A wonder that never was

It is very difficult to recover from the ill effects of a bacchanalian weekend on a manic monday morning! However there are a few pleasant things that have the potential to make the effort of waking up worthwhile. Here is one such article I ran into today -
It talks about the design of a behemoth warship that would have weighed 3 million pounds - more than three times bigger than the largest warship of the day in 1945! And that's not the only feature of this monster - it was to be made of pure ice!!!
A story (probably apocryphal) has it that Winston Churchill was convinced about this idea while in a hot bath tub. Read on...

Here are more details:
The ship would have been over 2,000 feet (600 metres) long, with walls each 30 feet (9 metres) thick. As the ship was designed principally as a floating airfield, propulsion through the water would have been minimal (from a dozen outboard electric motors), supplied with power from diesel engines that would also have driven essential on-board refrigeration.
“HMS Habbakuk” (Habbakuk is a book of old Testament containing the prophecies of Hebrew minor prophet), as it was named, was to sit in the middle of the Atlantic as a floating aerodrome, or icedrome, to handle the refueling of aircraft flying from the U.S. to support the anti-Nazi was. It was the idea of Geoffrey Pyke, a polymath who had been a journalist, spy, educator, and investor.
During the war, Pyke was on the staff of a think-tank run by Lord Mountbatten.
“HMS Habbakuk” was one of a number of wonderful ideas that Pyke was to continue to generate throughout the war. Mountbatten found many of them significant enough to push hard for their approval by the British War Office.
Even so, the concept of an ice ship was extremely difficult to sell. Pyke had sent as memo explaining the concept to Mountbatten, written in rambling detail. This is not very surprising as the memo weighed over 2 kilograms and was several hundreds pages long.
The memo began with the notion that it was possible to make a very heat-resistant ice by mixing it with wood pulp. The idea had occurred to Pyke, perhaps, through the example of the Inuit (Eskimos) who in those days till made their traditional homes by mixing ice with lichens to make it strong. Pyke suggested that it would be possible to freeze together in huge blocks a mixture of water and something cheap and plentiful like wood pulp, he calculated that the resulting solid would be as strong in stress resistance as steel.
In fact, experiments with a 14 per cent wood-pulp mix showed that it was even better, and it was thought that this new substance, now named Pykrete, should be relatively easily fashioned into ship-building material. Pyke had a sample made, and delivered a large block to Mountbatten, who whisked off with it to Winston Churchill.
There is a story that Churchill, smoking a large cigar, was in his bath when the ice arrived. Invited to the bathroom, Mountbatten sat on a chair near the edge of the bath and on an impulse, dropped the large slab of Pykrete in the hot bath water. It floated around between Churchill’s legs, impervious to the heat.
The idea gathered momentum, and a group of engineers met in Canada to build some experimental models of the ship, and to best the practicality of working with ice as a material. They built a model 100 feet (30.48 metres) long, and it proved to be tremendously strong. Mountbatten demonstrated this convincingly by using a shotgun, showing how the ice was completely unharmed by bullets fired even at close range.
By the early months of 1945, the ship looked likely to be made, but the project was written off when Allied victory was announced in Europe, and then, a little later, came the surrender of Japan. Pyke was offered the chance to patent (thank God there were no GATT rules then) his odd material, but he decided not to. The project, recorded in the huge memo, is now in the archives at Broadlands, the Mountbatten home. Pyke died from cancer in 1948.
“MS Habbakuk” would have made an extraordinary machine, certainly the largest manufactured object on earth, both then and even into the present times. It would also have been very safe: it was believed that the ship, with its 30-foot walls, could easily absorbed by impact of a torpedo. And should a crack appear, why, turn up the on-board refrigeration, and mend the hole with sea-water ice!
Research has been done into combinations of ice with other materials, most notably glass fibre, in the ice laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but no suitable use for ice has turned up.
It is unlikely that anyone, even the petroleum industry, with its eyes on Antarctic Oil, will use ice alloys to build tankers. No ship will ever sail with a hull made from ice — but we should think what a great loss to the romance of seafaring.