Design isn’t easy.
The actual process of coming up with a concept, putting it onto paper, and then turning that paper design into a real tangible thing is about one of the hardest things a person can do.
Even simple products need stringent attention to detail and a wide range of skills.
From engineering to marketing and business, and of course, time and money.
For centuries, oceangoing vessels have been some of the most complex and impressive feats of our engineering prowess.
Ships represent some of the most complex challenges in the areas of engineering design and construction.
But designers don’t always get things right.
From the Chinese submarines that were rushed to completion to the ocean liner that had to be returned to its builder and the ore carriers that had a nasty habit of breaking up.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m your friend Mike Brady from Oceaner Designs, and here are three more of the worst ship design failures from history.
Have you ever been set a work or a school project with an insanely tight deadline and no idea where to start? Well, if so, you may feel a little bit like how Chinese engineers felt in the 1950s when they were tasked by the chairman of the country to design a nuclear submarine in 20 minutes with everything that they could find in a cupboard.
Okay, well, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s not too far from the truth of the story of the design of China’s harm class submarines.
By the 1950s, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing.
Both sides of the Iron Curtain fought tooth and nail to oneup one another in the public eye as the world became increasingly divided between East and West.
But while the two great superpowers postured and showed off their prowess, another player was stepping up to enter the game.
After enduring decades of violent, seemingly endless civil war and a brutal invasion by the Japanese, China had once more reemerged onto the world stage.
The still relatively new communist government was under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zaong.
It had previously held close connections with the Soviets during the opening years of the Cold War, but by the 1950s, cracks in that relationship were already beginning to form that would ultimately lead the two rival communist powers towards an irrevocable split.
With the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, new leadership in the Soviet Union would see a shift, not just in policy, but in ideology as the nation sought a better, more peaceful relationship of coexistence with the West.
Mau completely rejected this, however, citing this policy of coexistence as revisionist and a betrayal of true communist ideology.
Instead, he took an extremely defiant stance against the West as a whole, but in particular against the United States.
And rather than follow the Soviet Union’s example, Mao decided he would forge his own path and force the world to acknowledge China as an equal power.
And he knew full well that the only way to do that was to publicly demonstrate mastery over the one thing that both sides cared about more than anything else, the atom.
But Mao also knew that a nuclear bomb just wasn’t enough.
The United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom had already begun to stockpile weapons and develop newer, more powerful designs.
But by the late 1950s, a new era of nuclear development was rapidly evolving, and that was the era of the nuclear submarine.
Here, Mao saw an opportunity as America and the USSR pushed new nuclear boats into service.
He declared unequivocally, “We will have to build nuclear submarines even if it takes us 10,000 years.
” And from the outside, 10,000 years might have actually seemed like a rather accurate estimate at the time because China was still largely pre-industrial with zero experience in nuclear technology.
And developing a nuclear anything in a country where the primary form of transportation beside one’s own feet was an animal.
Then with worsening relations with the only nuclear nation that might even think to lend support, the notion of building a working nuclear submarine must have sounded not just impossible, but downright laughable.
But in fact, the worsening relations with the Soviets would eventually play to China’s advantage.
You see, despite Na’s wishes for China to succeed and flourish all on its own, he knew full well that his nation’s comparatively pathetic industrial capacity and its lack of knowledge or understanding of nuclear science needed outside help.
This came as the eventual split with the Soviets in the early 1960s led to improved relations with the West.
This allowed Chinese scientists and engineers to access dated but workable French nuclear reactor designs.
With technological data and understanding finally secured, China’s dream of a nuclear submarine was now actually achievable.
But remarkably, work on the new boat dubbed project 091 had actually already begun years before this vital knowledge had ever been procured.
In fact, China had not even attempted to build conventional powered diesel electric submarines before their foray into nuclear power.
Work on project 091 had actually started all the way back in 1958 when chairman Mao instructed the central military commission to order the construction of the submarine with the task of designing the boat given to engineer Ping Shiu.
Known today as the father of China’s nuclear submarines, Ping would oversee the design and construction of project 091 at the Bohigh shipyard in Hulu Dalo.
