One way of mitigating galvanic corrosion was to coat the aluminum with a layer of zinc chromate. The other was putting an insulating barrier between aluminum and steel joints. Newport News first chose an insulation known as “aluminastic.” But Gibbs did not trust the shipyard’s initial judgment and decided to see if the insulation could hold up against the heat generated by the welding of nearby steel components. On December 14, 1950, he ordered a test of the joinery. Workers welded two pieces of steel together, one of which was riveted to a section of aluminum insulated by aluminastic. When the rivets were removed and the aluminum plate examined, the aluminastic had been badly melted and frayed by the heat from the welder’s torch. This was completely unacceptable.
The following day, welders performed the same test on a section insulated by a new materiaclass="underline" DuPont PAW tape. As the welder reached the top of one of the pieces of steel, the PAW tape spouted out flames nearly two inches long. But the sparks settled, the tape held up beautifully, and the aluminum below it was undamaged.21
Above all, William Francis took the most intense interest in the design of the funnels. A ship’s funnels, of course, are more than big tubes to exhaust smoke from the boiler rooms. They also bear the company colors, and give an ocean liner an unmistakable silhouette, recognizable from miles away. For United States, Gibbs designed the two largest smokestacks ever put on a passenger ship: 55 feet tall and 60 feet across at the base, each crowned by the signature, soot-deflecting fins that he had pioneered on the Grace Line’s Santaships and used again on America. He wanted to make sure his ship would be instantly recognizable, and he thought the finned, teardrop-shaped funnels would do that.
Like every key design element, the stacks were put through grueling tests. The shipyard placed a scale model of the ship in a wind tunnel, with smoke from burning woodchips vented through the stacks.
But Gibbs’s initial stack design proved deficient—the stacks were graceful and striking, but the inclined fins at the top did not deflect enough smoke away from the upper decks. If the stacks were built as Gibbs wanted, soot and cinders would coat the clothes and irritate the nostrils of strolling passengers.
A Newport News shipyard apprentice named Howard E. Lee Jr. approached Gibbs with a simple idea: rotate the fins so that they were horizontal, parallel to the deck.
Lee wanted to test his idea, and Gibbs grudgingly agreed.
As the test ran, Gibbs stared at the smoke blowing from the model’s modified stacks, and then according to Howard Lee, “[he] only grunted, and walked away without comment.”
Lee claimed he was never thanked for his idea, but the horizontal stack fins were integrated into the final design. William Francis was never happy when someone bested him, especially when it was a young shipyard apprentice, not from Gibbs & Cox.22
Once the patterns were sent to the Newport News metal shop, the funnels proved to be the most challenging part of the ship’s construction. The funnels were not the simple steel stovepipes of liners past; they were curved, finned sculptures shaped from unforgiving aluminum. According to the Shipyard Bulletin, published by the company, “Had they been built of steel, the plates would have been shaped with relatively little trouble by heating and bending. This was not possible with aluminum. All of the plates were shaped cold.”23 The mode of construction meant that workers had to hammer individual aluminum plates over molds, in much the way French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi shaped the copper plates of the Statue of Liberty eight decades earlier.
There was one thing Gibbs handled completely by himself. He spent countless hours testing the ship’s three whistles in the New Jersey Meadowlands, pitching them with a tuning fork.24 Not only did he want their deep tones to sound harmonious, but also to be distinct from any other ship on the ocean: a raucous, husky, masculine bellow.
In early 1951, cranes hoisted the two enormous and carefully shaped funnels into the air and then gently dropped them into place on the waiting ship’s deck. A team of painters, clad in bodysuits and respirator masks, then mounted scaffolding and ladders to spray paint them in the vibrant red, white, and blue of the United States Lines.
With the funnels in place, United States finally looked like a great ocean liner, towering high above the shipyard that created her. Her graceful lines and elegant proportions stunned those who visited the site. “There’s a truly American cut to it,” a reporter from the New York Times Magazine observed, “in the springing jut of the prow; the great mass in its lines, but no bulkiness.”25
The workers on-site sensed the transformation once the stacks were riveted in place and her striking profile complete. By then United States was more than just another construction project; the great ship was taking on a life and soul of her own.
By the spring of 1951, the hull and superstructure of the ship were largely finished and the construction crews were rushing to install mechanical systems and interior partitions. Cranes danced and bowed around the huge vessel, each carefully dropping whole sections—hull plates, deckhouses, lifeboat davits, winches—into place. With a cascade of white and red sparks, a team of welders would attach them to the main body of the liner.
“The noise,” reported one visitor, “is ear shattering.”26
The pride the three thousand workers felt in United States grew with each passing day; the ship was now an extension of them. “She’s a mighty sweet baby,” said Preston Hicks, a rigger supervisor at the Newport News shipyard.27
The “sweet baby’s” christening ceremony was scheduled for June 23. For such a magnificent vessel—America’s grandest entry into the transatlantic stakes—the highest lady in the land might be expected to christen her, just as Queen Mary had christened Queen Mary—or, as William Francis Gibbs knew, just as First Lady Frances Cleveland had christened St. Louis back in 1894.
But First Lady Bess Truman refused the honor. Her husband felt the event would not be something she should attend, given the contentious relationship between his administration and the ship.
The refusal did nothing to dampen Gibbs’s excitement. To him, United States was the country’s real first lady, and she was ready to take center stage.
19. AMERICAN MODERNE
Unlike the dramatic launchings of the great liners of the past, there would be no great slide into the river, no smoke billowing from the tallow-greased ways, no enormous splash of water soaking the spectators.
In accordance with instructions from William Francis Gibbs, until the dock was fully flooded and the hull was hidden from view, the press could photograph only the forward end of the ship. At no time would pictures of the rudder or propellers be permitted. “This is consistent with arrangements usually made with naval vessels,” Gibbs’s April 30 memo noted.1 The secrecy that applied to Navy warships would be strictly followed for the new passenger liner.