A model of the French Alma class shows two funnels mounted abreast instead of in a fore-and-aft line. That arrangement can look unusual to a modern viewer, yet it appeared on many period vessels and was not limited to American river paddle steamers. The example helps reconstruct the kind of silhouette imagined for the warship in The War of the Worlds. It also cautions against reading later warship layouts backward into nineteenth-century descriptions.
Notable Point · 37:38-38:30
Alma-class funnels and a War of the Worlds warship
An Alma-class model shows that side-by-side funnels were a real nineteenth-century arrangement when The War of the Worlds was written.