William Francis Gibbs jumped in and told Franklin that his team had already produced plans for that ship: Design 12201. This was to be an ocean liner, he said, that would not only be the fastest ship in the world, but also the safest and the most beautiful ever built. It would be a ship big and luxurious enough to steal travelers from the Queen s. And it would have the design and power needed to snatch the fabled Blue Riband from Queen Mary, clinching an honor no American-built ship had held for almost a century.
Franklin left the Broad Street Club that afternoon far from convinced about going ahead. But the Gibbs brothers had given him something to think about. The general understood the financial commitment involved in the superliner, but he also knew his company had the backing of Vincent Astor, still the United States Lines’ largest single shareholder. Astor, recognized as one of the nation’s leading venture capitalists, gave his friend Franklin permission to look into things further.
One month after the Broad Street Club lunch, on March 4, Franklin met with the Gibbs brothers again. Franklin said that he had given their proposal “careful consideration” and had decided he would be willing to move ahead, provided the Gibbs brothers could design a liner “superior to the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth in speed” and deliver it for $50 million, equivalent to about ten times that today.2
“We will have to rejuvenate our passenger service,” William Francis recalled Franklin telling them. The superliner must be one “the public can get behind, like a Cup defender—a sort of mythical flagship of our fleet.”
But as Franklin also insisted, and as he told his board, the project could only get the blessing of government if she was “quickly convertible to a transport.”3 The liner would have to be able to switch from a luxury liner into the world’s fastest troop transport within forty-eight hours, ready to carry 14,000 soldiers anywhere on earth without refueling. The conversion capability, the Gibbs brothers insisted, was not a problem. Unlike previous liners, peacetime furniture and fittings could be easily removed. As for speed and cost, they said, a ship with a “sustained sea speed of 33 knots, corresponding to the scheduled 28.5 knots of Queen Mary, could be designed and built at a figure of about $50 million.”4 The ship would match the dimensions Gibbs had laid out to his chief hull designer: 990 feet long (over three football fields in length) and 101.5 feet wide, with a draft of 31 feet. She would weigh in at about 50,000 tons, significantly lighter and hence more fuel efficient than the 80,000-ton Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary.
The brothers also promised she would incorporate technologies perfected during World War II, features that would give her the greatest power-to-weight ratio in the history of commercial shipping, fast enough to outrun any submarine. Although the new ship would be luxurious and boast superlative service, unlike her European predecessors she would be designed for wartime use first and foremost. And her sleek and sensuous lines would take the American public’s breath away.
Franklin was sold. Now he had to find a way to pay for her. On March 26, he sent a proposal from his office at One Broadway to the United States Maritime Commission, the government agency in Washington that would determine how much money, if any, his company would receive for the project. Franklin told the commission that his company sought “to develop and construct, with the aid of a 50% subsidy, a new fast trans-Atlantic passenger liner to be operated on the North Atlantic… on a two-week turnaround from New York to Plymouth, England, Havre, France, and return by way of Southampton, England.”
The new ship, Franklin promised, would incorporate “the advances made during the war in superheat, high pressure, strong light metals, ventilation and air conditioning,” as well as fireproof construction. She would be so far ahead of her time, Franklin believed, that she would ensure American dominance of the prestigious North Atlantic sea-lanes for the next twenty years.5
William Francis and Frederic Gibbs returned to the Gibbs & Cox offices at 21 West Street. They were elated but knew that during the century before, ambitious men had also staked fortunes, reputations, and national honor on bigger, faster, and grander ships designed to dominate the North Atlantic. A fine ship was a moneymaker, a wartime asset, and a point of immense national pride. A bad one was a money loser, a mechanical nightmare, and a national embarrassment.
The ship the Gibbs brothers had sold to the United States Lines in the spring of 1946 would be more than just a proud bearer of the American flag on the high seas, more than just a massive commercial endeavor. The superliner on his drafting board, William Francis Gibbs vowed, would be the greatest ship in the world, maybe even the greatest ship ever to sail.
Within a month, Gibbs & Cox and the United States Lines came together in agreement. They would go forward with plans for this radical new design: the world’s most advanced and fastest superliner.
When the Maritime Commission’s naval architect, James L. Bates, heard the United States Lines had accepted the Gibbs & Cox design, he refused to take the decision as final. Putting aside his “Design IV”—the big ship that had goaded William Francis Gibbs into Design 12201 in the first place—Bates prepared to leapfrog the Gibbs & Cox design with plans for a liner even bigger than 12201 and almost as big as Queen Mary. On April 6, he brought his proposal to General Franklin.
But Bates no longer had his pugnacious boss Admiral Land to pull strings for him—he had retired from the Maritime Commission only a month before the Gibbs brothers and Franklin had met for lunch. Moreover, the president of the United States Lines had no plans to build another Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth. Franklin didn’t want a bigger ship, but an exciting, fast, and efficient one. He also wanted economy, especially in fuel consumption: government subsidies supplemented crew wages and other labor costs, but not fuel. Franklin had told the Gibbs brothers that construction costs must come in at $50 million, which was considerably below the estimated $75 million for Bates’s new design. All in all, Gibbs & Cox’s Design 12201 fit his requirements, and Franklin saw no reason to change his mind.
Meanwhile, Gibbs and his staff had been leafing through the papers Bates had just published. This included a recent paper to the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers titled “Aspects of Large Passenger Liner Design.” William Francis always made sure he understood his competition, and this was no exception. The Gibbs & Cox team carefully studied Bates’s design specifications, and then had the firm’s model shop prepare a series of hull models. The first would be Bates’s Design IV, the 930-foot liner; the second would be Bates’s Queen Mary–like, 1,006-foot liner; and the third would be their own, 990-foot Design 12201.
Gibbs then asked his firm’s chief engine designer, Walter Bachman, to calculate how much horsepower would be needed to drive each ship at various speeds. On April 9, 1946, only three days after General Franklin had met with James Bates, Bachman presented his two key findings:
• At 30 knots, Bates’s 1,006-foot design would require 124,000 shaft horsepower, 4.5 percent more horsepower than Design 12201, and consume 15.5 percent more fuel.