Preventing fumes on deck from ships' funnels has always been a headache for the designers of ocean liners. Although it was proven that William Francis Gibbs' streamlined funnel design — used previously on the SS Santa Rosa, her three sister ships and the SS America — was also suitable for the great SS United States, some minor changes were made in order to improve the final result. This new design involved modifying the angle of the funnels' fins, making them parallel to the ship’s keel and not raked aft, as in all of Gibbs’ previous designs.
Wind tunnel tests prior to the vessel's construction further proved that the fins' rotation would direct the smoke fumes upward and aft, thanks to the strong wind currents created by at the trailing edge of the now horizontal fin design. The result was that decks remained virtually smoke-free, as never before achieved on a liner. The man responsible for this successful idea was not Mr. Gibbs himself, but a Newport News Shipyard apprentice named Howard E. Lee Jr., who, as a result of his experience with building and flying model airplanes, decided to apply the concept of ‘lift’ associated with airfoils to shipbuilding.
