How Cruise Ships Got So Big
Cruise ships are a relatively new human invention that look quite different from other ships. Oh, and they are absolutely massive. How did they get that way?
The predecessor of today’s cruise ships was the ocean liner: big, beautiful ships that sailed across the Atlantic. But ocean liners had a totally different purpose from cruise ships: They were for transportation. Everything about them was designed to facilitate an ocean voyage from one continent to another.
But air travel changed that. Planes eliminated the main reason to take a ship somewhere, and ocean liner business plummeted. So the industry pivoted and began selling a ship as the destination itself. The cruise ship was born. But the ocean liners, built for a voyage, weren’t ideal for the purposes of a cruise, and over the next few decades, the cruise ship began its evolution. And it has culminated in the behemoths we see today.
Cruise ships always make me think of David Foster Wallace’s classic piece, Shipping Out (which you might know as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again).
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