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New York Floating Dry Dock Company

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In 1838, Phineas Burgess and a business associate, Daniel Dodge, began work on a new dry dock for the port of New York. A new company, the New York Sectional Dock Company, was formed for the purpose, and the company's first dock, a sectional floating dock patented, designed and built by Burgess and Dodge, was completed by 1839. In 1843, the company was formally incorporated as the New York Floating Dry Dock Company, with a capital of $100,000. Burgess was made the new company's superintendent.

The original dock built for the company by Burgess and Dodge in 1839 consisted of seven wooden sections in total, each section being 92 feet across with an internal working area of 64 feet, and 23 feet wide, the total length of the seven sections—and thus the maximum length of a serviceable ship—being 165 feet. A platform at both ends of each section, rising 28 feet above the internal deck, or 36 feet high externally, each contained a water tank and pontoon for setting the depth of the section, worked by machinery contained in an engine house atop the platform. The engine house in the central section of the dock on each side contained a steam engine and boiler from which power was transmitted to all the sections along the same side of the dock, to raise and lower the pontoons as well as fill or empty the water tanks. The sections were connected to each other by double tie beams which could be "readily slipped out" when required.

As a sectional floating dock, the new dock had a number of advantages over its chief competitors, the hydraulic dock and the marine railway. It was not fixed in one place, so could be floated out when necessary to a ship needing repair; for example, it could be taken to a salvage site and floated directly under the salvaged ship when raised. The dock could be split into subsections, of, for example, one dock of three sections and one of four, to service two smaller ships simultaneously rather than one larger ship. The dock could also be used to readily service and maintain itself, by simply detaching the section needing service, floating the rest of the dock beneath it and raising it as with a ship. When completed, the dock was the most powerful in New York, capable of lifting a ship of 2000 tons burden, or essentially any merchant ship then afloat. In its first two years of operation, the dock raised more than 500 vessels.

In 1850, Burgess built a second sectional dock for the company. The new dock had a total of eight 35 × 85-foot sections, with each section having a reported lifting capacity of 600 tons, or 4,800 tons for the dock as a whole. A later, more reliable report estimates the lifting capacity of this dock at 3,000 tons. At this time, the Floating Dry Dock Company had three docks in total including the new eight-section dock, the others being a five-section and three-section dock both with 24 × 65-foot sections, for lifting ships of up to 1,500 and 800 tons respectively. The importance of these facilities to the New York waterfront is illustrated by the fact that in the year to March 1851, the company's three docks lifted a combined total of 450 ships, with an aggregate tonnage of 131,594 tons—roughly twice the tonnage of either of its two closest competitors. The company's newest dock was capable of lifting the largest class of steamships, including the steamships of the Collins and Havre lines.

By 1860, Burgess had built a third, still larger dock for the company. This dock had eleven 30 × 100-foot sections and could lift a ship of 3,500 tons and 350 feet in length. By 1861, the company's three docks had raised more than 8,000 ships in twenty years of operation, reportedly without a single accident. Leading shipbuilders such as Jacob Westervelt and Roosevelt & Joyce made regular use of the company's facilities.

In 1867, the company built an "immense" sectional dock at Hoboken, New Jersey, described as "the largest in the United States ... perhaps the world." The dock was 92 feet wide and 360 feet long, but could be lengthened an additional 40 feet when necessary, and was reportedly capable of raising a vessel of 8,000 tons, or "any vessel afloat, except the Great Eastern".

The two docks built by Burgess for the New York Floating Dry Dock Company between 1850 and 1860 were still in operation in New York as late as 1907, though their retirement at that time was said to be imminent. According to a 1905 engineer's report, these two docks remained the largest in the United States for approximately fifty years, during which period no significant improvement in sectional dock design in the U.S. was achieved. A similar report in 1907 stated: "[w]hile this [type of] dock has much more mechanism than any other type that has been developed, the general plan and theory was most ably worked out by the originators, and the best evidence of this should be the fact that these two docks have held almost the first place in the commercial dry docking of the Port of New York for about half a century and their record would probably show more vessels docked than any similar structure in the world."

East Boston Dry Dock Company

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In 1847, the East Boston Dry Dock Company was formed, and Burgess moved to Boston to oversee construction of a dry dock facility for the new company. The facility, "one of the most capacious and substantial in the country", was completed in 1853. It included a sectional dock with six sections, capable of lifting a ship of up to 3,300 tons in 45 minutes; a smaller, steam-operated floating dock, with a capacity of 500 tons, and a marine railway with the capacity to haul vessels of up to 1,000 tons in 30 minutes. The sectional dock, built at a cost of $110,000, was patented by Burgess, who sold the patent to the company for an additional $10,000. By this time, Burgess had built "all the docks of this construction in the country", his reputation "honorably earned by the acknowledged excellence of his works." In the year ending February 1858, the East Boston facility serviced 120 vessels. After completing the dock, Burgess moved back to New York.

