Supposedly, inventor Geoffrey Pyke once proposed building ships out of ice to patrol the North Atlantic for the British War Office. By the time two prototypes were built, long-range aircraft had already taken over the job... or so the story goes. Mythbusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage see if a ship made out of ice and sawdust-or, in this case, newspaper-is seaworthy.

A lot of mythology surrounds British inventor Geoffrey Pyke. He supposedly made people come to his bedside to see his designs because getting up and getting dressed took too long. It seems fitting somehow that such a quirky character could convince the British War Office in 1942 to test the concept of massive floating platforms made of ice- insulated and cooled "berg ships" up to 4000 feet long to be used as bomb- and torpedoproof aircraft carriers that would protect North Atlantic shipping lanes.

The following year, Pyke's former professor and his assistant discovered that adding wood pulp or sawdust to water before freezing would make far stronger platforms. They named the material pykrete in honor of Pyke. By the time two small-scale prototypes were built, longer-range aircraft were patrolling the Atlantic, and the wild scheme was largely forgotten.

For the MythBuster design, I drew on my days as a commercial captain and chose the Carolina skiff, a flat-bottomed boat that's popular on the Chesapeake and throughout the Southeast. The flat bottom makes a stable work platform for clammers and other watermen; it also means you can plane with relatively little horsepower. Since super pykrete is on the heavy side, we wanted to make sure we had enough power to go fast without resorting to a massive engine.

Read the full article to find out how the Mythbusters faired.