Industrializing American Shipbuilding: The Transformation of Ship Design and Construction, 1820-1920

Abstract

William H. Thiesen, a historian for the United States Coast Guard, has written a wonderful study of crisscrossing trajectories in American and British ship design and construction. He reviews the standard literature, and, using original research on technological innovation in ship production at giant yards along the mid-Atlantic coast from New York to Newport News, he offers a useful theory about the industrialization of the yards. After a brief summary of traditional shipbuilding practices, Thiessen contrasts “practical” (non-theoretical and intuitive craft-based) wooden design practices with British scientific and iron shipbuilding. English and Scottish design theory became based on “rules of arithmetic, the principals of geometry, the doctrine of curves, the laws of gravitation, the nature of fluids, &c” (quoting the British naval shipbuilder Henry Chatfield, p. 16). That change was expedited by the early introduction of iron as native shipbuilding declined at the end of the eighteenth century. He reviews the many contributions of British theorists and shows how their efforts demanded new, elite social and intellectual institutions such as the Royal School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and the Institution of Naval Architects.