But while the work on the ambitious new project had begun in 1958, it wasn’t until 1970, a full 12 years later, that the finished submarine, now named Long March 1 after the Communist Army’s retreat during the Chinese Civil War, was finally launched.
Though it would be another four long years until the boat finally entered service, this exceedingly long construction and fitting out period was thanks not only to China’s inexperience with both submarines and nuclear technology, but also to the devastating effects of the cultural revolution.
This dark period in Chinese history would see widespread political persecution and violence and millions of deaths.
But that persecution was especially targeted against China’s upper class and their intelligencia, who were just the sort of people that were actually crucial to building a submarine in the first place.
Not only that, but the horrific purges and the terror of the cultural revolution would actually coincide with several crippling natural disasters that unfortunately coupled with very poor economic policies led to widespread famine and suffering across the country.
With the entire nation held tight in the grip of this unbelievable nightmare, it’s not surprising at all that progress on the new submarine was achingly slow compared to their Soviet and American counterparts.
But when you think about it, 16 years from being ordered to being commissioned into the Navy in a nation that previously had no nuclear experience at all while in the middle of the Cultural Revolution is actually a pretty amazing feat in and of itself.
And in the end, they’d created not just China’s first nuclear submarine, but the first one in all of Asia.
But this sort of sprint before you can crawl strategy employed by the Chinese would long have some serious, crippling, and potentially deadly consequences.
While on the outside, the Long March 1 would look like a modern advanced submarine, easily on par with its Western and Russian counterparts with that strongly teardrop shape or Albaore styled hull and the streamlined sail.
On the inside is where China’s inexperience with building nuclear boats truly showed.
The submarine, given the NATO designation of Han class, had two absolutely crippling design failures built into its very core.
The first of these faults and the one that made the Long March 1 almost completely useless in the event of an actual war was the complete lack of any noise reduction efforts or internal vibration dampening.
Now noise is the enemy of any submarine in the modern era and the Hanclass Long March 1 especially was one of the noisiest submarines ever put to sea.
In other subs like those built by the US and the Soviet Union, extreme measures were taken to reduce the submarine’s acoustic signature and improve its stealth.
These measures primarily consisted of suspending loud equipment and machinery on spring-loaded or rubber cushioned platforms that isolated the machinery from the submarine’s hull so that its vibrations can’t be transferred to the outer structure and then be picked up by the enemy sonar.
And on the outside, thick rubber tiles were fitted to further reduce the submarine’s signature and to help absorb the powerful sound waves emitted from an active sonar array.
It’s sort of like how the coating on a stealth bomber is designed to absorb radar emissions and make the plane nearly undetectable.
The Han class, at least in its early years of service, didn’t use any of these measures, and it would have been easy prey to any marginally capable enemy submarine or vessel they might have gone up against.
But the problem of noise was made even worse by the Han’s relatively small fivebladed propellers.
Simply put, a smaller prop with fewer blades has to spin faster to generate the same amount of propulsion as a larger prop with more blades.
It therefore increases the noise.
It’s somewhat understandable in the context of how and when the submarine was designed and built that engineers almost totally neglected the one thing that makes a submarine a threat.
They were trying to pull off the impossible and had to stick to strictly prioritize only what was absolutely necessary to deliver on Chairman Mao’s lofty orders.
But the Han class’s other crippling design fault is far, far less forgivable.
Putting the nuclear into a nuclear submarine is one of the most difficult engineering challenges that anyone could attempt.
It takes a level of knowledge, skill, and competency that most of us mere mortals simply cannot comprehend.
Extreme care has to be taken to make sure not only that the sub’s reactor works and outputs the needed power, but it also has to do it safely and reliably.
because being stuck in a confined space with a nuclear reactor could lead to some disastrous consequences if it wasn’t handled well.
But this is where the Chinese engineers, brilliant as they were in actually building the thing in the first place, neglected something critical, and that was the reactor’s shielding.
Simply put, those early Hanclass submarines were just downright dangerous to be aboard.
Poor design and calculation had meant that not enough of the vital biological shielding around the submarine’s reactor vessel was fitted, and it led to dangerously high levels of internal radiation, especially when it was run at full power.
