The crowds that lined the Hudson by the thousands to greet what had been hailed as the most beautiful ship in the world knew nothing about the vibration. The crowd did know that Normandie had captured the Blue Riband from Rex on her first voyage, sailing the now-established course between Bishop Rock and Ambrose Lightship in 4 days, 3 hours, and 2 minutes at an average speed of 29.98 knots, a full knot faster than her Italian rival. Flying from her mainmast was a thirty-foot-long blue pennant symbolizing the speed prize.
When Normandie docked at Pier 88, crowds of spectators pushed and shoved to get a look at a world unimaginable to all but royalty and movie stars. For most of them, even a $91 tourist class stateroom (about $800 in 2012 terms) on Normandie was completely out of reach.5 But despite Depression era poverty, unemployment, and bad news—or perhaps because of those things—the American public was ocean-liner crazy. On Broadway, Cole Porter’s 1934 hit high-society musical Anything Goes had been set aboard a mythical transatlantic superliner named American. Expecting big crowds to greet Normandie, the French Line charged people fifty cents for a tour of the first-class salons, still redolent with the aroma of French cigarettes, cognac, and perfume.
Among those lined up to pay to get on the ship was a nondescript man in a shabby black suit and floppy fedora. William Francis Gibbs, accompanied by his bespectacled, professorial chief electrical engineer, Norman Zippler, had come to check out the competition. When their group’s guide looked away, the two men bolted for a door to the lower decks, which were strictly off-limits to visitors.
Of principal interest to them were the engine rooms, and Normandie’s four unique turbo-electric generators, the largest, most powerful ever placed in a commercial vessel. At cruising speed, the engines could deliver 160,000 horsepower to the four propellers, nearly 50 percent more power than the steam turbines of Normandie’s closest rivals.
After hours of playing cat-and-mouse with Normandie’s crew, an exhausted Zippler asked his boss if they could sit down. He was tired and afraid of getting caught and thrown off the ship by angry French Line officials.
Gibbs agreed, and they found a hidden corner.
“Take out your book and I will give you some dictation,” Gibbs said quietly. For the next three and a half hours, the two men huddled in Normandie’s belly as Gibbs rattled off from memory all he had seen—gauge readings, measurements, and devices.6
Gibbs greatly admired Normandie, mainly because she was so revolutionary, blending advanced engineering with glamour, grace, and charisma. The first ship he ever designed, as a raw amateur working with his brother in 1916, had reached for many of the same elements: over 1,000 feet long, scooped-out hull, fine lines and a flared bow, and powered by turbo-electric engines. He was impressed with Normandie’s power plant. The steam generated by the boilers spun four turbo-alternators that generated 33,400 kilowatts of power to the four electric engines.7
But even before his escapade into Normandie’s belly, Gibbs had already concluded that American firms such as General Electric, Babcock & Wilcox, and Foster Wheeler could produce better engines than those on European ships. “The great power plants of the United States,” he said, “were way ahead of the power plants of any great nation… this knowledge and experience of engineering that had been gained by these great concerns at tremendous cost could be adopted and made practical for use in a naval vessel.”8 However, the big American shipyards such as Newport News, New York Shipbuilding, and Bethlehem refused to use them. To save on costs, they preferred to purchase licenses from the Parsons Company of England—whose namesake had invented the steam turbine in the 1890s—and use these older designs in their commercial and naval vessels.
Gibbs was already well ahead of the curve. Five years before Normandie entered service, he had grasped a new chance to use American-designed turbines in American-designed ships, when the Grace Line approached him with a request that seemed too good to be true: to design four new, high-quality passenger-cargo steamers.
Grace Line operated steamships between New York, Caribbean ports, and the West Coast. They wanted four 10,000-gross-ton, combination passenger-cargo liners. Because of their long voyages, the ships had to combine comfort and speed—the classic passenger liner requirements—with economy of operation.
Before giving Gibbs & Cox the job, Grace Line president D. Stewart Inglehart asked Gibbs to make a presentation before the company’s board of directors. When Gibbs appeared, the directors peppered him with questions until one of them stumped him.
“I don’t know the answer to that one,” he responded calmly. “I can find it out.”
Inglehart later called on Gibbs, to tell him how the board had voted, and why. “We gave you the job because you didn’t bluff on that question,” Inglehart said. “It was a catch question. We had the answer to it. After you left that day we said, ‘Here is a man we can rely on to tell the truth,’ and that decided the issue.”9
The four ships would be named Santa Rosa, Santa Paula, Santa Elena, and Santa Lucia, and were to be ready in 1932. With Malolo’s profile in mind, Gibbs streamlined the superstructures, used two low Bremen-style smokestacks, flared the bow forward, and added a horizontal fin to the back of the first stack to deflect smoke away from the upper decks. Compared to the conservative style of Theodore Ferris, the Gibbs & Cox look was moving steadily toward the sculpted and sleek.
The four Santas also introduced a new collaborator to the Gibbs & Cox design team, a sophisticated and confident New York interior designer named Dorothy Marckwald. Grace Line and Gibbs wanted a simple and elegant look that would appeal to the 250 all-first-class passengers. A successful, unmarried professional woman born into New York society, Marckwald understood what the Grace Line wanted and she delivered with restrained, colonial-inspired décor. The most spectacular public room was a columned, two-deck-high dining salon, painted in cream and pastel tones. On warm tropical nights, the ceiling could be retracted, allowing passengers to dine and dance under the stars.
One of Marckwald’s great strengths was her insight into the special needs of shipboard design. She refused to follow trendy resort styles, whether from the “cottages” of the rich at Newport or the era’s grand Adirondacks hunting lodges. “We knew the elk-horn style would soon be dated,” she said. She also had an eye for color. “One thing we don’t do on a ship,” she once said, “is use color that is at all yellowish green. You know—anything that will remind a traveler of the condition of his stomach.”10
Despite his guarded manner around women, Gibbs was pleased with what Marckwald produced and decided to employ her services for future contracts. He also respected her intelligence and her willingness to speak her mind. His confidence in her allowed him to focus on the area where Gibbs & Cox was making great strides, the engine room.
His treatment of the wife of a Grace Line executive, however, was a strange mixture of gallantry and misogyny. After a long business luncheon with the couple, William Francis remarked: “It’s not possible. No woman in the world can keep her mouth shut that long.” “I don’t see why you just don’t do exactly everything Mr. Gibbs suggests,” she told her husband. “He’s the most wonderful man in the world.”