Blog 160 - Marine Musings - The Ten Sadans that Powered the World

The Ten Sadans that Powered the World 

A "Fall-In" in the Junior Hostel Quadrangle - A Recent Feature

A largely unknown and unused tract of land in Taratola Road, Calcutta, was bequeathed to an up-and-coming Marine Institution, namely the Directorate of Marine Engineering Training, famously known since then by the acronym DMET. It was ceded in 1949 by the then Government of West Bengal. Dr BC Roy was then the Chief Minister of West Bengal and instrumental in getting DMET located in his jurisdiction. 

Till 1949, training of navigating officers and engineering officers took place on the TS Dufferin. With both disciplines raring to expand, the engineering training division was shifted to a shore based facility, divided between Calcutta and Bombay, both cities having the reputation of fairly distinctive marine workshops.

It was a completely residential Institution, quasi military in structure, Naval Uniforms being compulsory.

It was divided into a Junior Hostel - comprising of all First Year, Second Year and Third Year cadets occupying dormitory style accommodation - 6 to a spacious room - and a Senior Hostel, where each Fourth Year cadet had a room to himself, with common toilets and bathrooms at the end of the corridor.

They were divided into Ten Sadans, each Sadan being named after a famous scientist.

Each year - for three years -  there were 60 Cadets who trained in Calcutta and 40 trained in Bombay, making a total  of 100 Cadets per batch.

The first three years, the concentration was on  practical training as an apprentice in a Marine Workshop, for 4 days a week, with theoretical classes at night. The next two  days were completely filled with classes. 

As such, theory and practice went hand in hand, although we were too naive to realise it then.

The Fourth Year was one in which all the 100 were together in Calcutta. The year was filled with, mostly, theoretical classes. A day of the week was spent in laboratory work, understanding the basics of metallurgy or the composition of various oils.

During those 4 years, a bond was forged between theory and practice - a combination seldom seen in Engineering Colleges, even those of today. Those days prepared you for the long grind that lay ahead, when working on ships - prepared you in undreamt ways.

The workshop apprenticeship was a revelation to practically all of us raw recruits.

The Fitting Shop honed our skills in using a hammer and steel chisel to chip away at a metal block and change its shape to whatever the Foreman wanted of us. Although I have never used this technique in 38 years of (later) sailing, it strengthened the arms and accuracy of boys who, till then, were the coddled stock of a 100 mothers.

We came across, for the first time, unheard of precision instruments such as Face Plates, Vernier Calipers, Screw Gauges, Micrometers and laid the foundation for our use of quite a few precision instruments of various kinds out at sea. We became adept in their use and in their care.

We had to necessarily learn about tempering and annealing, a heat treatment process.

The Foundry Shop was a revelation, teaching us how moulds are made, how a part is cast, how it is finally sent to the machine shop for final machining. It taught us about metals, their melting points and gave us a general idea of how different metals react to various stimuli. It stood us in good stead in our (future) understanding of different parts of an engine or machinery.

The Electrical Shop It was only much later in life that I realised what a magnificent role the Electrical Shop had played in my sea career. In the shop, we were only overhauling motors and rewinding burnt out motors. But what I learnt - and did not realise I had learnt - was how to match the rating of the motor to the coils of wire needed, the size of the wire, what part a thicker or thinner  wire plays in the operation of the motor. Also that bearings- ball, roller, open, closed, double rows, load bearing bearings, pillow block and many more such - existed in this world.

A classic example of how what I had learnt in this Electrical shop - and which had penetrated into one corner of my brain, supposedly on deposit for retrieval at the right juncture - was about the thickness of the wire used to re-wind motors. The thicker the wire, the motor’s capacity for torque increases. I will relate that incident.

I was Second Engineer on the “Taronga” and, later, Chief Engineer on this same ship. We had a 200 ton ‘Stulken’ that used to regularly - at least once a year for several years - burn out its Hoist Motor. It used to get rewound and re-fitted, only to have it burn. Everybody was resigned to its burning out.

After one such burn-out (I was then Chief Engineer), I was dismantling the motor along with the Electrical Officer, to be sent to a workshop for rewinding. I noticed something strange. The motor had been re-wound - for the past seven years - by the same workshop in Japan. 

