Even today, The Great Eastern is a legendary awe-inspiring construction in the minds of boat lovers everywhere.
Built in 1858 on the River Thames in London by famed engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the massive iron steamship was 692-feet long, 82-feet wide, traveled at 14 knots and weighed 18,9000 tons!
Brunel was 5-feet tall, smoked 40 cigars a day and insisted there be 10 boilers fed by 100 furnaces onboard the ship, which there was.
The Great Eastern necessitated a crew of 400 people and took some 4,000 paying passengers around-the-world without refueling.
Tragedy struck in 1862 in Long Island Sound when The Great Eastern hit a great rock, which tore a huge, nasty, jagged 83-foot long 9-foot wide gash in the side of the ship.
The sip was promptly decommissioned, used to lay transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, became a floating dance hall for a short period then took two full years to dismantle and scrap by 1889.
[do_widget “OIO Ad Zone”]
