As the steel hull rose, machinery components were installed. The eight Babcock & Wilcox boilers were built off-site in Ohio, but Gibbs insisted that a prototype be tested at the Philadelphia Navy Yard before they were installed aboard the ship. A barge transported the boiler up to Philadelphia, where it passed muster, and back down to Newport News. The Westinghouse plant in Pittsburgh built the turbines, which were also carefully tested before installation.
Even as construction proceeded, a few key design elements continued to be refined. The ship’s propellers required special attention and testing. Along with engines and underwater hull design, they were crucial to the ship’s speed.4
And the propeller design lay in the province of a woman.
Despite his reputation for being uncomfortable around women, William Francis found one who was essential to the revolutionary design of his ship’s propulsion system. Elaine Scholley Kaplan started working at Gibbs & Cox during the war, when she was an undergraduate mathematics major at Hunter College. In 1945 she had married a fellow engineer, Howard Kaplan, who also worked at Gibbs & Cox and was exempted from the draft on the recommendation of William Francis Gibbs.
The Kaplans’ business and social lives were completely intertwined at Gibbs & Cox’s. Men and women went out to dances together, bowled together, and played music together. The company’s informal social goings-on, as well as announcements of engagements, weddings, and the birth of children, were published in a bound monthly magazine called Compass Points.
Not everyone enjoyed the firm’s social side. One young engineer fresh out of the University of Michigan described the company Christmas party at the Downtown Athletic Association as “about as fun as a middle school dance.”5 But Elaine and Howard Kaplan thrived. Bill played the saxophone in the company swing band, the aptly named Destroyers. Both developed friendships with people who understood the demands and satisfactions of Gibbs & Cox’s high-pressure, long-hour days.
As Elaine Kaplan rose to be a top propulsion engineer, she enjoyed success that testified to Gibbs & Cox’s openness not just to women professionals, but also to those who were Jewish. At the same time, as one of only two women on the fifty-person design team (the other, Rebekah Dallas, was chief of the firm’s female personnel), Kaplan understood the conventions of the 1950s that kept many women in support roles. She broke these barriers with intelligence and grace.
“She had an understated elegance,” Kaplan’s daughter Susan Caccavale recalled. “You could tell she was bright but she was so humble and unassuming that you would never know how accomplished and brilliant she was, which was part of her charm.” As a young engineer, Kaplan earned respect not only for her intelligence but for her meticulous work. She quickly came to the attention of Walter Bachman, the company’s chief marine engineer. “He was very kind and very patient, but also very brilliant,” Caccavale recalled. “He became kind of a father figure to her.”6
Kaplan’s talent eventually gained her William Francis’s high regard, although he could not entirely grasp the phenomenon of an attractive, hardheaded woman engineer. “Mrs. Kaplan to me is a complete and perfect mystery,” Gibbs said of her. “How anybody can look the way Mrs. Kaplan looks and come up and talk to you on a technical subject is beyond me—I am not over it yet.”7
The only workplace disagreement known between Gibbs and the young designer was the time he docked her a week of vacation for being late for work. They were very much alike; like Gibbs, Kaplan could explain complex engineering concepts in a way that any layman could understand.8
Gibbs thought so much of Elaine Kaplan that he gave her one of the most important assignments in his firm: designing the propulsion system for United States. And a simple idea perfected by Kaplan and Newport News Shipbuilding became one of the unique designs that Gibbs guarded as the ship’s deepest secrets.
Vibration from engines and propellers remained one of the great problems faced by marine engineers when designing large, fast ships. As Gibbs knew from personal experience, vibration had rattled the sleep and shaken the dinner tables of passengers on Lusitania, Normandie, and even the Queen s. The culprit was cavitation, in which fast-spinning propellers create tiny air bubbles that disturb the blades’ grip in the water. Cavitation sends shock waves throughout the hull and wears down the huge, expensive propeller blades. And no ship ever had 60,000 horsepower forced onto each propeller shaft as United States would.
The challenge brought Kaplan deeply into the work at the shipyard. She began to make frequent trips down to Newport News by train. What were supposed to be day trips turned into weeklong marathon sessions, where she supervised testing of the propellers in the model tanks and kept close tabs on her engineering colleagues from the shipyard. At the hotel, the fashionable but frugal Kaplan washed her one outfit in the bathtub every night.
Kaplan’s original designs for United States’ propulsion system called for four 18-foot-diameter manganese bronze propellers, each with four blades. The four propeller shafts were enclosed in winglike structures known as bossings, which projected out from the stern and added to the ship’s stability.9 But tests showed that this traditional arrangement, despite all of Kaplan’s attention to the size and pitch of the propeller blades, still created bad vibration at high speeds.
The solution that emerged from work by Kaplan and colleagues at Newport News was to configure the two sets of propellers in a new way: the two outboard props would have four blades; the two inboard props would have five. With more surface area, the inside, five-bladed propellers could better grip the water churned up by the two outboard props.
In April 1950, the yard ran a series of self-propulsion model tests using the new five-blade design. The results showed the ship would have an astounding, estimated top speed of about 37 knots at full power, with cavitation greatly reduced.10
Characteristically, William Francis did not lavish praise on his engineer. “Let me say that for my money, Mrs. Kaplan is quite the equal of any technical person that we have in this place,” he said at a company dinner. He then admonished her: “Now, for God’s sake don’t get conceited and for God’s sake come in on time.”11
By May 5, as the propeller tests ended, the bottom of the ship was largely complete, and the sides and bulkheads were rising up from the dry dock floor. Tiers of wooden scaffolding surrounded the nascent hull. To an outside observer, she still looked more like a mammoth barge than a sleek ocean liner. The first hint of the ship’s beautiful exterior lines was at the front of the ship, where the graceful bow was taking shape.
But eight months after construction began, it suddenly seemed that the Truman administration would yank the ship out from under William Francis Gibbs. The reason: military necessity.
After making a series of frantic phone calls, William Francis and Frederic Gibbs grimly called a meeting with their decorators in September 1950. Dorothy Marckwald and Anne Urquhart, who had been working for months on the ship’s interior, came to Frederic’s austere office at One Broadway. The two decorators had just been given word: United States, a third of the way through construction, was being seized by the Pentagon and would be completed as a troop transport. Military brass called General John Franklin of United States Lines to break the news, and Franklin then told the decorators that their contract was canceled and their services were no longer be needed. The two women were devastated—after two decades of designing interiors for Gibbs & Cox liners, this would be their crowning achievement.