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In the early 1840s, the U.S. Navy tendered for the construction of dry dock facilities at a number of naval shipyards around the country. Phineas Burgess and his business partner Daniel Dodge joined forces with a New York firm, Dakin & Moody, to submit bids for four of the proposed facilities, at Pensacola, Portsmouth, Philadelphia and Mare Island. Due to a difference of opinion in the Navy, two of the contracts—for Pensacola and Portsmouth—went to another firm which proposed to build conventional floating docks, while the Dakin & Moody bids were accepted for the Philadelphia and Mare Island yards. The facilities subsequently built at Southwark, Philadelphia and Mare Island, California by Dakin & Moody in partnership with Burgess were to prove of considerable importance, transforming the Philadelphia yard into a major naval shipbuilding yard in the leadup to the American Civil War, while the Mare Island yard in California was to remain for some years the only drydock on the United States' West Coast and a vital facility both for warships and commercial vessels. Burgess would later build two smaller sectional docks, for the Philadelphia and Brooklyn naval shipyards, in 1864–65.

Philadelphia Naval Shipyard

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Dakin & Moody's plan for the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard's new drydock facility incorporated a sectional floating dock integrated with a rectangular stone basin from which radiated a number of marine railways. The facility was designed to allow the floating dock to be positioned in the basin in alignment with any of the marine railways, so that a ship on a cradle could be winched directly from the dock onto a railway or vice versa, thus allowing for several ships to be serviced or built on the railways simultaneously, while one or two additional vessels could be serviced or built on the dock itself. The original plan called for up to 11 marine railways, but the Navy decided upon five, with only two built immediately and the other three to be constructed later. The integration of the three elements of the facility—the floating dock, basin and marine railway—was a concept patented by Dakin & Moody, while the floating dock was based on the proven Dodge-Burgess patent used to design the docks of the New York Floating Dry Dock Company.

Three engineers were engaged on the project: a naval engineer, William P. S. Sanger, selected the location of the basin and ways; Burgess was selected as Dakin & Moody's engineer; and a civil engineer, Colonel Ward B. Burnett, superintended the project as a whole. Construction began in 1847 and was completed by 1851; however, an accident which led to the sinking of one section of the sectional dock delayed the opening of the facility until 1853.

The sectional dock built for the facility had a total of nine sections, six with a width of 32 feet and the remaining three with a width of 30 feet.[1] With all nine sections combined, the floor or deck of the dock was 105 feet wide by 300-plus feet long,[2] while its total lifting power was calculated at 5,892 displacement tons.[3] The dock could be divided into two smaller docks of six and three sections respectively, the larger dock with two 20-horsepower beam engines for operating the machinery and the smaller with two 12-horsepower engines.[4] The stone basin built to accommodate the floating dock was 355 feet long by 236 wide; its walls and floor were built of blocks of dressed granite "averaging two feet by five", laid in hydraulic cement.[5] The sectional dock alone cost $363,822.69, while the facility in total cost $813,742.[6] The sectional dock was tested in October 1853 with the lifting of USS Fulton.

The addition of the drydock facility represented a substantial upgrade to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, allowing it to play a "major role" in naval shipbuilding prior to and during the American Civil War. Warships built by the yard before the war included the steam frigate USS Wabash (1855) and the screw sloops USS Lancaster (1858), USS Wyoming and USS Pawnee (1859), while others including the steam sloop USS Saranac, the sloop-of-war USS Vandalia and the frigate USS Congress received substantial overhauls. A further nine warships were built by the yard during the war. The facility remained in operation until about 1875, when the Philadelphia yard was relocated from Southwark to League Island.

Mare Island Naval Shipyard

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References

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  1. ^ Stuart, p. 16.
  2. ^ Stuart, p. 18.
  3. ^ Stuart, p. 72.
  4. ^ Stuart, p. 17.
  5. ^ Stuart, p. 15.
  6. ^ Stuart, pp. 20-21.

refs

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  • Philadelphia dock meant "major role in naval shipbuilding" - gbook P. 76: d&m propose basin and railway, gilbert following year. d&m plan adopted 1846. p. 78: "the dry dock assured Southwark a major role in naval shipbuilding and overhaul in the years before the Civil War." Ships built: wabash, lancaster, martin's industry (lighthouse tender), propeller arctic rescued kane arctic expedition, later cable ship, screw sloops wyoming, pawnee, overhauled coast survey ship bibb, sloop vandalia, steamer saranac, old frigate congress. P. 77: dock launched july 1851, p. 78, accident delayed first test with Fulton to october 1853. Problems 1846 obtaining property from residents for dock. amazon link:[1]
  • 1875 pensacola yard bid - htrust
  • comanche contracts - htrust
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