Being a heavy duty motor, it was rather large, and had interpoles around its periphery.

Each pole coil, as seen in the photograph contains coils of wire of a particular thickness, the thickness being dependent on the torque and the output the motor is supposed to power. Each of these pole coils are independently wound and slipped into its slot around the periphery. Each pole coil is secured by means of bolts which are located on the outer casing of the motor body, the central space / portion being taken up by the rotor. The insertion of the pole coils is a very tight fit. To make it easier to insert, the previous workshops had used a thinner gauge wire, thereby reducing the torque that the motor can deliver.

My suspicion was that, in order to ‘slip in’ these Interpoles easily, the workshop had used a thinner gauge of wire. I asked the Company to send the motor to a different workshop, Asea Brown Boveri in Singapore, along with my suspicions of a smaller gauge wire. They did the calculations and found, yes, I was right. They used the thicker gauge to rewind the motor. Lo and behold - the motor purred like a ‘Singer’ sewing machine.

All because of one Electrician / Fitter in a Marine Workshop telling me about wires nearly two decades before.

Diesel Shop where small engines and different types of pumps were being overhauled. It formed the heart of what I would be doing in the forthcoming years.

Machine Shop where we learnt to operate different types of lathes, how to centre a workpiece on to the lathe, how to machine the workpiece, different types of cutting and boring tools, how to cut threads, how to use a capstan lathe and much, much more. The skills received then were what attended us throughout our career.

And the Third Year where we became part of the workforce sent by the workshop to different vessels - mostly dredgers and tugs - where we came across operating machinery. We overhauled valves of different types, pumps of different types, triple expansion engines, small diesel engines, steam pumps, boilers and the like. This is where we came to know what was in store for us after Passing Out.

The Fourth Year was spent in a daze - at least for me - trying to make headway (or tailway) into the most important subject on our calendar - Machine Drawing. I just managed a pass.

Other subjects, such as Thermodynamics, Strength of Materials, Electricity, were all understandable. In Metallurgy, we learnt why certain metals crack on impact and certain metals absorb the impact. The composition of various metals was an eye opener. So were their machinability. In fact, we were using practical applications of all these subjects, more or less on an every day basis, on board all ships, without knowing we were using the same principles taught to us. I realised it only after becoming a Second Engineer.

And now we come to The Ten Sadans.

Sadan - Has several definitions - Abode, dwelling, The Shelter, Work, Achievement, Fulfilment, A Sensible Prudent and Reasonable Person.

सदन Meaning in English is Legislature, which is also written as 'Sadan' in Roman. Other Sadan Meanings in English include Assembly, Body, Chamber, Congress, Council, Diet, House, Parliament, Plenum, Senate, Lawmakers, House Of Representatives and Voice Of The People etc.

Sadana (सदन) is a Sanskrit technical term denoting a “residence” in general, according to the list of synonyms given in the Mayamata XIX. 10-12, the Mānasāra XIX. 108-12, and the Samarāṅgaṇa-sūtradhāra XVIII.

Sadhanai in Tamil denotes achievement.

Though our Sadans in DMET were primarily ones of providing shelter and was an abode to all of us that walked those hallowed halls, the other definitions were also relevant. Because most of us were sensible, prudent and reasonable persons, working towards achieving what we wanted to fulfil.

Like I said, we had ten Sadans, each Sadan named after a famous scientist.

During the four years that we spent in the College, I don’t think anybody spent time on reminiscing over the name of the scientist in whose Sadan we resided. Some scientists were typecast into the role he played in the scientific studies of four years. 

For example, Newton was synonymous with pressure and gravity, nothing more.

Rankine and Diesel were typecast as the originators of ‘cycles’ that had their name, with ‘Diesel’ going a bit further as we studied Diesel Engines.

The others were more or less wisps of the wind - they had touched us briefly and left hardly any trace.

Here I have tried to give a brief paragraph about each scientist, nearly 60 years too late.

Raman, Froude, Bose, Rankine, Marconi, Edison, Newton, Faraday, Parson, Diesel. 

