U. S. Navy Department
Report on Salvage Operations
Submarine S-51
SPECIAL THANKS to Mark Grieshaber
for his endless hours of hard work to make the availability of this document possible.
(See Mark's editiorial notes at the bottom of this page.)
WEBMASTER NOTES: This 104-page document has been divided into six sections
to allow for ease in downloading and printing. Original page breaks have been noted with
a dotted line and the page number to the right. Graphics for Figures have been shrunk
to thumbnail size within the document to save downloading time. You may click
on the thumbnail image of the photo to see it enlarged. Full indexing is available
through hyperlinks to specific page numbers, Figures, or Plates both within the
text and in the Indices section.
Contents
Editorial Notes by Mark Grieshaber
Indices: pp. i-vi (Title Page, Index, List of
Plates & Figures, and List of Appendixes)
Section 1: pp. 1-14
Section 2: pp. 15-33
Section 3: pp. 34-48
Section 4: pp. 49-59
Section 5: pp. 60-81
Section 6: pp. 82-104 (Includes Appendixes)
Editorial Notes by Mark Grieshaber
Transcription notes on the scan / ocr / edit process for document
"Report on Salvage Operations, Submarine S-51", by Edward Ellsberg.
The goal:
Convert the text to online form to make it as widely accessible as
possible.
Some notes on the scan/ocr/edit process:
- The target document type was plain ascii text for widest
accessibility.
- The original document, as published, was typeset in a 12 point
font similar but not identical to Times-Roman, with liberal usage
of Italic, Bold, and small capitals. It averaged 89 characters
per line, and 50 lines per page.
- Italicized items (eg, ship names) were instead double quoted
(following precedent in figure captions).
- Special characters were spelled out (eg, "degrees"). The original
typeset fractions (eg "1/4" as a single character) were converted
to decimal equivalents. This could plausibly be done differently
as composite fractions (eg, "1/4" instead of "0.25") or spelled
out completely (eg, "one and five-eighths" instead of "1 5/8").
- Paragraphs were maintained, as was the pagination of the original.
Due to the desire to be as broadly available as possible, the
paragraphs were reformatted to a maximum of 79 characters per
line,
so the number of lines per page has increased.
- Original hyphenation was collapsed back to full words (because of
the line width reformatting that took place).
- Original, obvious spelling and typographical mistakes were
corrected
in place with no additional notation. Original errors whose
nature
was not completely obvious were retained as in the original, with
no
additional notation.
- Handwritten notes appeared at the top of page 1 of the photocopy
that was available for conversion:
"S-51 launched at Lake Torpedo Boat Co.
21 Aug. 1921 Last of submarines under contract for USN.
(NY Times of that date)
Commissioned -- 1922
Stricken from Naval Register -- 1930
Sold -- 1930"
- The top of page iii in the original was stamped "SHIPYARD
TECHNICAL
LIBRARY".
- The original text that was available for conversion had no page
"ii"; it is presumed that page "ii" was blank and was not copied.
- The equipment used for the scan/ocr/edit process included the
following:
Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 4c flatbed scanner connected to a
Power Macintosh 8500/120 running
OmniPage Pro version 7.0 Optical Character Recognition
software.
The resulting ascii text files were transferred via ftp to a
Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo running IRIX 6.2, where the
"vi" editor and the
"spell", "grep", etc utilities were used in the editing
process.
- The biggest problem encountered during the conversion process was
the poor quality of the original document typeface, compounded by
several generations of photocopying. Thin strokes common in
letters
such as "w" and "y" tended to disappear completely, leading to
repeated errors on many such characters, even after extensive
training of the OCR software.
- The program "GIMP" (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) was used
extensively and exclusively in processing the figures from the
report. Minimally, the following was done to each image:
- Rotation so that the frame of the figure was horizontal (ie, of
the original figure, not the contained photo; shipboard photos
often have a horizon that is distinctly non-horizontal)
- Cropping to one pixel inside the original figure frame (ie, the
frame was cropped off)
- Obvious defects were touched up (blebs, scratches, etc)
- Grayscale levels were adjusted to give better contrast and
viewability
- Scaling so that the maximum X dimension was 640 pixels, and the
maximum Y dimension was 480 pixels
- Sharpening to recover the crispness of the original after scaling
- Figures were all saved as jpeg files, with a compression of 0.45,
no smoothing
Transcriber:
Mark Grieshaber
mvgrie@shute.monsanto.com (1999)
Return to the S-51 Home Page.