In 1936, on the occasion of the inauguration of the British passenger liner R.M.S. QUEEN MARY, the British cigarette manufacturer, the Churchman's published a series of 50 cigarette cards on which the new liner was advertised under the title "Wonders of the QUEEN MARY". On one of the cards, the newest ship of the owner shipping company, Cunard Line, built in 1936, was compared with the company's very first ship, BRITANNIA, put into service almost a hundred years earlier, in 1840.
Blank cards - cardboard sheets - were originally used to stiffen cigarette packets. Colored, stylish cigarette cards and match labels varied with pictures, witty texts, and informative descriptions began to spread as label art for marketing purposes after the appearance of cheap cigarettes available to the general public in the 1880s, and then, from the 1920s, the explosion the printing industry went through a similar development, and the new technologies of lithography and the expansion of consumer needs enabled the strong growth of the market.
That's when the thematic sets depicting celebrities (military leaders, movie stars, radio celebrities, athletes), sports (football, cricket, golf), nature (animal world, geography), history (castles, coats of arms, battle scenes), or even technical achievements (airplanes, cars, locomotives, naval- and merchant ships) appeared on cigarette cards for the design and production of which the largest tobacco product manufacturers employed separate graphic groups - studios specializing in cigarette cards and match labels.and even published independent collector's catalogs, with which they all tried to ensure brand loyalty among new smokers for their products.
These products also attracted the attention of younger age groups who are thirsty for novelty, who, primarily through collecting, or after school disappointments, found the opportunity to learn while having fun through the interesting pictures and the explanations written on the back of the illustrated cards (while the tobacco companies gained potential consumers in the form of young collectors who learned smoking habits from adults). In the 1920s and 1930s, 100 British tobacco manufacturers launched 2,000 collectible series (!) in this way. Among them was the series of 50 cards, in which there is a representation comparing the size of QUEEN MARY and BRITANNIA.
From a genre point of view, such representations sold on cigarette cards form an independent type of comparison drawings presenting the impressive dimensions of ocean liners. The representation of the two famous Cunard ships inspired the president of our association, who works on the "Encyclopedia of Ocean Liners", to recreate the 1936 representation by using the scale profile drawings he made:
Figure 1: The recreated comparison drawing and the original from 1936 (in the upper right corner). Made by Dr. Tamás Balogh © 2025.
Steamship construction gained momentum in the middle of the 19th century, similarly to the construction of steam locomotives during the railway mania between 1830-1847 (when 263 laws and 15,300 km of new railways were established in Great Britain alone, although the mania had its effect throughout Europe, since 10,000 km of railways were built in Germany between 1845-1855, 2,341 km between 1847-1867, then 21,200 km in Hungary.
The steamship - thanks to the work of Robert Fulton, who perfected it - was nevertheless initially more popular in America than in Europe: In 1829, the United States had 54,037 tons, Great Britain barely 25,000 tons. 10 years later, 193,423 vs. 82,716 tons, in 1848, 427,891 vs. 168,078 tons, after another ten years, and in 1858 already 729,390 vs. 488,415 tons was the ratio. There had to wait until 1876, until the year came when more steamships were built than sailing ships.
The rudimentary steamships of the 1830s, which were still mostly only for stunts - barely a few tens of meters long, no more than 200-250 tons, and equipped with steam engines of barely 50 HP - grew rapidly, and their performance improved considerably due to the development of their structure and steam engines. The milestones of the development is marked by such technical feats as the ships depicted in the picture above: The wooden BRITANNIA was a large ship in its time, with a length of 63 meters and a width of 10.3 meters. In addition to the sails of her three masts, she was propelled by paddle wheels powered by a 740 horsepower two-cylinder steam engine. The ship's 4 coal-burning boilers provided the ship with a speed of 8.5 knots (16 km/h) with a daily coal consumption of 38 tons, which could go even faster in case of favorable winds and currents. The ship had a volume of 1,154 tons and was able to carry 115 passengers with a crew of 82. She crossed the Atlantic between Liverpool and Halifax in 12 days and 10 hours. In comparison, the QUEEN MARY is built of steel, has 310.7 meters in length, while her width is 36 m. Her four propellers were driven by the same number of steam turbines with an output of 700,000 horsepower. The ship's 27 oilburner boilers powered the ocean liner at a speed of 28.5-32.8 knots (53-61 km/h) using 1,000 tons of fuel oil per day. For 14 months between 1936-1937, and then without interruption between 1938-1952, she held the Blue Ribbon for the fastest Atlantic crossing. The gross tonnage of the ship is 81,237 tons, the number of passengers that can be taken on board is 2,140, while the number of crew is 1,100. Her fastest crossing time was 3 days 22 hours 42 minutes on the Halifax-Southampton route.
Between 1837-2003 - that is, while ocean liners were being built - several significant periods followed each other In the hundred years between 1840 and 1940, considered the heroic age of ocean liners, 1,019 ocean liners were built worldwide, while the world's 16 largest seafaring nations in 1914 had a total of 8,445 commercial ships (cargo and passenger ships combined) of more than 1,600 tons (suitable for ocean crossings) and 14,282 less than 1,600 tons - that is, a total of 22,727 - in operation, a total of 42,416. 000 tons of space. From the Belle Époque, which is considered the golden age of ocean liners, to the present day (during the 111 years between 1912-2023) - excluding the war years - a scant 20 ocean liners have sunk. In comparison, 50 ocean liners were sunk between 1914-1918 and 144 between 1939-1945 as a result of acts of war (compared to a total of 5,000 ships sunk in World War I and a total of 20,000 ships sunk in World War II), while barely a dozen ocean liners served in both world wars.Ocean liners therefore represent barely 1 thousandth (0.0071%) of the nearly 3,000,000 known shipwrecks sunk in world history.
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Sources:
Hurd, Archibald: A Merchant Fleet at War, London, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, 1920.
Charles, Roland W.: Troopships of Word War II., Washington, 1947.
Kudyshin, Ivan; Chelyadinov, Mikhail: Лайнеры на войне. 1936 1968 гг. постройки, Moscow, 2002.
Tebutt, Melanie: Children and hobbies in 1930s Britain: cigarette cards
Smith, Eugene W.: Transatlantic Passenger Ships - Past and Present, Boston, 1947.
Sz.n.: Mercantile Fleets - British an Foreign, in.: Scientific American Reference Book, 1914. p.195.
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