![]() The answer was the Olympic-class of ship: 52,000 ton, 882-foot long superliners with the capacity for 3,000 passengers and crew, three lifts in first-class and one for second-class, and two reciprocating high-pressure engines for the two "wing" propellers, with a low-pressure turbine for the smaller, central propeller, increasing cost-effectiveness in steam economy by reusing steam wasted by the reciprocating engines. As such, they sought to build two, possibly three, liners that were at least ninety feet longer than the Lusitania and Mauretania, and by far more luxurious than both put together. Part of this was granting modest luxuries to third class, which included linens, silverware, waiters who brought their food, and free postcards on their menus, so that they could praise White Star to their friends and relatives back home. As opposed to Cunard, White Star prided itself on comfort and luxury rather than pure speed (as that tended to come at the cost of passenger capacity, and resulted in a tendency to vibrate uncomfortably). White Star, seeing the threat Cunard's new "Greyhounds of the Atlantic" presented to the company, quickly drafted a response. These liners had top speeds of over 24 knots, thanks to their four turbine engines (the first class of ocean liners to be exclusively turbine-driven, after the comparative experiment with Cunard's liners Carmania and Caronia over the cost-effectiveness of the turbine in 1905) and were the largest liners in the world both in physical size and mass note the empty shell of the Lusitania at launch outweighed the fully outfitted Kaiser by 2,000 gross tons, as well as among the first to have elevators (or "lifts" as the British know them) for passengers. In response, the Cunard Line, which had always placed speed and reliability as paramount for their ships, produced the 787 and 790-foot long Lusitania * which infamously ended up being torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat in World War I and Mauretania in 1907. Hence the initials RMS on ships that held that license - Royal Mail Steamer.īut in the late 1890s, the Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hamburg America Lines threatened to encroach into Cunard and White Star's competition with the launch and maiden voyages of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and Deutschland * later renamed Viktoria Luise, two liners of unprecedented size, speed (with Kaiser running at a then-unheard-of speed of 22.35 knots note just over 41km/h, or almost 26mph, and Deutschland traveling even faster) and luxury. ![]() Various ship lines in Great Britain, the United States, and eventually Germany would answer the call with large, steam-driven ships, but the most famous of these lines, Great Britain's Cunard and White Star, would be the big dogs, constantly competing against each other for emigrant passenger tickets (the real bread and butter of the trade, rather than first-class passengers) and the profitable license to carry the mail to and from Britain. ![]() Throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, millions of emigrants wanted to go to America to start a new life, and the mail services in Europe needed a swift and reliable means of transporting hundreds of thousands of letters and packages across the Atlantic.
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