Streamlined Battleships

During the 1930s the industrial design profession was clawing its way into viability. One device pioneering practitioners such as Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy relied on was flashy, self-funded designs intended to catch the eye of newspaper and magazine editors.

And those days were the era when modernistic design often incorporated streamlining as a theme. It even reached the point where Loewy came up with a streamlined pencil sharpener.

If aircraft and pencil sharpeners could be streamlined, then why not battleships? After all, streamlining could lead to either faster speeds or more efficient cruising, depending on the situation. And maybe streamlined cladding, if done right, might deflect enemy shells.

Otto Kuhler, best known for his streamlined locomotive designs, did the battleship design shown above as a just-for-the-hell-of-it proposition.

This, from a 1941 Revere Copper and Brass advertisement, is another version of a streamlined battleship. I don't know who designed it.

The problem is, whatever advantages streamlining might offer, the examples shown here would not have been combat-worthy in World War 2.

In terms of armament, they are more similar to the pre-Great War USS Florida (BB-30) shown here than to World War 2 equivalents. American battleships of 1912 vintage were spare designs with turreted main batteries and smaller, anti-torpedo boat guns mounted in the hull. The tall cage masts supported observation compartments where spotters noted where shells were hitting and passed aiming corrections to fire controllers below. Florida's masts also supported searchlight batteries. Aside from the masts and related equipment, the newly-operational Florida could have been streamlined in the Kuhler manner had that concept occurred to naval planners and architects in those days.

This is the USS South Dakota (BB-57), commissioned in 1942. When new, its topside bristled with anti-aircraft guns and more and more were added as the war progressed. Streamlining is clearly antithetical to the need for strong protection from aerial attack.

I'm no naval architect, so I'll only note that the design in the Revere ad has a hull shaped more like that of a powered yacht than those of fast battleships of the early 1940s which featured a more vertical prow near and below the waterline.

Another problem is that the turret armament is impractical. In the first place, five real guns couldn't be fitted into those turrets. In the second place, five guns would make for extremely awkward ammunition handling even if that many guns could be crammed in.

Those streamlined battleship designs were never anything but futuristic fluff. Yet streamlining was in the air in the late 1930s and the notion might have been briefly considered by a few naval planners. If it had, then it was quickly rejected in the interests of practicality under combat conditions.

Floating Fifties Furniture

Last week I paid a brief visit to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Canada), mostly because I'd never gotten around to visiting the place on previous visits and thought it was high time I did so.

The museum is modest in scale because the Victoria metro area is not large. The main exhibit when I was there had to do with the art of Victoria native Emily Carr, but it too was of modest scope.

An exhibit that aroused enough interest to justify a blog post had to do with Canadian furniture and industrial design from the late 1940s into the 1960s. I'll skip over the hi-fi sets and tabletop radios to focus on the furniture style which I'd half forgotten. Although the objects were Canadian, the core style is close to what was being done in the United States and elsewhere at the time.

The photos above are of objects in rough chronological order (if my all-too-quick glance at the information plaques sank in correctly). The top photo deals with the late 1940s and early 50s, the middle with the mid-to-late fifties and the bottom one with the late 50s and early 1960s.

Judging by appearance alone and not any designers' statements of intent, the goal was an appearance of lightness. This was in contrast to "heavy," "substantial" styles of traditional furniture. Horizontal elements tend to be thin. legs and supports are often in the form of thin metal dowels painted black so as not to intrude on the "floating" effect created by the bright or light colored horizontal bits.

A popular contemporaneous style was Danish or Scandinavian modern. Such furniture usually featured wood and fabric (which material and to what degree depending on function). It too tended to be uncluttered, but usually seemed more substantial than the rather extreme look pictured above.

From an interior and furniture design standpoint, the 1950s seem to represent an extreme of the modernist movement in keeping with Abstract Expressionism in painting which peaked at the same time.

Design at Your Fingertips

No doubt the concept (in rudimentary form, perhaps) has been around for ages. And perhaps someone else articulated it clearly earlier, but the guy I'm aware of who built a highly successful career around ergonomics and human factors was industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. As the result of reading his book Designing for People when I aspired to be an industrial designer, along with a lot of interaction experience with various devices in the years since, I pay a lot of attention to the quality of interaction with tools of various kinds.

