Naval architecture

“ Indeed nothing appears more effectually to have retarded the progress of naval architecture, than the involving it in mysteries which the professors would gravely insinuate are only intelligible to themselves. ”

“ From late discoveries respecting floating bodies, and a comparative view of the ships of different nations, the board of naval architecture will, it is hoped, be enabled to suggest many useful improvements in the construction of all kinds of vessels, and by well conducted experiments to reduce the art of ship-building to a more regular science. ”

“ Grace and delicacy have been avoided for a kind of clumsy impressiveness, and the worst features of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries naval architecture are retained with a surprising obstinacy. ”

“ Throughout the whole of this century we set no value on scientific principles as applied to naval architecture, and were content to remain copyists. Although before the advent of the Napoleonic wars we had thus endeavoured to reduce their balance of advantage, yet even so the French still maintained an absolute superiority in design. ”

“ Some of them rise out of the water with a length and breadth so imposing, as to excite wonder how a nation, so ignorant of maritime affairs, and limited in their commercial intercourse, could have built such stupendous specimens of naval architecture. ”

“ Perhaps we have reason to be proud of our naval architecture, and need not go to the Greeks, or the Goths, or the Italians, for the models of our vessels. Sea-captains do not employ a Cambridgeport carpenter to build their floating houses, and for their houses on shore, if they must copy any, it would be more agreeable to the imagination to see one of their vessels turned bottom upward, in the Numidian fashion. ”

“ In naval architecture enter the problems of building construction combined with those of bridge building, complicated by the fact that there is no fixed foundation for the structure to rest upon. At one moment a ship may be spanning a trough in the seas and at the next it may be seesawing over the crest of the wave. ”

“ Progress in the pure science of naval architecture, as distinguished from the practical application of scientific rules and principles to shipbuilding, is a great and complex subject, and one which it would be impossible to do full justice to here. ”

“ Certainly the ships represented on tapestry, on seals, or on coins are very unlike any piece of naval architecture which ever had existence. Every seaman knows how impossible it is for an ordinary landsman to draw anything like a faithful representation of a ship, however picturesque a production the thing might appear to him. ”

“ There are no clouds of canvas, no beautiful models of marine architecture, none of the stateliness and majesty which have marked hundreds of great naval engagements. There is but little to the sight calculated to excite enthusiasm. There are eight black specks, and one oblong block, like so many bugs. There are no human beings in sight,—no propelling power visible. ”

“ This big ship or carack class—call it what you will—marks a determined stand in naval architecture to build real ships as distinct from big boats. From her evolved the vessels that sailed across the Atlantic with Columbus, that carried Elizabethan explorers to all points of the compass, that fought the Armada and the Dutch, and became adapted in time to such wooden walls as the Victory and others, and which are not radically dissimilar from the modern full-rigged ships, though made of iron instead of wood, with steel rigging and a much larger spread of canvas. ”

“ Such a line of conduct would very soon carry our naval architecture to a pitch of excellence worthy of imitation, and instead of being indebted to foreigners for models, we should be able, with just pride, to point to the productions of British science and intellect in this noble art. ”

“ It seems astonishing how such large vessels can be constructed by persons entirely ignorant of the principles of naval architecture. They are altogether made by the Indians with163out drawing or design. During the time when Brazil and Venezuela were under the Portuguese and Spanish governments, building-yards were established in several places where good timber was to be found, and the Indians were employed, under naval architects from Spain and Portugal, in the construction of vessels for the coast and inland trade. ”

“ The United States began late to build a modern navy, but has made highly encouraging progress, and while still far in the rear of Great Britain and France in the number of her ships, possesses some of the finest examples of naval architecture now afloat upon the waters. ”

“ In no other profession, perhaps, were theory and practice so out of sympathy with each other. The native art of the builder was numbed and56 shackled, by the restrictions imposed upon him as to tonnage and dimensions; the study of ship form, with a view to analysing the forces under which sailing ships moved by wind through water and to discovering the laws which those forces obeyed, was still mainly an academic pastime of the Society for Improving Naval Architecture, and outside the province of the naval authorities. Our ships were still formed on no rational principle. ”

“ The slow progress of naval architecture up to the end of the eighteenth century, an advance the rate of which may be gauged from the fact that, except for sheathing and pumps, no important improvement was patented between the years 1618 and 1800, has been characterized as consisting mainly of approximations to the successive forms and arrangements of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and French ships, all of which had been in their turn superior to ours. ”

“ A large model showing Seppings’ method of construction will be found in the Greenwich Museum. The system, while no doubt being efficacious in preventing the “working” of a ship’s component parts, must necessarily have added very considerably to her weight. It was about this time, too, that teak was used occasionally for the construction of ships. During the first quarter of the century whatever improvements were made in British naval architecture owed their origin almost entirely to the knowledge gained from the numerous prizes captured from the French. ”

