Posted
on February 10, 2014
Today
we celebrate another good-guy of history on his birthday. Samuel
Plimsoll (1824 – 1898) had been a clerk and a manager of a brewery,
but he wanted to start his own business. The business he chose,
selling coal in London, ended up failing, and Plimsoll was so poor
that he had to live in what we might call a “poorhouse” for a
while.
He
worked to get out of poverty, but good luck played a part in his
escape. He felt sympathy for the poor and downtrodden and, from then
on, he tried to make a real difference on behalf of others.
One
problem he noticed was that many British merchant ships were
unseaworthy, and the wealthy merchants risked their crews' lives by
overloading these unsafe vessels.
You
may wonder why merchants would risk having their very own ships sink,
with their wares onboard—let alone the human working on the ships!
Well, the merchants over-insured their ships, so they were worth more
to them if they sank than if they reached port. The merchants win,
either way.
Run
down, over-insured, overloaded ships were often called “coffin
ships”!
Few
people in England were trying to do anything to change these unsafe
practices. But Samuel Plimsoll was determined to try! He got himself
elected as a Member of Parliament, and he dove into the problem,
trying to get a bill passed to rein in the merchant ship owners'
greed and to make shipping safer.
Unfortunately,
a lot of MPs were themselves ship owners, guilty of the very same
practices Plimsoll wanted to outlaw. Plimsoll had to work to inform
the public and to galvanize them into complaining to their lawmakers.
Finally, a Royal Commission was formed and a bill was introduced.
Plimsoll thought the bill wasn't enough but better than nothing—and
he was really upset when Prime Minister Disraeli announced that the
bill would be dropped.
So
upset that the called his fellow politicians villains, and he shook
his fist in the Speaker's face.
Eventually
Plimsoll apologized. Eventually Parliament passed a bill that at
least gave lip-service to ensuring the safety of seamen. Eventually
Parliament amended the bill to make real safety requirements.
One
of the requirements is the painting of a line on the hull of the ship
to show the maximum height on the hull where the water can hit, for
buoyancy and therefore ship safety. Can you see that, the more stuff
you load onto the ship, the lower it will sit in the water? The
Plimsoll Line (as it is called) shows the legal limit to which a ship
may be loaded.
Because
warm water is less dense than cold water, and fresh water is less
dense than seawater, some water types provide less buoyancy than
other water types. That's why, on many ships, there are multiple
lines marked on the hull or elsewhere.
Other
names for the Plimsoll Line include the International Load Line and
waterline.
By
the way, other do-good projects Plimsoll worked on were improving
cattle-ships (with which animals were transported in horribly
overcrowded and disgusting conditions) and changing history textbooks
in America to be less bitter toward England.
Experiment with water density!
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