Except for two Indians on the list, all the rest were Westerners.

There was an intense rivalry between Sadans, mainly in sports activities. 

I belonged to Raman Sadan. Raman Sadan had never been at the forefront of any sporting event. Before I joined DMET, I had played Table Tennis for my College and for my University, Osmania. After about a week of being in the hostel, I was asked by the (Third Year) Junior Cadet Captain what games i play. When I said ‘Table Tennis’, I was immediately challenged to play against him, as he was a Sadan player. When I beat him below five points in every game, I was nurtured and given special privileges to practice the game, so that Raman Sadan could win the TT Championship that year.

We won the championship every year, for the four years that I was there.

In researching the biographies of the ten scientists whose names adorn each Sadan, I have unabashedly used material from Wikipedia and Google.

Raman Sadan

 - Named after Sir CV Raman - Although we studied Optics in a small way, we did not reach up to the ‘Raman Effect’ at any given time. I think his name attached to the ten Sadans was more because he was a famous Indian scientist.

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman FRS  7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering. Using a spectrograph that he developed, he and his student K. S. Krishnan discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, the deflected light changes its wavelength. This phenomenon, a hitherto unknown type of scattering of light, which they called "modified scattering" was subsequently termed the Raman Effect or Raman scattering. Raman received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and was the first Asian and the first non-White to receive a Nobel Prize in any branch of science.

He moved to Bangalore in 1933 to become the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science. He founded the Indian Academy of Sciences the same year. He established the Raman Research Institute in 1948 where he worked to his last days.

He was actively involved in setting up various scientific institutions in spite of an animosity with the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

He was awarded the highest civilian award of India - the Bharat Ratna - in 1954.

Sir CV Raman

His Spectrograph

A Postage Stamp issued in Sir CV Raman's honour

Froude Sadan - 

William Froude

William Froude (/ˈfruːd/; 28 November 1810 in Devon – 4 May 1879 in Simonstown, Cape Colony) was an English engineer, hydrodynamicist and naval architect. He was the first to formulate reliable laws for the resistance that water offers to ships (such as the hull speed equation) and for predicting their stability.

At Brunel's invitation Froude turned his attention to the stability of ships in a seaway and his 1861 paper to the Institution of Naval Architects became influential in ship design. This led to a commission to identify the most efficient hull shape, which he was able to fulfil by reference to scale models: he established a formula (now known as the Froude number) by which the results of small-scale tests could be used to predict the behaviour of full-sized hulls. He built a sequence of 3, 6 and (shown in the picture) 12 foot scale models and used them in towing trials to establish resistance and scaling laws.

Froude’s models still exist in The Science Museum, London

His experiments were vindicated in full-scale trials conducted by the Admiralty and as a result the first ship test tank was built, at public expense, at his home in Torquay. Here he was able to combine mathematical expertise with practical experimentation to such good effect that his methods are still followed today.

Bose Sadan

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose CSI CIE FRS (/boʊs/; IPA: 30 November 1858 – 23 November 1937) was a polymath with interests in biology, physics, botany and writing science fiction. He was a pioneer in the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction. A crater on the Moon was named in his honour. He founded the Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia. He served as the Director of Bose Institute from its inception until his death.

Born in Mymensingh, Bengal Presidency (present-day Bangladesh), during British governance of India, Bose graduated from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta (now Kolkata, West Bengal, India). Prior to his enrollment at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta, Bose attended Dhaka Collegiate School, where he began his educational journey. He attended the University of London to study medicine, but had to give it up due to health problems. Instead, he conducted research with Nobel Laureate, Lord Rayleigh at the University of Cambridge. Bose returned to India to join the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta as a professor of physics. There, despite racial discrimination and a lack of funding and equipment, Bose carried on his scientific research. He made progress in his research into radio waves in the microwave spectrum and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves.

Rankine Sadan

William Rankine

William John Macquorn Rankine FRSE FRS (/ˈræŋkɪn/; 5 July 1820 – 24 December 1872) was a Scottish mathematician and physicist. He was a founding contributor, with Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), to the science of thermodynamics, particularly focusing on its First Law. He developed the Rankine scale, a Fahrenheit-based equivalent to the Celsius-based Kelvin scale of temperature.

