One Olympian Dream

    One summer evening in 1907 at the Devonshire House in London, Mr. Joseph Bruce Ismay, director of the White Star Line and Mr. William James Pirrie, chairman of Belfast's Harland and Wolff Shipyards, had an after dinner conversation about the new express ships of White Star's archrival Cunard.

    Cunard's new ships were the Lusitania, which was already in service, Mauretania, which was due out later that summer.  These two were the fastest ships in the world at 26 knots, and the world's largest at 31,000 gross tons.  Cunard was already draining the business out of White Star, whose largest ships were the smallish Arabic, Cedric, Baltic, and Adriatic, which had been coined "The Big Four."  Althought luxurious, these ships were "nine-day boats" compared to the equally, if not more lavish Lusitania and Mauretania which could cross the pond in half the time.

    White Star wasn't about to lose their business to Cunard, so Ismay and Pirrie dreamt up their own perfect fleet.  Two magnificent liners would be built to provide a fortnightly service to America and back, and maybe a third ship would be added to provide weekly service.  The first two would be named, respectively, Gigantic and Titanic, and the last add-on, Olympic.  These ships would be 40,000 gross tons each, making them the largest.  Although they wouldn't be faster than Cunard's greyhounds, they would be in many ways much more sybartic.

    Ismay and Pirrie wanted a three story first class dining saloon with a huge glass dome overhead on each ship . . . just like the fabulous Lusitania and Mauretania.  They wanted Turkish Baths down low in the ship flanked on both sides with a true swimming pool, a gymnasium, and a squash court . . . things the Cunard rivals didn't have.  Each ship would be 850 feet long . . . about a sixth of a mile. Every one of the trio would have three towering funnels, twin screws driven by reciprocating engines, and each would have an elevator, one for first class with a wrap-around staircase, and another for second class, where elevators had never been seen before.

    In the early planning of things, however, the name Olympic was decided to be used for the first of the fleet. Gigantic would be saved for last.  That wasn't the only change either.  In the building of every ship, there needs to be compromises in design for safety, stability, and size.  Each ship would be lengthened to 882 feet.  The first class saloon would have to be downsized to one story without a dome, and the gymnasium would have to be detached from the rest of the "spa" and moved to the boat deck.  A turbine engine was added to the machinery, bringing the number of propellers up to 3.

    Four evenly spaced, towering funnels would come to be instead of three, to prove that even a colossus could possess grace.  The first class stairs wouldn't be the plain wrap around, no, only two grand three-jointed William and Mary staircases and three elevators could ever suffice.  The Boat Deck would be rather crowded and perhaps top-heavy (or "tender" as the nautical people say.) with the proposed plan for 64 boats for all aboard lying around.

    It would also be an embarrassment to the rest of the White Star fleet, for the law proposed in 1894 only required 16 boats on every ship that's sizes was greater than 10,000 gross registered tons. In 1902, the law was revised so the bigger ships, presumably safer, only needed 12 boats on board.

    Eventually, White Star and Harland and Wolff agreed that twenty boats for each ship would do.  Twenty, well above the law's expectations, but ships had grown fourfold in size since then.  Britain wasn't pushing for a ship that could evacuate all on board, but rather, a ship that not even God could sink.

All in all, the final proposal boiled down to this, with minor modifications to come in the future:

 

Length	882 ft 5 in
Width	92 ft 6 in
Length Between Perpendiculars	850 ft
Moulded Depth	59 ft 6 in
Gross Tonnage	40,000
Net Tonnage	20,000
Displacement	60,000
Machinery	III Expansion Reciprocating Engines and Low Pressure Parson's Steam Turbine Geared to Triple Screw
Speed	22 knots
Accommodation 1st Class	1,054
Accommodation 2nd Class	510
Accommodation 3rd Class	1,020
Lifeboats	14 Standard, 2 Emergency Cutters, 4 Engelhard Collapsibles