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Architectura Navalis

An excerpt from the Society's Transactions

The paper entitled "Architectura Navalis" by Professor A R Hall is published in Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 1979-80 Vol 51.

The author first examines the earliest thinking on the design of ships, their hull form and its effect on speed, stability and buoyancy. Starting with Galileo, he goes on to analyse the scientific studies of Huygens, Newton, Bouguer and Euler in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By the eighteenth century it was hoped that some practical experiments would throw more light on this subject, so a number of trials of models of were undertaken in several countries. The following short excerpts describe some of the trials, and provide the author's conclusion as the effects of all the centuries of scientific theory and man-years of practical experimentation. (See also our Transactions for a list of other papers on related subjects).

The first experiments in England in 1758 began when The Royal Society of Arts (as we know it now) offered a group of awards for 'ships blocks' or hull models "in order to ascertain by experiments the principles on which a good vessel is founded."

"Three years later (1761) a series of quite elaborate trials took place at Peerless Pond near Old Street, and later at Snaresbrook Great Pond in Epping Forest, which ended in the award of £100 for a 74-gun ship model, and of £60 for a frigate model. The usual towing tests were made over a distance as great as 105 yards to establish the relative resistances; the models were evidently fully made and rigged, since a test was also made of the force required to cause the model to heel, with sails set, through an angle of 20 degrees."

These trials were followed in 1775 by the better known model trials of Fredrik Chapman in Sweden, and of three French scientists in Paris, then twenty years later by the extensive trials of Beaufoy in England.

Chapman held that 'a good theory' was needed to attain 'any greater perfection than (shipbuilding) possesses at present'. Below is a short extract from one of his tables, showing some of the hull forms that he investigated in his 2,000 or so experiments:

No 1 17 pounds	No 2 17 pounds	No 3 17 pounds	No 4 12 pounds	No 5 19.25 pounds	No 6 16.25 pounds	No 7 12 pounds

The author concludes that little improvement in naval architecture took place during these years, and that it was only later in the 19th century that the changes took place enabling "the most efficient sailing carriers ever devised" to be built:

"The wooden ship, at the hands of a number of mathematicians, philosophers and experimenters received a vast deal of study and intellectual effort. Even the toil of the galley-slave was measured by the differential calculus. All this study... was by no means without effect; it made French ships, by 1780 or so, a little faster than the English ones. It did not, by itself enable Villeneuve to win the Battle of Trafalgar. And clearly all the ink and experiments from Galileo to Beaufoy did nothing to change the obvious and fundamental characteristics of the wooden sailing ship, or of the shipyards from which it came. In a very real sense, through all the changes from clinker to carvel build, from single decks and single masts to three-deckers with multiple masts, from square sails to fore-and-aft rig, Victory and her contemporaries were of the same stock as ships of 2,000 years before and cousins to the sailing barge and fishing lugger. We know where the great change in the art of the ship came from: it came from John Wilkinson and James Watt via such pioneers as Symington and Fulton. The new ship came not like Venus from the sea foam but from the mines of iron and coal. The industrial revolution in shipping, if I so may term it, owed nothing to Newton and Bouguet, Beaufoy or Chapman. The iron steamship was a new created thing; it was an offspring, doubly, of the riveted steam boiler."

Biographical Note: Professor Rupert Hall returned from America in 1964 to take up the chair of History of Science and Technology at Imperial College, the first such academic appointment in Great Britain, a post which he held until 1980.

The complete text of this paper can be purchased on line from our archive.

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