W. H. D. Rouse
speaker
2,788 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Aug
W. H. D. Rouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And there, append to a board, was the order I had given for a special dinner that night.
And there, too, more impressive even than that order, was a list of the several hundred stewards, together with a designation of the post of each in case of casualty.
I noticed that thirty or forty of them were told off to control passengers.
After all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic, and in a crisis the elevator boys themselves would have more authority than any passenger, however gorgeous.
A thought salutary for gorgeous passengers, that they were in the final resort, mere fool bodies to be controlled.
After I had seen the countless storerooms, in the recesses of each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and a nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the second cabin, which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great world of the saloon.
I found that I held a much diminished opinion of the great world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a thin crust or artificial gigaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of the ship.
It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the most thrilling part of the ship was.
Under the protection of another high officer, I had climbed to the bridge, seventy five feet above the level of the sea, which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by an ambitious wave a couple of years before, and had there inspected the devices for detecting and
and extinguishing fires in distant holes by merely turning a handle, and the charts and the telephones and the telegraphs and the underwater signalling and the sounding tubes and the officer's piano.
And I had descended by way of the capstan gear, which, being capable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred and sixty tons in suspension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage like a fierce wild animal, right through the length of the vessel to the wheelhouse aft.
It was comforting to know that if six alternative steering wheels were smashed, one after another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked chiefly by direct force of human arm.
And after descending several more stories I had seen the actual steering, the tremendous affair moving to and fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the light touch of a sailor six hundred feet distant.
And then I had seen the four shafts revolving lazily one hundred and eighty four to the minute, and got myself involved in dangerous forests of a greasy machinery, whizzing all deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs.
Only at rare intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing in particular, as often as not gazing at a dial.
There were dials everywhere, showing pressures and speeds, and then I had come to the dynamo room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the minute, and then to the turbines themselves, insignificant little things with no swagger of huge crank and piston.
Disappointing little things that developed as much as one third of the horsepower required for all the electricity of New York.
And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at the rock bottom of the steamer, I had been instructed to descend in earnest, and I went down and down steel ladders and emerged into an enormous and incredible cavern, where a hundred and ninety gigantic furnaces were being fed every ten minutes by hundreds of tiny black dolls called.
was called firemen.
I, too, was a doll as I looked up at the high white hot mouth of a furnace, and along the endless vista of mouths.
Showing 601–620 of 2,788 · page 31 of 140
← Previous
Next →