Cross the Atlantic with unprecedented speed, comfort and safety!
Normandie will undertake her maiden voyage on 29 May 1934. Tickets for this historic event are available now! Be among the select few who will enjoy the memories of this cruise for a lifetime.
{additional marketing boilerplate targeted at the super-rich skipped}
Among her features are:
Unprecedented engine power and range at speed. The Blue Riband will be ours!
Unprecedented safety. Normandie's collision avoidance system will inform her Master of all objects in her vicinity, at all times and in all weather.
Normandie's unique anti-iceberg protection system renders her immune to collision.
OOC technical background:
In 1927, French engineers Camille Gutton and Pierret experimented with wavelengths going down to 16 cm. Other engineers, Mesny and David, noticed repeatedly since 1931 that an aircraft flying between a transmitter and a receiver would disturb a radio communication. This was the basis of a device put into operational use in 1935 by the Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie Sans Fil (CSF) to detect airplanes flying over a given zone.
In 1934, Henri Gutton (the son of the former, and engineer of the CSF) resumed his father's experiments after initial reports made by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in 1930 (see above) and brought improvements to the magnetron. Emile Girardeau [1], at the head of the CSF, recalled in a testimony that they were at the time intending to build radar systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". The CSF received the French patent (no. 788.795, "New system of location of obstacles and its applications") on July 20 1934, for a device detecting obstacles (icebergs, ships, planes) using pulses of ultra-short wavelengths produced by a magnetron. This is the first patent of an operational radar using centimetric wavelengths. The radar was tested from November to December 1934 aboard cargo ship Oregon, with two transmitters working at 80 cm and 16 cm wavelengths. Coasts were detected from a range of 10-12 nautical miles. The shortest wavelength was chosen for the final design, which equipped the liner Normandie as soon as mid-1935 for operational use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar
Okay, so its introduced on Normandie a year early.
Then again, so is Normandie...