In June 1917, President of the United States Woodrow Wilson had summoned auto-builder Henry Ford to Washington in the hope of getting him to serve on the United States Shipping Board. Wilson felt that Ford, with his knowledge of mass production techniques, could immensely speed the building of ships in quantity. Apprised of the need for antisubmarine vessels to combat the U-boat menace, Ford replied, "what we want is one type of ship in large numbers."
On 7 November, Ford accepted membership on the Shipping Board and an active advisory role. Examining the Navy's plans for the projected steel patrol ships, Ford urged that all hull plates be flat so that they could be produced quickly in quantity and he also persuaded the Navy to accept steam turbines instead of reciprocating steam engines.
At this point, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was drawn into the project. He recognized that no facilities were available at the Navy yards for building new craft and asked Ford if he would undertake the task. Ford agreed, and, in January 1918, he was directed to proceed with the building of 100 of them. Later on, 12 more were added for delivery to the Italian government.
The first boat was launched on 11 July 1918. According to Ford, "They were built simply by applying our production principles to a new product.
Ford's plan for building the ships was revolutionary. Establishing a new plant on the River Rouge on the outskirts of Detroit, he proposed to turn them out as factory products, using mass production techniques, and employing factory workers. He would then send the boats by the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic coast. However, Ford had little part in the design of the boats. Except for his insistence upon simple plans and the use of steam turbines, he contributed little of a fundamental nature to the design concept.
First, Ford engineers built a full-scale pattern at the company's Highland Park facility, giving both the Ford team and the Naval officers an opportunity to correct flaws in the rough initial design and decide on the placement of all rivet holes in the craft, as well as allowing the carmaker's production experts the chance to compose specifications for the manufacturing and assembly processes.
The assembly plant was completed in five months, and the first keel was laid in May 1918. The machinery and fittings were largely built at Ford's Highland Park plant in Detroit, although the new River Rouge plant, given impetus by the war, saw a good deal of the steel sheets and other parts formed and fabricated there in the A-Building, or fabricating building. At first, Ford believed that boats could be sent down a continuously moving assembly line like automobiles.
The size of the craft made this too difficult, however, and a "step-by-step" movement was instituted on the 1,700-foot line, entailing seven separate assembly areas, followed by the addition of a 200-foot extension to the assembly facility, or B-Building, to support a pre-assembly stage.
Unfortunately, the Eagles suffered from various issues due to Ford's institutional inexperience with shipbuilding: for instance, the Model T did not use electric arc welding, and the resulting workmanship on the Eagle boats was so poor that the superintending constructor requested that Ford workers do as little welding as possible on water-tight and oil-tight bulkheads.
Additionally, the use of ladders instead of scaffolds caused major difficulties--the attempted bolting of plates, carried out by workers wielding short-handled wrenches on ladders meant that the bolters were unable to apply sufficient force to bring the plates together tightly. Metal shavings between plates then made the riveters' task of pulling the plates together for a seal practically impossible.
The first Eagle boat was launched on 11 July. The launching of these 200-foot craft was a formidable operation. Not built on ways from which they could slide into the water, the hulls moved slowly from the assembly line on enormous, tractor-drawn flatcars. They were then placed on a 225-foot steel trestle alongside the water's edge which could be sunk 20 feet into the water by hydraulic action. The plan was to fit the Eagles out with all the basic equipment of a warship--turbines, weaponry, wiring, etc.--after launch, but this quickly became a choke point due to the cramped spaces on the boats themselves, and violated Ford's own mass production ethos.
The original expectation, set out in a contract between Ford and the Navy on 1 March, 1918, was for delivery of 100 ships: "one by mid-July, ten by mid-August, twenty by mid-September, and twenty-five each month thereafter," or approximately one new Eagle boat completed each working day of the month. The first seven boats were not completed until the end of 1918, and succeeding boats were plagued by issues such as leaky fuel oil compartments. This state of affairs continued, even though the labor force reached 4,380 by July and later peaked at 8,000. The chief reasons were Ford's excessive initial optimism and the inexperience of labor and supervisory personnel in shipbuilding. Upon the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, the number under contract, previously raised from 100 to 112, was cut to 60. Of these, seven were commissioned in 1918, and the remaining 53 were commissioned in 1919.
The entire Eagle Boat operation came briefly under challenge by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in December 1918. At the ensuing Congressional hearings, Navy officials successfully defended the boats as being a necessary experiment and well made while Ford profits were proved to be modest. However, historian David Hounshell states that "the Eagle boat venture cannot be considered successful by the standards of the war era or the present," and today serves as a case study in the history of technology to illustrate the difficulty in transferring knowledge and techniques between superficially similar, but fundamentally different, fields of endeavor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle-class_patrol_craft
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