Stettin , Germany was famous among all shipyards on the European Continent. Visiting the shipyard in April  1899 one would see no less then nine huge vessels in course of construction, seven yet on the ways, and two in the water. Of the nine ships, seven were for German companies- one of them a ship of the line for the German Navy. The other two were a cruiser for Russia and the "Yakuma", then just completed, for Japan. Of the German liners, two would be the greatest ships in the world, with a single exeption, and will both have a greater speed than any other merchant ship. These splendid vessels, although intended for the Atlantic passenger service, to be fitted with a degree of luxuriousness hitherto unapproached, were all built under the requirements of the German Navy. On the decks there were beds for the mounting of great guns, the rudder and screws were especially protected from the possible harm of shots, and apparatus was provided for steering below decks if the superstructure would be carried away. Guns were ready at Hamburg or at Kiel, the crews were organized, and in a fortnight , should the Empire need them, these peaceful passenger ships could be made terrible machines of war.

Two years earlier there had come from the Vulcan Shipyards what was then the largest and fastest of all ocean steamships, the "Kaiser Wilhelm der grosse" . Prophets of evil  predestined these ships to failure. In vain. The great succes of the  "Kaiser Wilhelm der grosse" did more than any one other thing, perhaps, to establish the world fame of the German shipbuilder.

Deutschland under construction at her builders site, the Vulcan Shipyard, Stettin. Whereas , by mistake the Kaiser Wilhelm der grosse's propellers  overlapped, here they didn't.

Hardly had she been well tested when a still greater and still swifter ship was planned- the "Deutschland" recently in commision. The "Deutschland" was not so long nor quite so broad as the "Oceanic" , so recently from the yards of the Irish ship builders at Belfast, but  would be next to her in size, and much swifter. On the ways of the Vulcan  Shipyards there was a long brown spine of steel , knobbed with rivets and almost ready for the ribs.  It was the keel of an unnamed ship which would be as large as the "Deutschland" , and another one was already planned tot surpass the "Oceanic". A few years earlier builders had said confidently that the absolute limit of size had been reached; At this stage none would dare to name a limit.

The time had come in shipbuilding that when half a knot in speed could be added, it would be an epoch. The builder was so hemmed in and set about  with problems that the half knots beyond twenty-two -and there were only a few twenty-two-knot merchant ships-mean a vast outlay of money, time ,and skill. And yet these fractional costs were payning investments.

A vessel that steamed, say , 565 miles a day, while her nearest rivel made only 502 miles, would arrive in New-York from Cherbourg nearly a full day ahead-and a day in the life of a man whose minutes were counted in hundreds of dollars was not to be despised. It was probably that if a great steamship company would order a 750 foot ship, to make 30 knots an hour

"Kaiser Friedrich III ", had only 13.000 horse-power, the "Oceanic" , the greatest ship in size, haf only 27.000 horse-power, the "Campania" had 30.000 horse-power. It was therefore unknown ground that the Vulcan builders covered when they undertook to build the world's greatest engines. But there was no uncertainty about it. Indeed, in  shipbuilding almost everything depended on experience. The builders knew to almost the last detail just what was necessary to the construction of such enormous machinery : the strenght of every bit of metal, the sizes of the parts that would give the greatest efficiency, yet would occupy the smallest space ; the proper location in the ship of the vast weights of the boilers, the coal bunkers, and so on - all of these facts had been established by years of experience with smaller crafts. It required the continuous work for siz months of over a score of draughtsmen to make the plans, to say nothing of the greater work of the men whose brains the beautiful lines of the ship were first traced, and who had planned the engines and solved to a nicety those wonderful problems of strains and of vibration an balance, a single mistake in which might had ruined the entire creation.

On the other hand, if he would make her too long in proportion to her breadth and depth, the ship would brake her back with the enormous weights she would carry in combination with the thrust of her machinery. These are only a few of the difficulties with which the builder had to wrestle, but they indicate the delicacy and intricacy of the art- the necessity of striking just the proper proportions of depth, legth,breadth, and weight, so that the vessel would derive the greatest possible speed from the work of her engines. After these problems of size and proportions were settled, there was the further difficulty of balancing of the great ship. Engines and boilers weighed thousands of tons, bunkers had to be loaded with thousands of tons of coal, there were hundreds of tons of other machinery, water-tanks, cargo, and so on. These al had to be arranged in the long narrow shell of the ship so that she would list neither to right or to left, and so that throughout her whole 700 feet of length, she never would sink more than a few feet deeper at one end than the other. Then there were the problems of preventing the vibration of the propellers as nearly as was possible, as well as shaking of the ship ; of ventilation, andproviding strong draughts of air to the furnaces forty -to- fifty feet below the upper deck. Then there were other handicaps. The marine insurance companies- the Lloyds - had to be placated to the last degree, for their men on hand were to watch every step in the building of the ship. The ship had to comply, for instance, to the hundered- and- one rules of safety - her forward ribs had to be made especially strong  to resist ice , or collisions ; she needed to have to so many pumps, so much fire-fighting apparatus , so many water-tight compartments, and so on, else insurance could not be obtained for her

