majestic

"Samuel Rea (September 21, 1855 – March 24, 1929) was an American engineer and the ninth president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, serving from 1913 to 1925. He joined the PRR in 1871, when the railroad had hardly outgrown its 1846 charter to build from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, and helped it grow to a 12,000-mile (19,000 km) system with access to Manhattan, upstate New York, and New England." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Rea A similar photo ran in The Bridgeport times and evening farmer. (Bridgeport, Conn.) , August 25, 1922 with the caption: "SAMUEL REA, President Pennsylvania Railroad returns from international conference." chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92051227/1922-08-25/ed-... See also, "rushed home on the S.S. Majestic to attend the railroad peace conferences in New York." chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058226/1922-08-26/ed-...

The Australasian Supplement published a long report from a ‘Special Correspondent’ on the Universal Exhibition in Vienna. From the perspective of Vienna, and through Daintree’s ‘charming coloured photographs’, they were able to see Queensland as a whole: They are so pretty and so instructive, without seeming to be so, that few people can pass them by without going steadily through them. They are of high interest to the geologist, while at the same time the person who is not a geologist will be just as much interested; for in addition to the regular sequence of views, commencing with the alluvial districts and the sugar plantations, and working up to the gold formations, there is so much life introduced into them that one feels that one is looking at Queensland through a camera.55 Richard Daintree was not only a frontier photographer, and he was not only a metropolitan photographer – his work was the product of both spaces as they interacted within the new space of modern spectacle. The images were exposed right at the outer edge of imperial expansion, but they were produced into meaning right at its center, integrating the very latest in display technologies within the most sophisticated of scientific systems. In many ways, therefore, they anticipate the future role of ‘the photograph’ over the 150 years that followed when, within the increasingly sophisticated exhibition, publication, and, eventually, online digital spaces, photographs increasingly became retrievable polysemic units within a mobile dataset, and they were increasingly experienced as retinal events aggregated together into a synthetic optical field. Source: Frontier and Metropole, Science and Colonisation: The Systematic Exhibitions of Richard Daintree Martyn Jolly, published online 2020 doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2020.1788233

What an incredible story, about the shipping produced. The demand for wartime output, but also the tonnage of merchant shipping. A proud history definitely! thanks for sharing it.