This post lightly touches on the subject of computer keyboards, something I and most readers of this blog deal with often. It's not a comprehensive survey; I have some illustrations below, a few comments and a wistful conclusion. Feel free to toss in your two Euro-cents (while they last!) in our new, improved, faster publishing Comments link at the bottom.

Gallery

Apple II computer - 1977
Early Apples integrated the keyboard with the body of the machine. I suppose this helped keep costs down a little, but it forced users to be in a fixed position while typing.

IBM PC - early 1980s
The IBM PC featured a keyboard tethered to the system unit. This allowed a user to work with the keyboard on his lap or in other convenient positions: greater freedom. The keyboard had a nice touch along with a click-clack aural feedback. I bought my PC in May, 1983 and really liked the keyboard (which was probably relatively expensive to produce).

Microsoft ergonomic keyboard

Microsoft wireless keyboard

Flexible, waterproof keyboard

Combimouse keyboard
The set of keyboards shown above indicate the variety of ergonomic and other solutions that are or have been on the market. I haven't tried any of them, so I can't comment as to their effectiveness in aiding typing. The reason I haven't tried them is because, unlike some office workers, I seldom engage in extended typing sessions on a computer. When I compose a blog post such as this I'll write a few sentences and then pause to consider what I wrote, taking my hands away from the keyboard. And, in any case, these posts aren't long. Similar thing if I'm writing a computer program: write a few lines of code and then think and perhaps run a test.

But in theory those warped-looking keyboards should be in better synch with one's body. Try dropping your hands before you on a table. Note how your forearms tend to converge, forming something like a 90 degree angle to one another. If your hands are extended, the bones of your middle finger should fall along the same axis as the forearm. But when typing on a standard keyboard, the wrists will have to turn outward a bit so that the hands can cover the board better; this breaks the fingerbone-forearm axis I just mentioned. Warped keyboards tend to preserve that axis.

Apple iMac keyboard
I have an iMac and paid extra for this keyboard which is larger than the basic one (which is like that of a MacBook laptop computer). This keyboard has, among other additions, a key allowing for forward-deletes and a numeric pad, two features that make the extra cost worthwhile to me.

Apple MacBook Air
I also have one of these. For some time Apple keyboards have had flat keys that (for me, anyway) took some adjusting, though I've now adjusted my "touch" accordingly (but still don't like it). I can understand why those flat keys are used in slim laptops such as the Air; tall keys would require a thicker computer.

So why didn't Apple provide better (for me, at least) keys on desktop machines? To cut costs, probably -- though their computers are pretty pricey and probably profitable enough to warrant the added cost of a decent keyboard for iMacs.

Apple iPad virtual keyboard
I've only tried the iPad virtual keyboard briefly -- I used it to bring up this blog on an iPad at an Apple Store. So I know it works, but have no idea as to how well I could knock out an email or blog text using it.

Conclusion? Thirty years later, the IBM PC keyboard is still the best, though I concede the necessity for flat keys on slim laptop computers.

Koloman Moser Did It All

Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the leading lights of the Vienna Secession and probably the most versatile of the lot. He designed furniture, posters, stained glass windows and household objects besides doing a little painting. Moreover, the work he did was generally of very high quality (with an exception noted below).

Biographical information on Moser can be found here and here. There are books about him as well; check Amazon or another web site for details.

Here are a few examples of his work:

Gallery

Poster design (not used) for first Secession exhibit - 1898

Poster design - "Read!"

Frommes calendar - 1899

Secession Exhibition poster - 1902

Window, Steinhof chapel - 1905

Cruet stand - 1904-05

100 Crown banknote, Austria-Hungary Bank - 1910

The Three Graces
For some reason Moser was not adept at painting, or so I think. This one is better than most, but still rather messy compared to the clean, well-designed posters, bookmarks and other graphic work he produced.

Bel Geddes' Modernist Tears

Something we need to think about when dealing with Modernism is how fresh and different architectural and industrial designed objects appeared when they were new and stood in contrast to nearly all existing structures and manufactured products. Even if these early examples fueled imaginations and desires of some, often the young, proponents faced a hard slog persuading managers to commit money for new construction or factory retooling during the early years of the Great Depression. This required salesmanship, and first-generation industrial designers probably spent considerable time trying to drum up business.

