In early May, press releases appeared announcing the impending construction of the vessel, to be named Material Service in honor of its charterer, with work to commence in early June and with a wildly optimistic completion date of 1 October 1928 (which the shipyard missed by six months).    The Material Service would incorporate a number of features which ideally suited her intended operation upon Chicago’s unusual waterway system.    In essence, the Material Service would be no more than a hull, 240 feet in length, with virtually no superstructure other than the windows and roof of a rudimentary pilothouse that protruded from an afterisland astern, where her powerplant and accommodations were located.   Smith and Putnam intended that the vessel would maintain a continual height above the waterline of 14 feet, 6 inches, loaded, in ballast, or in combination, the maximum allowable clearance dictated by the fixed highway and railway bridges over the Cal-Sag Channel.   For this reason, the Material Service carried a centrifugal pump in her forepeak capable of adding or removing 800 tons of water ballast from her side and top tanks:   After unloading, water ballast was admitted to the tanks, lowering her profile; after loading, the ballast water would be removed, making for a constant height above the waterline and a constant draft of, during her first years of operation, 11 feet, 6 inches.   The opening of bridges across the Chicago River for waterborne commerce had vexed the city since its earliest days as a burgeoning port the previous century, with the openings frustrating land commerce and pedestrians and the bridges themselves obstacles to safe navigation.    By the time the Material Service appeared, traffic on the Chicago River had dwindled to a fraction of what it had been in 1889, when the river carried 11 million tons, as most cargo began moving to the industrializing Calumet region, but there still remained enough vessel movement in the 1920s for the City of Chicago to continue invoking  daily "closed hours," during which time bridges would not be opened in deference to pedestrian and motorized traffic, something that could wreak havoc with the efficient operation of a vessel like the Material Service.    Smith and Putnam intended their vessel to glide effortlessly beneath closed bridges, and publicized the notion that she would require no bridge openings, but in reality this was not the case.   The vertical clearance of the Material Service, although the maximum allowed by the bridges of the Cal-Sag, was too high for the vessel to negotiate the Chicago River and its South Branch without the opening of at least eight bridges (two railway and six street) between State Street downtown and Ashland Avenue to the south.    Nevertheless, of the forty-nine movable bridges the Material Service would encounter during her 38-mile trip between Lockport and the mouth of the Chicago River, these eight would be the only ones requiring opening.

The Material Service Takes Shape

Figure 4.  After little more than four months work, the Material Service begins to take shape at the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company, 28 October 1928.  Although innovative in terms of its overall design, adapted to Chicago's waterways and as the first "inland" self-unloader, the vessel's actual construction was highly conventional, with riveted plating over shaped steel ribbing,  what was then contemporary Great Lakes shipbuilding practice.  However, within two years Smith would experiment extensively with electric arc welding in the building of the fish tug Jean R. 230036 [b West Bay].  William Lafferty Collection.

        While bridge openings presented a problem the design of the Material Service would avoid, so, too, was her power plant intended to avoid another persistent problem that, literally, rained down on the heads of Chicagoans.  Just as bridge openings exasperated the citizenry, so, too, did the copious amounts of sooty, black smoke generated by coal-fired heating plants, railway engines, and steamboats, leading the city to seek ways to ameliorate this problem that caused dirt and health hazards.   Smith and Putnam quickly pointed out that the Material Service would be propelled with a relatively "clean" internal combustion plant:  Twin 6-cylinder Diesels with 14 inch cylinder diameters and a 16 inch stroke, produced by Cleveland’s Winton Engine Company (predecessor of General Motors’ Cleveland Diesel Division) would produce a combined 700 brake horsepower.   The engines would vent their exhaust through openings in either side of the vessel’s afterisland, eliminating the need for a protruding funnel and producing, relative to a coal-fired steamship, minimal emissions.  The engines would also be controlled directly from the pilothouse, making for an efficacious propulsion system ideally suited to the peculiar constraints of Chicago’s waterways.

        In terms of its profile, propulsion, and intended service, the Material Service, strictly speaking, did not represent any quantum advance in naval architecture or marine engineering. With the completion of a vastly enlarged Erie Canal in 1918, renamed the New York State Barge Canal, a number of innovative vessels that would provide the design paradigm for the Material Service had already appeared.   These vessels blended a low profile, in response to low bridge clearances across the Canal, and Diesel propulsion for flexibility of operation.    The first such vessels constructed to exploit the New York State Barge Canal were operated by Interwaterways Lines Incorporated, organized by Duluth grain broker Julius Barnes who was also interested in the McDougall Duluth Shipbuilding Company, where the five vessels were built.  Frustrated with the ever-increasing rail rates between Buffalo and the Atlantic for the shipment of Midwest grain, Barnes decided to build a fleet of grain-carrying motorships that could transport grain from the Lakehead to New York City with no transshipment at Buffalo nor railway carriage beyond.   On paper, the proposition seemed viable, but the small motorships, carrying less than 2,000 tons of grain, could not compete with lake boats carrying between 12,000 and 14,000 tons per trip;   also, the motorships still needed to offload a portion of their grain cargoes at Buffalo so that the Barge Canal draft then in effect could be achieved.    Moreover, the vessels’ hulls were poorly designed for maneuvering in the constricted waterways of the Barge Canal, while their semi-Diesel Scandia engines proved underpowered for the task.  Nevertheless, after repowerings and some rebuilding for service other than grain carriage, these vessels continued in service for many years:   The Day Peckinpaugh 221276 [a Interwaterways Lines Incorporated 101, b I. L. I. 101, c Richard J. Barnes], the first such vessel completed, operated as a cement carrier until recently on the upper portion of the Barge Canal, out of Oswego, New York, and is now in lay-up at Erie, Pennsylvania.

Early New York State Barge Canal Motorships

Figure 5.  Above left, the Michigan 221467 [a Interwaterways Lines Incorporated 105, b I. L. I. 105] was the last of the five Barnes motorships built at Duluth for  Interwaterways Lines, Inc., which pioneered direct Great Lakes-Atlantic Seaboard traffic using canal-sized motorships on the New York State Barge Canal in 1921.   She is shown here in her final active service as a caustic soda carrier for the Michigan Atlantic Corporation, a subsidiary of the Michigan Alkali Company, the first firm to build a self-unloader, the Wyandotte   205458 in 1908.  William Lafferty Collection.  Figure 6.   Above right: The Blue Comet 222943, as the Troy Socony, was the first of the Standard Oil Company of New York's motor tankers constructed expressly for service on the New York State Barge Canal.   Built by  the Sun Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company at Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1923, she was powered by dual Seymour & McIntosh 300 bhp Diesels.  Father Peter van der Linden photograph, William Lafferty Collection. 

Figure 7.  Built the same year as the Material Service by the St. Lawrence Marine Repair Dock Corporation at Ogdensburg, New York,   the Empire State 228732, shown here in the Ogden Slip at Chicago in 1932, represented the apogee of the type of canal-sized motorship constructed for service on the New York State Barge Canal, connecting the Great Lakes with  the Atlantic seaboard.  Her profile is higher than that of the Material Service:   Her pilothouse could be raised and lowered by means of three 6-inch hydraulic screw jacks powered by an electric motor, a design aspect that would prove popular with subsequent inland tugs and towboats.  Her  twin funnels, serving to exhaust twin 6-cylinder Nelseco Diesels,  and her fore- and aftmasts telescoped into her maindeck at the push of a button,  like the radio antenna of a modern automobile.  As with the Material Service, the Empire State  used a ballast pump to maintain a constant draft and lowered overhead clearance in the restricted waterways of the Barge Canal.   William Lafferty Collection.