Gatfield's mammoth ship docks at employee art show

Posing for a Fermilab Today picture, William Gatfield stood by his newest creation. A couple, meandering through Fermilab's employee art show, caught sight of it and flocked over. "It's incredible," the woman said, "I wonder who made this?" The photographer waited for the admirers to clear the shot. Gatfield just quietly smiled. "I bet this guy made it," the man said, "That's probably why she's taking his picture." After congratulations, Gatfield was assaulted with a barrage of questions: How long did it take? How much does it weigh? Is it to scale?

Gatfield, a welder from the Technical Division, has created a buzz with his newly completed metal sculpture, "The Great Eastern." His model of the colossal historic ship, for the record, took 10 years--working on and off--to finish, weighs 300 lbs. and is to scale, more or less.

Gatfield, a welder for 33 years, wanted to create a model of the ship after reading a book about it. "It fascinated me. The building of it was such a major undertaking," said Gatfield. "I wanted one. Not being able to afford anything close--I decided to build one." Gatfield built his ship in his garage. To challenge himself, he decided to use small strips of steel, a quarter inch wide, for the hull. "They provide a better shape," he said.

The Great Eastern was the largest ship ever built at the time of its 1858 launch. No ship built for 50 years would come close in size. Several inventions developed for the Great Eastern are now standard on ships. It was the first ship to have a double hull, a safety precaution--now required--which was not built into another ship for 100 years. The steering gear invented for the Great Eastern is now used on all ships.

The ship is named one of the seven wonders of the industrial world by Deborah Cadbury in her book of the same name, along with the Brooklyn Bridge, the Transcontinental Railway and the London's sewer system. It could cross the Atlantic twice without refueling. Running on steam power and wind power, the ship could reach 13 knots--fast for its time. The Great Eastern had five steam funnels and enough canvas in its sails to be a clipper ship. It laid the 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland and the 1869 cable between France and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was sold for scrap in 1889 and took nearly two years to take apart.

Jules Verne loved the Great Eastern and described his 1867 voyage in A Floating City. Reportedly, while on board, he developed his ideas for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The ship undeniably breeds enthusiasm: "I wish I could go back," said Gatfield, "to a previous life and be on this ship."
--D. A. Venton

Peak luminosity record

Yesterday afternoon at 2:24 p.m., the Tevatron collider achieved a record peak luminosity when store 5086 began to produce collisions. The collision rate had a peak value of 2.3E32 cm^-2 sec^-1. It was the seventh time that the Tevatron peak luminosity exceeded 2.0E32. Congratulations.

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From Government Computer News, November 20, 2006:

Grid accelerates research
Tools help deliver CERN data to labs worldwide

Whatever its success in the marketplace, grid has been a great success in the research community. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Ill., has been testing a grid network that will eventually distribute experimental data from the European laboratory for particle physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, to multiple research laboratories around the globe. Thanks to grid tools, data created at CERN can be distributed and then analyzed at other facilities around the world.

While electronically shepherding large amounts of information from one location to another is a difficult problem in itself, the task grows even more complex with multiple recipients, said Ian Fisk, Fermi associate scientist.
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