Quotes About Boilers

Coal had served blacksmiths for hundreds of years. Soap boilers used it; so did lime burners, who roasted limestone in kilns to make quicklime for plaster; so did salt boilers, who boiled down seawater in open iron pans, a tedious process prodigal of fuel, to make salt for food preservation in the centuries before refrigeration.

Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines.

Swimming up out of the depths was very much like waking that night on the Hansa—a sense of confusion resolving into the certainty of disaster: icebergs, torpedoes, exploded boilers, something beautiful shattered and devoured by the deep, a world consumed by a war that would not end.