Short-Lived Innovation
Her designers envisioned an ocean greyhound, embodying lines "closely resembling those of a finely modeled steam yacht." Fast, safe, reliable, and luxuriously appointed, the triple-screw turbine-powered steamship Great Northern, built for the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railway Company in 1914 by William Cramp & Sons Shipbuilding Company in Philadelphia, enjoyed very different operational careers in mercantile and military service. She served as a troop transport during the Great War, and, albeit briefly, as an altogether new type of auxiliary to the U.S. Fleet—an "administrative flagship."
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