This certainly was true of Norman Bel Geddes who as early as 1932 was able to get his book "Horizons" published, surely as an exposition of Industrial Design as well as a sales tool for his own firm.

Aerodynmic research at the time favored a pleasing shape popularly called "teardrop" that, when properly applied, allowed an airplane of a given weight, frontal area and available power to fly faster thanks to reduction in what might be called form or shape drag. In part thanks to Geddes' book, the public at large began associating teardrop shapes with speed and modernity in general, and by the late 1930s utterly static objects such as pencil sharpeners were styled as teardrops or incorporated other faux-aerodynamic features.

In some cases -- I'm thinking of certain French sports cars of the era that I'll write about soon -- the results were pleasing indeed. So if teardrop became a design fashion cliché, it wasn't necessarily a bad one.

Below are Geddes designs from the early 30s, most of which were featured in Horizons. They seem impractical given what we have learned about aeronautics and engineering over the last 80 years. Nevertheless, they remain provocative and fun to look at.

Gallery

Motor Car Number 8
Geddes in Horizons: "Employing the principles of aerodynamics, I designed a motor car four years ago, and called it Car Number 5, meaning a car of five years from then. Working backwards in four stages, we succeeded, by the time we came to Car Number 1, in designing an automobile which, except for its extreme simplicity, would resemble present-day cars.... Each of the five models represent a twenty percent change over the previous one as each is advanced by degrees toward a definite idea standard...." Number 8 is one of a series representing "a further departure." Its exterior "is streamlined, other than on the ground side, to as near the drop form as is practicable. It is not designed for higher speed but for present-day speed with less power." At the front positioned between the wheel wells are a driver and passenger. Behind them are two rows seating three each. A small luggage compartment lies behind the last row of seats and in front of the motor which is behind the rear axle. At the extreme rear, including part of the fin, is the fuel tank.

Automobile patent model - 1934
This concept came after Horizons. I wonder why it needs eight wheels.

Intercity bus
Geddes noted that the bus "accommodates fifty-three persons, including a driver and steward. The lower deck deck seats thirty-three persons; the upper deck twenty. This seating capacity exceeds by twenty the average seating capacity of conventional buses with the same [250-inch] wheel and is greater than that in any bus of cubic content yet designed." Luggage is stored the the rear of the upper deck, the motor is mounted over the rear axle.

Ocean liner
"I have designed an ocean liner 1808 feet in length, with a molded depth of 120 feet, and approximately 70,000 tons displacement. Streamlined as to both hull and superstructure, it is designed for luxurious accommodations, economy of operation, and increased speed performance. It is a steamship that can be built and operated under existing conditions. Accommodations are provided for 2000 first-class passengers and a crew of 900 men....
According to calculations, this liner should not only be more economical to build and operate than the fastest liner now in service, but she should, in addition, cut transatlantic steamship time by about one day."

I must note that the Geddes length figure is surely a typographical error; diagrams in the book suggest a length of about 1,000 feet and the beam of 110 feet coupled with the 1,808 length yields an unrealistic length-beam ratio. Overall, the ship he proposes is dimensionally a trifle larger than the largest liners of the day. As for speed, the ultimate Blue Riband champion, the SS United States, crossed the Atlantic about 20 hours faster than the record when Geddes wrote his book, so his prediction was not out of line.

Air Liner Number 4
This was designed with the assistance of aeronautical engineer Otto Koller in 1929, so it was extremely radical in it day. Accommodations were for 451 passengers and a crew of 155. "She has a total wing spread of 528 feet. On the water she is supported by 2 pontoons 104 feet apart [approximately the wingspan of a typical World War 2 heavy bomber], 235 feet long and 60 feet high.... Total power required, 38,000 horse power -- 20 motors, each 1,900 horse power; maximum speed, 150 miles per hour; cruising speed, 100 miles per hour; normal flying ceiling, 5,000 feet; absolute ceiling, 10,000 feet; time of climb to ceiling, 1 hour; speed at ceiling 87 1/2 miles per hour; cruising range without refueling, 7,500 miles, gross weight, 1,275,300 pounds.... The flying time between Chicago and Plymouth [England] is forty-two hours. She is refueled in flight while passing over Newfoundland." A few pages later, he mentions that the plane would carry six extra motors and that it would take but a few minutes to exchange a bad one for one in good working order. As part of his conclusion Geddes states: "Air liners of a size that is not easily visualized to-day will eventually supplant ocean liners in intercontinental transportation of express traffic - passengers and mail, but not freight."

