when propellers are like trees...

"and there, beyond all this vastness of furnaces and clanging machinery, you will find at last the quiet, simple thing that all this is about: namely, the smooth column of steel, lying in cool and comfortable bearings and turning round and round with no sound - the propeller shaft. a passage in which you cannot quite stand upright conveys its great length to the tail of the ship.

think of a tree. the roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kinds of necessary things. this nourishment passes, unified up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. so all the varying forces, the stresses, the resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the white and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ships wake"

text: richard hughes, in hazard
image: keith sonnier, 1968