JF Ptak Science Books  Post 308       

In trailing some loose associative memories of ships being compared to skylines, and seeing he ships placed in the skylines, I was able to find four good samples.  This one is, in a way, the negative version of that, showing cities placed inside of the ships, the ship in this case being the White Star triple-screw Olympic–which at the time was the largest ship ever launched at 882′–and the image found in The Illustrated London News for 22 October 1910.  It was done in celebration of the launch of the ship from Belfast, which was also the heaviest transference of weight (27,000 tons) from land to water in history.   To illustrate the ship’s massiveness the picture editor placed a row of hotels and buildings bounded by the eastern end of Burlington House to the very edge of Piccadilly Circus, with the Piccadilly Hotel (height 77′ 6″) right there in the middle under the first three smoke stacks. 

The second image relates the passenger capacity of the Olympic to the Savoy Hotel, showing a floating platform with four of these massive hotels.  The Illustrated London News was making a real point about the Olympic and the Savoy, because at around this time smaller ships were referred to as “floating hotels”; the Olympic, on the other hand, was much more than that–it was four floating hotels, and big ones, at that, and the image captures that perfectly. 

Truth be told, I really like the image of the floating hotels out of context and without a caption–it really makes the case for the idea of a Floating City in a Floating World. 

[CLick for a larger, clearer image]