A prize with no official judge
The Blue Riband was an informal title for the passenger ship with the fastest regular crossing of the North Atlantic. It had no governing body for much of its history, and no ribbon was handed over in the early period. The phrase was borrowed from older uses of blue ribbons as marks of distinction, and it became a convenient label that newspapers, shipping companies and the public all used.
The record was normally set by average speed over a crossing rather than by the shortest time, because routes differed in length. Westbound crossings, against the prevailing winds and currents, were usually slower, so records were tracked separately for each direction, and the title usually went to the ship with the best average speed in a given direction.
From the first steamers
The origins are sometimes traced to 1838, when the Sirius and the Great Western crossed under steam. The Great Western’s faster passage is often cited as the first real record. In the 1840s the Cunard Line’s ships, beginning with the Britannia in 1840, took up the contest, and Cunard held much of the prestige of the decade.
In the 1850s the American Collins Line challenged Cunard with large, fast, heavily subsidised paddle steamers, among them the Atlantic and the Baltic. They took the record, but the line’s financial position was weak, and the loss of the Arctic in 1854 and the Pacific, which disappeared in 1856, helped to bring it down. The company folded by the late 1850s.
Inman, Guion and White Star
After the paddle era, the screw-propelled iron liners of Inman, Guion and then White Star took the honours in turn through the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. The Guion Line’s Arizona and Alaska were notably quick, and the White Star Line’s Britannic and Germanic were among the fast ships of the 1870s. The Cunard Line later regained prominence with ships such as Umbria and Etruria and then the Campania and Lucania of the 1890s.
Fast crossings were the result of larger engines, more coal burned and better hull forms, so competition for the title pushed engineering forward. It also raised running costs, and owners debated whether prestige repaid the expense. The wider development of the ocean liner history shows how often speed was balanced against profit.
The German challenge
The record passed to Germany in 1897 with the Norddeutscher Lloyd ship Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, whose four funnels set a pattern for later liners. Other German ships followed, including the Hamburg America Line’s Deutschland, which took the title in 1900. The success of German ships reflected national pride and the strategic interest of the new German empire in large, fast ships.
Turbines: Lusitania and Mauretania
British response came with the Cunard sisters Lusitania and Mauretania, both entering service in 1907. They used steam turbines, which gave high speeds with greater smoothness, and both took the record in turn. The Mauretania, in particular, held the Blue Riband for roughly two decades, from the end of the 1900s until 1929. The Lusitania sinking in 1915 ended the career of one of them, while Mauretania continued in service until the 1930s.
Bremen, Rex and Normandie
The interwar years saw a new set of contenders. The German Bremen took the title in 1929, followed closely by her sister Europa. Italy’s Rex won in 1933. The French Normandie took it in 1935 with a powerful turbo-electric plant, and Cunard’s Queen Mary took it back in 1936. Normandie and Queen Mary then traded the record in 1937 and 1938, with the Queen Mary holding it thereafter until after the war.
In 1935 the British politician Harold Hales presented a physical trophy, known as the Hales Trophy, for the fastest Atlantic crossing, which gave the informal contest a more formal object. The trophy was open to ships of any nation.
The United States
The final liner to win the title was the American SS United States on her maiden voyage in 1952. She took the record from Queen Mary by a clear margin, averaging above 34 knots, and she was designed with considerable use of aluminium and a hull shape that reflected her naval connections. Her record was never beaten by a liner. This is one of the few cases where the title ended not because a faster ship arrived but because the age of the express liner itself ended.
An afterlife
Jet aircraft made the contest less important at the end of the 1950s, and shipowners no longer had a commercial reason to build ships solely for speed. The Hales Trophy was later awarded to fast catamaran ferries, such as the Hoverspeed Great Britain in 1990, that crossed without carrying the passengers and cargo of a traditional liner, though those claims were treated by some people as outside the spirit of the original prize.
What the contest meant
The Blue Riband was, in practice, a matter of national prestige and advertising. Companies promoted their records, and governments sometimes subsidised ships partly for that reason. It encouraged the technical advances that appear in the history of the steamship era and left a vivid record of how much attention the Atlantic crossing once drew.