Incredibly, this was a design fault that was carried over into the next boat, the Long March 2, with neither submarine having the issue rectified until much later in their careers, only after extensive refits.
But in the meantime, brave Chinese sailors were forced to put to sea in poorly designed submarines that was slowly killing them with deadly radiation.
And even without these crippling design errors, the Han class is still an exceedingly poor submarine overall.
Not only were they incredibly loud, but also nearly deaf.
The indigenously produced sonar systems that the submarine initially launched with were woefully inadequate.
And although they were later upgraded with more modern and capable French systems, the Han class was still greatly limited in its ability during the early years of its service.
Even the submarines weapons were sorely lacking with the cultural revolution also affecting China’s torpedo development program.
Delays there meant that until the mid1 1980s, Hanclass boats put to sea with obsolete, unguided steamowered torpedoes based off of those from 1950s Soviet weapons.
to arm a nuclear submarine with this sort of archaic weaponry in a sense defeats the entire purpose of having a nuclear submarine at all.
But if you really think about it, none of that really matters.
The loud running noise, the high levels of radiation, the poor sensors and weapons, none of it actually mattered in the end.
These boats weren’t really built to go toe-to-toe with the West or with Russia.
They were designed to send a message to say to the rest of the world, “We can do it, too.
” And in that way they completely succeeded.
For all their many faults and shortcomings, the Han class was successful in its goal of forcing the US, the USSR, as well as the rest of Asia and the world to recognize China as a serious global power that was capable of competing with them in almost all fields.
And as the Cold War progressed and eventually ended, or rather evolved into whatever weird kind of clown world we’re living in at the moment, more of the submarines, five in total, were built.
and each one incorporated new upgrades and improvements that vastly increased their combat capability.
This showed that not only could China build such technology, but they could innovate and improve on it.
In fact, during the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, two Hanclass submarines were discovered shadowing the battle groups of carriers USS Nimmits and Independence.
And though they were discovered and tracked, their presence forced the American carriers to redeploy further away from Taiwan.
Today, three Hanclass submarines actually remain in service with the Chinese Navy, with each boat being a market improvement on its successor.
The lead sub, the Long March 1, actually still survives as a museum ship.
She’s on display to the public in Quing Dao, where visitors can take a tour inside one of the world’s most important and certainly most flawed nuclear submarines.
The reactor’s been shut down, so if you visit, you won’t get radiation sickness.
I hope.
Look, at the end of the day, the Hanclass submarines were not the best uh submarines, that’s for sure.
But when it comes down to their intended actual purpose, which was sending that very important message to the West and to Russia, then they were a smashing success.
But uh unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our next ship, which was a vessel that was so poorly designed it had to be returned to its builders as if it were a malfunctioning toaster.
The late 1800s would see something of a renaissance in the design and construction of fast steam powered transatlantic vessels.
New advances in hull design, metallurgy, and propulsion were seeing days shaved off of a crossing along with vast increases in passenger comfort and accommodation.
These truly were boom times for the industry, and many of the new and existing lines were eager to establish their dominance in the Atlantic.
One of those companies was the Inman line, which we’ve talked about a bit on the channel before.
It was named after William Inman, one of the company’s three founders.
The company was started in 1850 and initially it serviced the Liverpool to Philadelphia route.
Those first voyages catered to wealthy first class passengers only though.
In fact, in those early years, the company was simply named the Liverpool and Philadelphia Steamship Company.
Very original.
It must have taken them ages to think of that.
The company would eventually become the Inman line, and they were some of the first to notice a new and emerging opportunity in the transatlantic shipping industry.
With an increasing number of people immigrating from Europe to the US, Inman had his ships refitted to accommodate those far poorer but extremely lucrative passengers.
But by 1854, Inman’s business partners, Richardson Brothers and Co.
, had pulled out of the venture over disagreements stemming from the use of the lines ships in carrying British troops to the Crimean War.
With Inman now at the helm, the line would actually be responsible for another major first for this renaissance of Atlantic travel.
See, also among the masses of immigrant passengers from Europe was a burgeoning new middle class of people who were wealthy enough to not tolerate the cramped, often squalid conditions of steward, but they weren’t quite wealthy enough to afford a true firstass cabin.
