The current issue of the New Yorker has an excellent story on the Titanic by Daniel Mendelsohn, but even though Dan has been fascinated by the Titanic from an early age, he comes a cropper while describing a famous scene from James Cameron’s inescapable film:
The scene in which the liner puts out to sea, the stokers filling the boilers, the steam gauges rising, the chunk-chunk of the turbines gathering speed as the pistons thrust up and down—culminating in an underwater shot of the triple propellers starting to churn the water—sets up what you could call “the mechanical tragedy.”
Dan, turbines don’t go chunk-chunk. They go whirrrrrr. According to Wikipedia, “Titanic was equipped with three engines – two reciprocating four-cylinder, triple-expansion steam engines and one centrally placed low-pressure Parsons turbine – each driving a propeller.”
Pistons thrust up and down in cylinders, not turbines, which spin. Are there no small boys on the New Yorker staff? I guess there should be.
