine grew. It not only made the Wrights’ powered flight possible in 1903 but promised increasingly fast and reliable terrestrial transport. Industrial technology was already associated with speed thanks to the invention of the steam locomotive in the early nineteenth century. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, however, speed itself became a commercial, social and even aesthetic marker, especially when associated with the new technologies of aircraft and cars.

Speed for speed’s sake soon became its own message. As early as 1905, in their seminal work Modern Advertising, the Americans Earnest Elmo Calkins and Ralph Holden looked at the limited but ever-growing market for automobiles and saw the challenge of selling them as that of ‘expressing the inexpressible, of suggesting not so much a motor car as speed’. The promise of fast and ubiquitous travel heralded a new technological, military, economic, political and social dawn: a revolution that was first eagerly embraced by pre-1914 artistic movements such as Futurism in Italy. In one way or another, speed would turn out to be the hallmark of the entire twentieth century.

*

The builders of early aircraft soon realised that flying faster was not merely a matter of increased power but depended crucially on aerodynamics. Fast-moving air did indeed provide lift, but it also caused drag. The science of streamlining thus became increasingly important. The earliest automobile designers, on the other hand, had been dealing with such low speeds they hardly needed to take wind resistance into account. Their designs essentially took over that of horse-drawn vehicles, the limousine driver (like any coachman) being exposed to the elements for much of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Yet speed still implied competition and it was not long before people began racing each other in cars, the first official automobile race being held in Paris in 1894. Even so, in the case of cars the idea of streamlining was still more a developing aesthetic than an aerodynamic necessity. Henry Ford’s land speed record of 1904 was achieved in his ‘999’ car: a huge engine mounted on a bare wooden chassis with four wheels, no body and a crude brake. Ford steered while his mechanic operated the throttle. Together they set a new record of 91.37 mph (147.05 kph). The chief idea behind this vehicle’s design was clearly to save weight rather than to minimise drag. A few judicious light fairings might have reduced wind resistance and enabled it to go still faster, although any gain would have been marginal.

Yet the concept of a highly streamlined vehicle had already flown in 1900, in the shape of Count Zeppelin’s first dirigible airship, the LZ1. A massive structure 128 metres (420 ft) long with a diameter of only 11.75 metres (38.5 ft), it was a slender tube and thus shaped like a cigar – or better, a cheroot. George Cayley would surely