It was indeed something to interest any one.  Everywhere were tokens of feverish activity, in office, shop, and slip.  As we picked our way across, little narrow and big wide gauge engines and trains whistled and steamed about.  We passed rolling-mills, forging-machines, and giant shearing-machines, furnaces for heating the frames or ribs, stone floors on which they could be pegged out and bent to shape, places for rolling and trimming the plates, everything needed from the keel plates to the deck.

In the towering superstructure of the building slip we at last came to the huge steel monster itself, the Usona.  As we approached, above us rose her bow, higher than a house, with poppets both there and at the stern, as well as bracing to support her.  All had been done up to the launching, the stem and stern posts set in place, her sides framed and plated up, decks laid, bulkheads and casings completed, even much of her internal fitting done.

Overhead and all about the huge monster was a fairy network of steel, the vast permanent construction of columns and overhead girders.  Suspended beneath was a series of tracks carrying traveling and revolving cranes capable of handling the heaviest pieces.  We climbed to the top and looked down at the vast stretch of hundreds of feet of deck.  It was so vast that it seemed rather the work of a superman than of the puny little humans working on her.

As I looked down the slip where the Usona stood inclined about half an inch to the foot, I appreciated as never before what a task it was merely to get her into the water.

Below again, Marlowe explained to us how the launching ways were composed of the ground ways, fastened to the ground as the name implied, and the sliding ways that were to move over them.  The sliding ways, he said, were composed of a lower course and an upper course, on which rested the “cradle,” fitting closely the side of the ship.

To launch her, she must be lifted slightly by the sliding ways and cradle from the keel blocks and bilge blocks, and this was done by oak wedges, hundreds of which we could see jammed between the upper and lower courses of sliding ways.  Next he pointed out the rib-bands which were to keep the sliding ways on the ground ways, and at the bow the points on either side where the sliding and ground ways were bolted together by two huge timbers known as sole pieces.

“You see,” he concluded, “it is a gigantic task to lift thousands of tons of steel and literally carry it a quarter of a mile to forty feet of water in less than a minute.  Everything has to be calculated to a nicety.  It’s a matter of mathematics—­the moment of weight, the moment of buoyancy, and all that.  This launching apparatus is strong, but compared to the weight it has to carry it is really delicate.  Why, even a stray bolt in the ways would be a serious matter.  That’s why we have to have this eternal vigilance.”

As he spoke with a significant look at Kennedy, I felt that it was no wonder that Marlowe was alarmed for the safety of the ship.  Millions were at stake for just that minute of launching.