Fellow Members ---

I continue to be amazed when I see how versatile wood is and what great feats can be achieved with it.

While in England visiting my grandchildren in April I took them to see the SS Great Britain. Built by Brunel for the Great Western Steamship Company's Bristol-New York service she was, at 322 feet, the largest vessel afloat when she was launched in Bristol 1843. She was a very technically advanced vessel for her day. While other ships had been built of iron or had been equipped with a screw propeller, the SS Great Britain was the first to combine these features in a large ocean-going ship. One of the very early ships ever built of iron she had steam driven screw propeller and, the part that really interested me, very large wooden masts. The ship has been extensively restored over the last 20 years but to date they have only fitted it out with temporary steel masts. You can still see bits of its original masts lying under a shelter near the ship and one of the main spars is in the museum. These are impressive. There were six masts on the original design, the highest of being 74 feet above deck. The mizzen mast (the 3rd mast for the non-nautically inclined) was roughly three and half feet in diameter of solid interlocked timbers! These assemblies were held to together with external metal banding. She could carry about 1,700 square yards of canvass which may not sound impressive until you realize that it is almost 25% of a football field. That is a lot of area for the wind to insert a tremendous amount of stress on the mast. She was also one of the first ships to be rigged with iron wire ropes instead of ordinary hemp ropes. Her original wire rope rigging was significant, not only because of the ship's importance, but also because the wire rope itself was involved in litigation between two fledgling British wire rope manufacturers of the era - but that is another story. Her high construction cost overrun had a negative effect on her owners' financial position. They were eventually forced out of business in 1846 when the she was stranded by a navigational error -- large scale construction was never easy even in those days.

Today many ships still use wooden masts but tall straight trees are hard to come by. A replica wooden sailing ship was in our local harbor a few years ago and the owner was saying that "fortunately" there had been a big storm in Florida the year before so there was a supply of trees available for masts. Today many of the wooden masts are made from interlocking spars from relatively small trees. At a BAWA meeting a few months ago one of our members explained how he constructed a tree trunk style leg for a table using the same interlocking form they use on modern masts.

As someone said to me "we are lucky they invented steam power at about the same time the discovered the giant redwood trees otherwise they would have disappeared even faster to make gigantic masts."

If you would like more information on the SS Great Britain you can go to: http://www.ssgreatbritain.org/Home.aspx