Ever the keen businessmen, Inman knew that this class of passenger could be easily won over by providing simple, comfortable accommodation at a reasonable price.
At the time, nobody else was really servicing this market.
So, the first to break in stood to make incredible profit and profit did as the company only continued to grow from there through the 1860s.
The business proved to be so lucrative, in fact, that the Inman line was the first to allow its passengers to prepay for tickets that would then be sent back to Europe in order to bring over waiting family and loved ones.
In 1865, a first class ticket would set you back $105.
That’s a little over 2,000 today.
While steerage could cost around $30 or about 600 today, and as the years wore on, the market for the transatlantic passage remained fiercely competitive with shipping lines coming and going, while others continued to enjoy success.
Engineers and ship builders were constantly seeking innovation and improvements, and technology was advancing at a rapid pace.
By the 1880s, the golden age of the steamship was well and truly underway with these beautiful, sleek, metal hold ships shaving more and more time off of transatlantic voyages and continuously improving upon their passenger accommodations, but critically their speed.
Enter the SS City of Rome.
This ship was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and elegant vessels ever made.
But for reasons that will soon become evident, the city of Rome would bear the distinct dishonor of being one of the only large transatlantic steamers to ever be refused by her wouldbe owners.
The city of Rome was meant to be the Inman Lion’s crown jewel that would cement the company as one of the dominant lines in the Atlantic.
On paper, the vessel would be the largest, say for the laid-up hulk of the Great Eastern, the fastest and the most luxurious ocean liner ever built.
To construct the new ship, Inman hired one of England’s finest up and cominging ship building firms, the Barrow Ship Building Company.
They had been formed in 1871 on the back of this booming iron industry in the town of Barrow Infernace.
The large financial backers behind these heavy industrial concerns had already funded the construction of a new railway.
They were looking for other expanding markets to invest in.
With a large iron industry and a functioning railway just a relative stone throw away from the Irish Sea, ship building was the natural next step.
And by the time the order came in to build the SS city of Rome, the Barrow ship building company was already building a reputation for innovation and quality work.
It would seem then that the stars were already aligned for Inman.
But sadly, it just wasn’t to be.
As you might expect, with such lofty claims of speed, size, and luxury, the construction of the city of Rome was quite a publicized affair.
Newspapers all over eagerly awaited the ship’s maiden voyage with journalists and editors very eager to document what was doubtlessly going to be a grand historic trip across the Atlantic.
And on June 14th, 1881, the beautiful SS City of Rome entered the waters of the Irish Sea for the very first time after being christened by Lady Constant Stanley, the wife of the Earl of Derby.
4 months later in October, she was fitted out and finally ready for her acceptance trials.
The short trip down to Liverpool was simply meant to be a shakedown cruise where the builders and the purchasing line could assess the vessel’s performance and then iron out any small issues.
But this initial voyage proved that Barrow had made several grave mistakes.
By all accounts, the ship functioned just fine.
There were no major mechanical or structural issues.
Simply put, though, she was just really slow.
She was far too slow to have any hope of ever capturing the speed records that the Inman line so desperately hoped to secure.
The SS City of Rome had been expected to be able to achieve a top speed of around 16 to 18 knots.
But in practice, the vessel was never able to achieve speeds anywhere near this and struggled to even crack 15.
With the ship underachieving her required performance, the line refused to pay for and take possession of the vessel.
With Inman washing their hands of the whole mess, it was now down to Barrow to find a buyer for their dud ship, as they had invested great sums of money in the construction of the SS city of Rome.
The loss of this investment, plus the reputational damage of failing to meet their contractual obligations, could easily sink the firm for good.
But all of this begs the question, why? What was wrong with the ship? From the outside and the inside appearances, the city of Rome appeared to be everything the modern, even cuttingedge vessel she was supposed to be.
Her new triple expansion steam engines and her four towering masts and complement of sails should have been more than enough to carry the vessel to an easy speed record.
In fact, the SS City of Rome was the first ship to feature three funnels.
Again, aside from the Great Eastern with five, but you get my point.
The answers lay in the ship’s hull itself and in those new and supposedly innovative engines.