The last bit largely came true, though of course intercontinental freight of certain kinds is now transported by air. Another reasonably correct projection was the 450-passenger capacity. The airplane itself, while theoretically possible, could not have been built before the early 1940s -- this on the basis of the horsepower requirements. Whether the plane would have been aerodynamically sound, I'm not qualified to say.

General Motors Aerotrain: A Rider's Report

The photos above are of General Motors' Aerotrain, a mid-1950s attempt to put pizazz into rail travel and sell many similar locomotive-and-coaches combinations to America's ailing passenger railroads.

The Wikipedia entry here and this fuller account summarize the disappointing (to GM) tale of railroads that tried the demonstrator trains but refused to buy any production versions.

Basically, the Aerotrain was a flashy, automobile-styled locomotive pulling a string of coaches using some of the body stampings from inter-city buses GM was building at the time. By the way, that automobile reference is more real than one might think: the guy behind the design was Chuck Jordan, who many years later went on to head GM's styling operations.

The Aerotrain interests me because I actually rode one. I was a school kid at the time, and my dad bought a new DeSoto and we were traveling from Seattle by train to pick up the car at the factory. After stopping in Chicago to visit relatives, we took the New York Central to Detroit (the Wikipedia entry doesn't mention this run, the second link does), and lo! we got to ride the Aerotrain.

In retrospect, the best part of the trip was the green-uniformed, red-haired Southern stewardess who looked at totally blushing me with big blue eyes and asked if y'all needed anything.

The worst part, as both links mention, was the rough ride. An unusual suspension design is cited as the culprit. Maybe so. But I always thought the problem was that the bus-based coaches were simply too light. In any case, trying to walk while the train was at speed was difficult due to random lurching and bouncing.

Sometimes transportation concepts of the future have no future.

Early American Streamlined Locomotives, Part 2

The streamlined trains featured in Part 1 of this series were diesel powered. At the time -- the mid-1930s -- most American locomotives were steam-powered, so the easiest, cheapest means of hopping on the streamlining bandwagon was to give existing locomotives streamlined cladding. And that's what some major railroads did while waiting to convert to diesel power, a process that moved into high gear in the 1940s.

Two of America's richest and most famous railroads were the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The key passenger run for each was New York - Chicago, linking the nation's largest and next-largest cities.

The Central ran up the Hudson Rive to Albany and then west to Buffalo along the route of the old Erie Canal -- a passage with few hill or mountain obstacles. From Buffalo, trains went near the south shore of Lake Erie through Cleveland and Toledo in Ohio before cutting across northern Indiana to Chicago.

The Pennsy's route from New York went through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh before angling northwest to the Windy City. Unlike the New York Central's route, Pennsy trains had to cut through the Alleghany mountains -- a series of sharp ridge-lines and intervening valleys -- making use of tunnels to minimize the amount of grade to surmount. Western Pennsylvania is also hilly with winding rivers, so those obstacles also had to be cleared.

Thus the Central had an easier route topographically, but the Pennsy had a shorter one -- no dog-leg up to Albany before striking west. This made the railroads competitive when hauling the rich and famous on their premier passenger trains, Central's 20th Century Limited and Pennsy's Broadway Limited.

Let's look at some photos:
Gallery

Standard New York Central J2 Hudson-type locomotive
More information regarding that line's locomotives can be found here.

New York Central "Commodore Vanderbilt" - 1935
NYC's first steam streamliner was designed by Carl Kantola (with wind tunnel testing at Cleveland's Case Institute) and fabricated as a converted Hudson in the railroad's shops near Albany. The Commodore Vanderbilt was the second-string New York - Chicago run to the premier 20th Century Limited.

New York Central "Mercury" - 1936
This Hudson was given a streamlined cover by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. It served on NYC's Cleveland-Detroit run.

