Deep in an Ocean Liner's Engine Room

A cross-section of a steamship's engine room reveals stokers shoveling coal into a row of glowing furnaces, sweat and soot covering their overalls as a boy watches from a doorway. Above them, coal spills down chutes from a storage bin while a cat prowls a metal walkway overhead and a rat scurries along the floor. Enormous flywheels and pistons churn in the central chamber, tended by an engineer perched between the gears, while another checks a bank of brass pressure gauges. Below deck, workers turn valves on a maze of pipes as steam hisses from a leaking joint, and a mechanic mops up spilled oil near stacked barrels. Coal carts on rails wait to be tipped into hoppers, and a worker carries gears through a lit doorway lined with switches. At the bottom, off-duty crew wash up at a row of sinks beside benches piled with boots. Every deck and machine here holds its own steady task.