See, by the late 1800s, steel was rapidly supplanting iron as the main material of choice, not just in ship building, but in almost everything else.
Innovations in metallurgy and on the production level had meant that steel could now be produced in industrial qualities.
Even by the time the city of Rome’s keel had been laid, it was already the obvious material of choice for ship builders.
But while production of steel was rapidly increasing, it hadn’t yet been universally adopted.
At the time of the city of Rome’s construction, other large industrial projects like the building of other rival ships were guzzling up Britain’s limited steel supply and causing some crippling shortages.
Simply put, Barrow had no choice but to use obsolete iron plating for the city of Rome, knowing full well that it was a vastly inferior material in all respects.
Iron as a metal is both softer and more brittle than steel, meaning more of it has to be used to achieve the same level of strength in a given component or structure.
But by using iron for the construction of the city of Rome, Barrow created a ship that was far heavier than initially called for in the design.
This added weight meant that the finished ship had a much deeper draft than initially accounted for.
It meant she sat lower in the water.
With more of the ship’s hull submerged, its already struggling engines had to work even harder to push her bulk through the water, and her performance was thoroughly ruined.
The use of iron also had another negative effect.
meant that the ship’s cargo capacity was significantly reduced because hastily introduced reinforcing structures inside took up valuable room that otherwise could have been used for profitable cargo.
In the engine and boiler rooms, things weren’t much improved.
The design for the boiler rooms had called for the fitting of new steel boilers, but for the same reasons as the hull, older, inferior iron boilers were installed instead, and the novel triple expansion steam engines simply weren’t powerful enough to make up for all of it.
This fact was actually something that the press picked up on with the city of Rome’s engine room described as underste and over complicated.
Ouch.
Part of the fault here actually did rest with the inman line instead of barrow because many of the design choices that led to these shortcomings had been insisted on by company personnel.
All of this led to a ship that hopelessly failed to meet the requirements outlined in the contract and it was a black stain on Barrow’s reputation.
But luckily for the company, a buyer for the orphaned dud liner was found in the anchor line.
They had been founded back in 1856 and initially serviced a Glasgow to New York route before eventually expanding to include more lucrative English routes as well as Scandinavia and Canada.
Here the SS City of Rome actually ended up totally redeeming herself, serving as a flagship of the anchor line.
Passengers enjoyed her luxurious accommodations and the excellent seaeping abilities.
Indeed, the ship’s interior was exceedingly luxurious.
The fittings and the furniture had been supplied by London architects Messes Wallace and Flockheart, and it took on a beautiful French Renaissance style that was lorded by the press and the passengers alike.
And although she’d been built clearly with luxury primarily in mind, the ship still featured comfortable accommodations for middle-class passengers and had capacity for up to,500 immigrants.
and under their ownership, the anchor line significantly reworked the ship’s engine room and had succeeded in improving her performance and her reliability.
By all accounts, the city of Rome, although still slower than other ships and not a record setter, was a wonderful and favored vessel to sail on.
And even then, people marveled at her beauty, with many regarding the city of Rome as the most attractive ship in service anywhere.
And with her elegant lines, her narrow beam, her swooping clipper bow, and her tall masts, it’s hard to argue with that assessment.
Truly, from any angle, the city of Rome is a magnificent looking ship.
And it’s a perfect example of a remarkable era in maritime history.
The city of Rome, despite its initial failure and public humiliation, would have a long and by all means successful 21-year career from 1881 to 1902.
And as for the inman line who initially ordered her, well, time wouldn’t be so fortunate for them.
The company had already started to struggle when the order for the city of Rome had been placed.
Economic turmoil in the United States throughout the late 1870s had seen a steep downturn in immigrant traffic from Europe.
With a large part of their business based on this crucial market, the lion’s income dropped sharply.
The city of Rome had actually been part of a strategy to regain their competitive edge.
It was hoped that a large, fast, and luxurious liner would attract a higher level of clientele and that the higher cost of these tickets would offset the lower sales volume.
But with the city of Rome failing, one of these necessary elements and with the heavy pressure from the White Star Lines Oceanic class and the Gueon lines record-breaking steamer Arizona, the Inman line fell into financial hardship and it was bought by a US company in the mid 1880s.