New York Central "20th Century Limited"
Ten J2s were given streamlined skins designed by Henry Dreyfuss and ran on the New York - Chicago run starting in 1938.

Pennsylvania Railroad S1
The Raymond Loewy-designed S1 was an experimental streamlined locomotive that appeared in the late 1930s. The center photo shows Loewy posing on his creation. The lower photo compares the S1 to one of the Pennsy's regular steam locomotives.

Pennsylvania Railroad T1
The T1 was another Loewy creation, but one that saw service starting in 1942. It was a cleaned-up version of a normal steam locomotive with an aggressive "face" that looks like it was not an optimal case of streamlining, though the rounded "splitter" form in front of the boiler must have had less air resistance than a regular flat boiler section did. The T1 was the last major steam-powered streamlined locomotive type built in America.

Early American Streamlined Locomotives, Part 1

Perhaps it was aviation in the form of Schneider Cup racing airplanes that became progressively more streamlined during the 1920s (along with other high-speed aircraft) that made designer-engineers in other fields sensitive to the benefits streamlining offered in terms of increasing potential top speed and decreasing the amount of energy required to cruise at a given velocity.

As this Wikipedia entry indicates, operational streamliner trains began appearing both in Europe and in the United States by the mid-1930s. Though attempts were made to "clean up" the shapes of steam locomotives in the late 1920s, the early round of streamliners did not have steam locomotives; diesel was the engine of choice.

America's first streamlined trains that reached commercial use were the Union Pacific M-10000 and the Burlington Zephyr, both appearing in 1934 to great publicity.

The Zephyr had the engineer's cab at the very front of the locomotive unit, which placed the operators in grave danger in the event of a collision; the M-10000 had them placed higher and slightly more to the rear, a configuration found in most streamlined diesel locomotives of 1938-1960.

Another feature, shared by both designs, that didn't pan out was that the coaches were articulated, sharing a truck at each end rather than being coupled in the normal manner. This proved inflexible, so later streamlined trains returned to the proven system of joining coaches.

I find these early streamliners deliciously 1930s, and hope you enjoy the photos below and might even be inspited to do some Web exploring of the subject on your own. You can try clicking on most of the photos to enlarge.

Gallery

Pre-streamliner passenger train
This was photographed somewhere in Alabama in 1948. Steam locomotives were well on their way out by then, but I included this scene-setting photo because it could just as easily have been taken in 1930, before streamliners appeared.

Locomotive No. 1, a Norman Bel Geddes design - 1931
Although Geddes' design was never actualized, it might have helped inspire streamliners that hit the tracks a few years later.

Union Pacific M-10000 (left) and Burlington Pioneer Zephyr
America's first two diesel-powered streamliners pose side-by-side at Kansas City's Union Station.

The M-10000 is open for inspection in Denver - 1934
This shows the rounded tail of the train. The Zephyr had windows at the rear of its final coach making for a popular observation area.

M-10000 and Chrysler Airflow - 1934
Streamlining was an idea whose time had come by the early 1930s. Chrysler introduced its at-the-time radically streamlined Airflow about the same time as the M-10000 hit the tracks. This publicity photo was intended to call attention to the similarity of the otherwise disparate vehicles' front ends.

Full-length photo of the Zephyr - 1935

Where Does One Build a Magic Motorway?

Norman Bel Geddes (1896-1958), a pioneer industrial designer and futurist who was famous in his day, had his fingers in many pies, as this Wikipedia entry suggests.

One of his largest projects -- perhaps his most famous -- was his huge model of how the United States might look in 1960, 21 years from the time it was created for General Motors' Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Being an automobile manufacturer, General Motors was interested in creating interest in and even enthusiasm for systems of high-speed highways that would make owning and using cars even more attractive.

I have to admit that, had I a time machine in the basement, a prime destination would be the '39 fair and GM's Futurama. Here are a couple of photos of the model:

Non-cloverleaf interchange as seen in General Motors' Futurama, 1939

Freeways intersecting in city center, General Motors' Futurama, 1939

About the same time as the model was being built, Geddes wrote a book about potential future freeways, elaborating on some of his thinking behind the Futurama project. It appeared in 1940 as Magic Motorways.

