Navy's Gamble

The Navy reported that it had won out in a great engineering adventure which has made U.S. warships, pound for pound, the most efficient craft on the seven seas. Its new high-pressure, high-temperature steam turbine has succeeded beyond its rosiest hopes. The new design:

> Saves up to 35% in fuel.

> Adds up to 1,000 miles to a warship's cruising range.

> Enables each ship to carry more armament.

> Increases the effective size of the Navy by allowing more ships to be on the line at all times.

The turbine is a seagoing adaptation of the one used in U.S. electric-power plants. But its use on a ship was something of a gamble, because it meant a drastic redesigning of traditional ship's machinery. Nonetheless, two enterprising Navy engineers, Rear Admiral Samuel Murray Robinson (then engineering chief, now head of the Navy's Office of Procurement and Material) and Rear Admiral Harold Gardiner Bowen, braved a fierce controversy and pushed it through. Ship Architects Gibbs & Cox (TIME, Sept. 28) were commissioned to design the new machinery.

A steam turbine is a simple machine that works like a water wheel, with jets of steam instead of water furnishing the power. Advantage of the high-pressure, high-temperature turbine is that it makes the blades spin faster and more powerfully with less expenditure of fuel. In the newest Navy ships, the steam, under pressure of 600 lb. per square inch, is superheated to 850DEG Fahrenheit.

Red Hot Steam. At that temperature, ordinary steam pipes become red hot; consequently, new metal alloys had to be developed to withstand the heat. To regulate the heating of the steam, the Navy had to develop a brand-new kind of boiler in place of the space-consuming boiler dampers used in land power plants.

But the result of all this redesigning is a turbine which not only uses less fuel but is more rugged and simpler to operate than the old type, breaks down less often, has stood up superbly under the severest combat conditions from Iceland to the tropics. First installed experimentally in the Mahan class of destroyers, started in 1933, the new turbine is now standard equipment in most of the modern U.S. fleet.

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