Rankine developed a complete theory of the steam engine and indeed of all heat engines. The ‘Rankine Cycle’ was a chapter that was taught to us. His manuals of engineering science and practice were used for many decades after their publication in the 1850s and 1860s. He published several hundred papers and notes on science and engineering topics, from 1840 onwards, and his interests were extremely varied, including, in his youth, botany, music theory and number theory, and, in his mature years, most major branches of science, mathematics and engineering.

The Rankine cycle or Rankine Vapor Cycle is the process widely used by power plants such as coal-fired power plants or nuclear reactors. In this mechanism, a fuel is used to produce heat within a boiler, converting water into steam which then expands through a turbine producing useful work.

The diagram may look simple enough, but the numerous hours that we spent in unravelling its mysteries, developing formulae from First Principles and - more importantly - using them, were testimony to the extraordinary lengths that we went to apply theory to practice. The Rankine Cycle, along with Carnot Cycles and Diesel Cycle were all the backbone of what we practised at sea.

Marconi Sadan

Guglielmo Marconi

Apart from the Carnot Cycle, the Rankine Cycle, the Diesel Cycle being at the heart of our daily activities, Marconi also played a very decisive part in our survival at sea. He gave ships the means and the technology to communicate with land based stations, without which we would have been incommunicado with the outside world. One of the most important pieces of information that a ship requires on a daily basis is - what is the weather like ahead of us and what weather can we expect tomorrow., so that preventive action can be taken. Stations ashore, set up by all nations, used to gather all meteorological information and transmit them to the ships. The ship’s Radio Officer, using his Marconi Set, would receive this information and convey it to the Captain for plotting on the nautical charts. 

The primary purpose of these Marconi Sets was to  communicate with shore stations weather reports and any emergencies that the ship may have. The last resort SOS was also transmitted using the Marconi set. 

In Morse code, the distress signal SOS is represented by the letters "SOS" (... --- ...). It is transmitted by sending three dots, followed by three dashes, and then three more dots, with no spaces between the letters.

This was the last ditch efforts of a ship to inform the world that they were in very serious trouble and needed help.

It was Marconi who made this happen.

In the late 1970s, an ‘add on’ was made to the Marconi set by way of telex machines, while the telegraph remained as a standby.

The Marconi Company continued to provide modern communication sets to the Marine Industry, using upgraded technology on a continuous basis.

The “Marconi Sailor” GMDSS set that is on practically every ship is a testament to the Marconi company’s innovative initiative.

At the stroke of midnight on January 31, 1999, Morse code was officially retired from international maritime regulations.

How much Marconi had penetrated into the lives of an ordinary sailor can be discerned by the fact that, on Indian ships, the Radio Officer was addressed respectfully as “Marconi Saab”. In the west, he was derogatorily called “Sparks”. 

Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi GCVO FRSA (Italian: [ɡuʎˈʎɛlmo marˈkoːni]; 25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor, electrical engineer, and politician, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio, and winning the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". His work laid the foundation for the development of radio, television, and all modern wireless communication systems

Edison Sadan

Named after the famous American scientist and businessman, Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established the first industrial research laboratory.

Newton Sadan

Named after Sir Isaac Newton FRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27)

Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton FRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for formulating infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz.

In the Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint for centuries until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. He used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating doubt about the Solar System's heliocentricity.^[12] He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles. Newton's inference that the Earth is an oblate spheroid was later confirmed by the geodetic measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, convincing most European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over earlier systems.

Faraday Sadan

Named after an English Scientist, Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday FRS (/ˈfærədeɪ, -di/; 22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. Although Faraday received little formal education, as a self-made man, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current that Faraday established the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena. He similarly discovered the principles of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology.

As a chemist, Faraday discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularised terminology such as "anode", "cathode", "electrode" and "ion". Faraday ultimately became the first and foremost Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, a lifetime position.

Parson Sadan

Although ‘Google’ lists several “Parsons”, one of them a recent rocket engineer, I think the Sadan was named after Sir Charles Algernon Parsons. You will probably agree with my choice after reading his biography.

