Notas del episodio
In 1894, eight-year-old William Francis Gibbs watched the liner SS St. Louis launch at a Philadelphia shipyard and decided he would build the greatest American ship in history. He made his name redesigning the Leviathan, a German ship seized as a World War I prize, and cemented it with his first original design, the SS Malolo, which was rammed amidships by a freighter in fog during sea trials yet stayed afloat because its watertight compartments reached far higher than the Titanic's. His firm designed over 70 percent of the American ships deployed in World War II, and the Cold War paid for his dream: a liner costing over $70 million, heavily subsidized by the Department of Defense, that could become a troop ship carrying a 14,400 man division 10,000 miles without refueling.
The SS United States crossed the Atlantic in July 1952 in 3 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes, taking the Blue Riband from the Queen Mary by more than 10 hours, while Gibbs had the captain hold speed around 32 knots to hide a secret top speed of 38.32 knots. By 1957 aircraft carried more transatlantic passengers than liners, and the military decided flying troops was safer than packing a division onto one target. United States Lines abruptly pulled the ship from service at Newport News, Virginia in 1969. After decades stripped of asbestos and interiors at a Philadelphia pier, a 2024 rent dispute led to her sale to Okaloosa County, Florida, which plans to sink her in the Gulf of Mexico as the world's largest artificial reef.
- Gibbs banned wood aboard, allowing only a butcher's block for the chefs and a grand piano.
- Theodore Steinway won approval for the treated mahogany piano by drenching it in gasoline and setting it on fire.
- The aluminum funnels and superstructure, then the world's largest aluminum project, were insulated from the steel hull with tapes, zinc barriers, and special rivets to stop galvanic corrosion.
- Pairing two four-bladed and two five-bladed propellers broke up the vibration and cavitation that shake fast ships apart.
- Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, and Walt Disney sailed aboard, and no commercial liner has ever broken her transatlantic record.