A score of men, directed by the brains of the master engineers and designers, had created a ship in six months which would require the labour of 1500 men for nearly two years to body forth in steel. The river Oder, where Vulcan, Stettin was based, was only a narrow stream without tides or perceptible currents.  Before Stettin started there, the water was mere  murky brown , with bits of rotten ice. Where the Vulcan works  spreaded  along its shore, the bank rised at a gentle slope, and now there housed the scaffolding for seven ships.  So narrow was ther river Oder, that three of these cradles  had been placed at a sharp angle in order that when  the greatest ships were to be launched , the y would not crush into the opposite bank. A ship's scaffolding at a distance resembles a gigantic basket, one end of which rests in the water, while the other reaches high up in the bank. On nearer aproach the sides of this basket resolve themselves into an intricate maze of timbers of enormous proportions. Here the ship was born. The interior of this basket had been cunningly fashioned by the artificer until it followed the lines of the future vessel- a sort of huge wooden mold. At the bottom ran a long , low ridge of stout timbers, called the bed, sloping down till the water edge. This was to support the backbone, or keel of the ship. In one of the cradles the keel pieces of a new warship just had been laid. A crew of riveters were at work fastening the vertical keel pieces to the horizontal keel.  Imagina a machine, as tall as a man and having the shape of your thumb and finger when fashioned in the form a  C.   A boy at a hand forge threw a bursting red rivet . Another workman seized it with thongs and dropped it into a hole in the ship's spine. There was a shout and a quick signal ; the giant thumb and finger of the machine closed in and came deliberately together, one at each end of the rivet. There was no sound, but when the machine opened again and drew away, the lower end of that rod iron, as thick as a man's two thumbs had been crushed like so much putty into a round head.

This rivet shrunk when cooling, and drew the beams of steel together until they were like one solid piece. And that was the daily work of the riveting machine. The ribs of the "Deutschland"  came from the mills in long, straight , L-shaped beams which had to be bent to follow the ship's delicate curves of the body. A wide iron floor, full of equidistant holes ; a furnace  sixty-five feet long - of a length great enough to hold  and heat the longest rib of the ship, a force of workmen waited for the furnace door to open- that was were the ribs were shaped. The master workman had pegged out the curve of a rib  by fitting

less force of hydraulic pressure. When it reached the plate ,  the cold steel bend upwards as easily as though it were pasteboard, until it was almost L-shaped. Then the noiseless , but mighty roller that had done the work, slipped back again.

Aroun the head of each cradle at the Vulcan Shipyards there was a cluster of machines , covered with umbrella-like canopies of corrugated iron. There were thick, swa-like  shears  that trimmed the steel plates, three quarters of an inch thick, as a little girl would snap the corners of a but of cloth. Other machineries that were, bore endless numbers of rivet holes in beams, girders and plates ; others countersunk these holes ; still others  leveled of the edges of these plates and then a huge crane

liftedthem over into the scaffolding, dangled them, though they weighed tons each, just where they were to be placed, and the workmen  fitted and fastened them in. One year from the time that the keel of the "F=Deutschland" was laid , her hull was

These men of the Vulcan Works possessed their own peculiar interest to the American visitor. They were not quite so foreign as they expected ; There was strong cousinship of sweat and grime and strength.  There was work done here by hand, by strength of shoulder, heaving, hammering and lifting, that in America was done by steam and electricity ; But as long a human muscle was cheaper than steam, so loung would it be employed. In their working dresses, the German  workmen strongly resembled the American , except in their shoes, many of which were heelless, with their wooden soles, the clacking of which on cobble pavement and iron flooring gave a distinctive and unaccustomed sound to the works.

The space over the "Deutschland's" engine still gaped wide open at the time, suggesting form the upper deck an enormous grimy pit. The cylinders for the main engines were still open at the top, the largest being nearly 9 feet in diameter, with a weight of forty-five tons, larger than the funnels  of any known steamer. After going down three stories of decks, we descende a ladder, fully sixty feet long inot the depths of the vessel.  Reading these numbers , one might not still understand the enormous size of this ship. But let him go down, pigmy like , among the machinery itself,  and look up into one of the great twin engines, he would receive an impression of size and powe such as he would never forget again, especially if he visited this greatest of all engines. There were 128 cylinders in the engines, and the ship had nearly a third of a mile of railroad track for carrying her coals from the bunkers to the furnaces. It was interestign to hear Captain Albers explain how the great ship would be balanced- the engines just aft amidships, boilers forward, fresh water in tanks on each side , just balancing eachother, coal in the bunkers around the boilers, so that in case of war the enemy's shot could not pierce the ship's vitals - and how water could be let in from the sea to this or that compartment to balance the coal burned away. This was all impressive, but even more impressive was the strange ,cold , dark, resounding hole in the extreme stern and at the bottom of the great ship, which they reached through  a door in a steel wall. Here in silence, and almost without human attention, worked the mighty rudder arm of the ship. It travelled in a cogged quadrant, and it was so big that the engines which run it was perched on top of it, and  travelled back and forth as the rudder answered the touch of the steermans' finger on thje bridge, a fith of a mile away...