Sir Charles Algernon Parsons (born June 13, 1854, London—died Feb. 11, 1931, Kingston, Jamaica) was a British engineer whose invention of a multi-stage steam turbine revolutionized marine propulsion.

Parsons entered the Armstrong engineering works at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1877. In 1889, after working for several other companies, he established his own works at Newcastle for the manufacture of steam turbines, dynamos, and other electrical apparatus.

The turbine Parsons invented in 1884 utilized several stages in series; in each stage the expansion of the steam was restricted to the extent that allowed the greatest extraction of kinetic energy without causing the turbine blades to overspeed. Parsons’ turbine was fitted with a condenser in 1891 for use in electric generating stations, and in 1897 it was successfully applied to marine propulsion in the “Turbinia,” a ship that attained a speed of 34 1/2 knots, extraordinary for the time. The turbine was soon used by warships and other steamers.

Parsons Turbine

The Parsons turbine company survives in the Heaton area of Newcastle as part of Siemens, a German conglomerate. In 1925 Charles Parsons acquired the Grubb Telescope Company and renamed it Grubb Parsons. That company survived in the Newcastle area until 1985.

Diesel Sadan

Named after Rudolf Diesel, a German inventor and mechanical engineer.

Rudolf Diesel

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel (English: /ˈdiːzəlˌ -səl/,^[1] German: [ˈdiːzl̩] ^ⓘ; 18 March 1858 – 29 September 1913) was a German inventor and mechanical engineer who is famous for having invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel; both are named after him.

Diesel was unable to graduate with his class in July 1879 because he fell ill with typhoid fever. While waiting for the next examination date, he gained practical engineering experience at the Sulzer Brothers Machine Works in Winterthur, Switzerland. Diesel graduated in January 1880 with highest academic honours and returned to Paris, where he assisted Linde with the design and construction of a modern refrigeration and ice plant. Diesel became the director of the plant one year later.

Ever since attending lectures of von Linde, Diesel worked on designing an internal combustion engine that could approach the maximum theoretical thermal efficiency of the Carnot cycle. In 1892, after working on this idea for several years, he considered his theory to be completed. In the same year, Diesel was given the German patent DRP 67207. In 1893, he published a treatise entitled Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat-engine to Replace the Steam Engine and The Combustion Engines Known Today, that he had been working on since early 1892. This treatise formed the basis for his work on and development of the diesel engine. By summer 1893, Diesel had realised that his initial theory was erroneous, leading him to file another patent application for the corrected theory in 1893.

Diesel understood thermodynamics and the theoretical and practical constraints on fuel efficiency. He knew that as much as 90% of the energy available in the fuel is wasted in a steam engine. His work in engine design was driven by the goal of much higher efficiency ratios.

In his engine, fuel was injected at the end of the compression stroke and was ignited by the high temperature resulting from the compression. From 1893 to 1897, Heinrich von Buz, director of Maschinenfabrik Augsburg in Augsburg, gave Rudolf Diesel the opportunity to test and develop his ideas.

The first successful diesel engine Motor 250/400 was officially tested in 1897, and is now on display at the German Technical Museum in Munich.

Diesel Cycle PV Diagram

Below we have a PV diagram that depicts a theoretically ideal Diesel cycle. The processes mentioned above can be identified in the figure below.

PV Diagram of a Diesel cycle

We came in as raw, unfinished products, each with his own foibles. We integrated into a whole and refined ourselves to meet the world designed for us and redesigned it to our specifications.

After the four years we spent in these ten Sadans, we moved out to ships as Fifth Engineers. We steadily worked our way up the ladder, passing all the Competency Examinations on the way to, finally, becoming Chief Engineers. 

Some stayed at sea for 40 odd years, becoming the cantankerous, old, Chief Engineer, feared by all, loved by a few.

Not only did we power the world, some moved on to jobs ashore.   

There were no country's borders that we did not penetrate. We became ship owners, took up top positions in prestigious Classification Societies, became consultants for top shipping companies, advisers to law makers such as IMO, owners and CEOs of top ship repair workshops and dry docks and even Chief Engineers of top hotels.

We moved the World.

AR