I'll skip over details such as his notion that cloverleaf interchanges weren't the best answer and that extra-high-speed lanes separated from regular traffic lanes would be a good idea. Instead, today I'll consider where Geddes thought these freeways should be built. Keep in mind this was about 17 years before Congress authorized the present Interstate highway system.

Maps and Diagrams from "Magic Motorways"
Click on images for larger, sharper views.

Original caption: Traffic flow volume--based on Study by U.S. Bureau of Public Roads

With regard to the two graphics above, Geddes writes (Page 253):"Motor traffic is expected to double in the next twenty years. The radius of traffic is also growing. In the East congestion is rapidly growing to the saturation point. To break up that congestion it is necessary to open up new ways out, to decentralize, to redistribute, to create breathing space--that is the coming need. It is a need that can be met first of all by a national highway policy." I should note that Geddes thinks centralized planning is a fine thing, a common viewpoint in the 1930s, hence his calling for a Federal solution to the problem.

Original caption: Bulkley plan for superhighways--1938
In 1938, Senator Robert Bulkley of Ohio introduced a bill that would establish a national freeway system (see here and here for background information). The map above might have been based on support material for the bill; I don't know for sure, but Geddes does credit it to Bulkley.

The route system seems more notional than a result of serious study. Geographic considerations such as barriers (Hell's Canyon in northeastern Oregon, the Sierras south of Lake Tahoe) are skipped over. Then there are some genuine oddities. Why a freeway From Bismarck, North Dakota to San Antonio, Texas while the far more populous potential node of Minneapolis-St.Paul is ignored? And why are Phillipsburg, Montana and Lebanon, Missouri considered so important? Then there's Atlanta, connected to Pittsburgh over a lot of mountainous country while lacking a fast route along the Piedmont to Washington, D.C. and the Northeastern urban agglomeration. I wonder why Geddes bothered to include such an odd map; in any case, it's ignored in the surrounding text.

Original caption: A national motorway plan
A note to the lower right of the map on Page 278 of the book credits Norman Bel Geddes and includes the date 1939.

He explains the theory behind a curious detail of his proposed system as follows (pp 275, et. seq.):

Contrary to accepted practice, the motorways must not be laid down using cities as their terminal points, nor must they be allowed to infringe on city boundaries or the city proper.... While express motorways must be designed to carry fast, long-distance traffic, no existing roads need be scrapped. The country's 1940 roads will continue to carry local traffic, and their usefulness will be enhanced by connection with the new motorways....

The plan [shown on the map] is based on a relatively brief, preliminary study.... Its design sums up the basic requirements of such a [comprehensive] plan.

See how directly the lines lead from one region to another. Notice that a direct route connects Seattle and El Paso--making possible uninterrupted travel from the northwest tip of the United States to the southernmost section.... Nowhere do the cities connect the motorways, although they are all fairly close to them.... Traffic moves in almost a straight line from Boston to New Orleans without passing a single city. Yet no city of over 100,000 is more than 50 miles from a motorway and most of them are half that distance.

Look at the northernmost motorway, which runs east-west across the top ties of states.... [It] avoids Grand Rapids by 35 miles, and makes straight for Lake Michigan. At this point the lake is 50 miles wide. Never mind. There is no let-down on the motorway. It shoots directly across the lake on a long bridge.

He estimates that this Boston-Portland (Oregon) route would be only seven percent longer than a direct route taken by an airliner.

This isn't from Geddes -- it shows the present Interstate system (in blue)

Original caption: Motorway feeder to city
Unlike his Futurama model, motorways avoid cities. The illustration above indicates how Geddes visualized connections between cities and the superhighway system.


As we know, a national system of freeways was built. City centers were not ignored in many cases. We also found that urban growth tended to occur around points where interchanges to local highways and roads were placed, something Geddes didn't consider. Or perhaps he figured that all those smart planners would ensure zoning laws prohibiting development near interchanges. Such a system can be found in Germany; one normally can't easily hop off an Autobahn to find a motel and a McDonalds. (I ought to add that Autobahnen are now getting off-highway service areas with such amenities to supplement the normal service plazas. Still, many exits to cities dump you out in the country and another ten-minute drive is needed to get you safely into civilization.)

Norman Bel Geddes had a good imagination. Even though his ideas were not realized quite as he proposed, I find them interesting to study with hindsight.