Under Water

The 747 of its day…

Yesterday we flew from London back to New York.

We were on Virgin Atlantic, the best airline for that trip, and laying down, covered in a duvet, I turned on the reading light and tucked into David McCullough’s John Adams.

Adams, it turns out, also went trans-Atlantic. Several times, in fact.

Then, the trip was by sailing ship, took anywhere from four to six weeks, and was truly life-threatening. Particularly so in winter, when Adams made his first crossing.

As we silently skimmed 40,000 feet above where Adams had plied the seas, it gave me a moment’s pause to consider what had happened to trans-Atlantic travel, technology driven, in only a very short time.

Since Columbus or the Vikings first made landfall in the New World, five hundred or 1,000 years ago, the method of traveling from one continent to the other was pretty much unchanged.  A ship at sea.

The ships got bigger, the power plants better, the voyage generally safer, but the concept did not change.

By the late 1950s, competition for sea based travel, (and we’re not talking cruise ships, we are talking trans-Atlantic liners) had grown pretty intense.  

The fastest trans-Atlantic trip was clocked by the SS United States (pictured above).  In 1952, the United States crossed the Atlantic in 3 days, 10 hours and 42 minutes, a world record.

She had 241,000 horsepower engines, averaged 41 mph and was 990 feet long.  All made out of aluminum.

The United States was but the latest addition to an international fleet of trans-Atlantic steamers who plied the route every day.  And they were the heirs to a competition that was literally hundreds of years old.  

At the head of that competition lay two British lines – Cunard and White Star.  Both had been building bigger, better and faster ships for more than 200 years.  They had gone through sail and steam and side paddles and screws.  Each kept ratcheting up the technology in a bid to be the best.  

Then, ten years after the United States set the world’s record, the whole business was over.

Over.

Air travel simply destroyed it.  

And no matter how big the ship, how fast the speed, how powerful the engine, trans-atlantic travel by ship was over.

And the massive investment that Cunard and White Star and the United States Lines had made was a worthless as a share in Madoff Securities.

Today, the United States sits in a Philadelphia shipyard, rusting away.  The Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, the former record holders, are money-losing tourist attractions in LA and Dubai.

Now, the irony is that Cunard and White Star and United States Lines once dominated trans-Atlantic travel. They were trusted brands.  With long histories.

TWA an Pan Am and BOAC were, well, fly by  night in comparison.

The United States, the ship, cost $75 million to build.

The same year that the United States won the Blue Riband, the prize for the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing, Boeing released its first 707.  The cost of the 707?  $4.3 million.

Had Cunard invested $75 million in boeing 707s instead of new ships, they could have become the biggest trans-Atlantic air carrier in the world.  The world’s biggest airline.  

But they didn’t.

Instead they went broke.

They went broke because they forgot what business they were in.  They were not in the ship business. They were in the business of moving people from New York to London.  Ships were in a way secondary.

It’s a lot like newspapers.

Newspapers are not in the paper business, they are in the news business.

The paper part, like the ships, is immaterial.

But if the papers cling to the paper part instead of embracing new technologies, they’re going to end up like Cunard… or the White Star ship, the Titanic.