“ As regards the work of our naval inventors, it will suffice to say, that the Americans, while not the first to plate vessels with iron, were the first to do so effectively and to prove the superiority of the ironclad in naval warfare. The memorable contest in Hampton Roads between the Monitor and the Merrimac made useless in a day all the fleets of all the nations of the world, and caused such a revolution in naval architecture and warfare as the world had never known. ”

“ There was just one drawback from which, as it seems to me, the nations on the Mediterranean compared with the inhabitants of Northern Europe have always suffered: even till to-day, or at any rate up to the introduction of steam, the tendency of the Mediterraneans has been to [57] build sailing boats rather than sailing ships. The very conditions that prompted naval architecture at all limited their scope. ”

“ The former was built some dozen years before by George Steers—a name celebrated among our marine architects as the [Pg 113] constructor of the famous yacht America, that "racehorse of the sea," which had crossed the Atlantic, and carried off the prize in the British Channel from the yachts of England—and was designed to be a model of naval architecture. She was the largest steam-frigate in the world, exceeding in tonnage the heaviest line-of-battle ship in the English navy, and yet so finely modelled that, propelled only by a screw, she could make ten or twelve miles an hour. ”

“ All the great advances which had been made previously in the science of naval architecture were chiefly due to foreigners, and any one wishing to acquaint himself at first hand with all that was then most advanced would have to consult the learned treatises of such distinguished Frenchmen as Bouguer, Dupin, Euler, D’Alembert, and the Abbé Bossut, of the distinguished Spaniard Don Juan d’Ulloa, and of Chapman, the celebrated constructor of the Swedish Navy. ”

“ Since the 19th Century great improvements have been made, it is true, and many facts have been discovered, and naval architecture still is progressing, but the 19th Century made a profession of it, and the 20th Century is only continuing its development. ”

“ In spite [218] of the handiness of the galley and her consequent popularity in the Mediterranean, she was thoroughly despised by Elizabethan seamen. Much more after their own heart was the nave or ship shown in Fig. 59, and also taken out of Furttenbach. The reader will notice a wise restriction of high-charged structures. This vessel, in fact, shows a steady improvement in naval architecture. ”

“ The nature of the build in the boats of the river requires no skill in naval architecture; the wood is not sawed, and it does not require seasoning, so that the utmost despatch might be used at all times in forming a flotilla, whether it were desired to navigate, cross, or bridge it. ”

“ It is not in the province of a newspaper to discuss scientifically points of mechanical interest, but the importance of a discovery of this nature will be easily understood by all nautical men, and especially by those who know any thing of naval architecture. ”

“ Without entering into the vexed question of the antiquity of Indian naval architecture, it is certain that native-built vessels, dedicated to commercial purposes, have always been constructed with considerable skill and possess remarkable durability. ”

“ And yet, great as is the annual cost of our navy, and great as is the amount of ingenuity spent in the construction of new and novel ships of war—each designed to be more impregnable and more formidable than its predecessor—our navy is at this moment in somewhat of an unsettled and transitory state. Changes in the construction of ironclads are every year taking place, and considerable difference of opinion exists among our highest naval authorities upon important points in marine architecture. ”

“ It is only within the past five years that the development of iron-clad architecture can be said to have taken any steady course. As yet the full effects of this forced and feverish course can scarcely be realized; but as fleets grow now slowly and steadily, those nations who have waited a little and profited by the true developments of the more hasty ones will be in a far better position to meet the sudden exigencies of war than those who have counted on numbers of vessels and gross tonnage displacement as a true criterion of naval strength. ”

“ At first glance, save that the fireplace was an incongruous note, one would have thought one’s self aboard ship, so closely had the nautical idea been carried out.
To begin with, the windows at the side, which opened out upon the orchard, were circular and rimmed with shining brass, and had thick panes inward-swinging like ships’ portholes. A polished fir column, set a trifle on a slant, rose from floor to ceiling, which was supported on white beams, the form and curve of which exactly imitated marine architecture. ”

“ We have found, for the first time in the history of ship-building, that the inward pull of the deck-beams and the outward thrust of the frames locks us, as it were, more closely in our places, and enables us to endure a strain which is entirely without parallel in the records of marine architecture. ”

“ Before we entered the war the Navy’s ship-building capacity amounted to ways for two battleships, two destroyers, two auxiliaries and one gun-boat. At once was begun a work of expansion which within a little more than a year added five ways and, when completed, would provide facilities for the simultaneous construction of sixteen war vessels, of which seven could be battleships. Three large naval docks, which can handle the largest ships in the world, were built. Camps were constructed for the training of 200,000 men. ”

“ The work of the quick-firing guns was the most striking feature of the battle, while the absence of torpedo-boats prevented that essential element of a modern fleet from being brought into play. An important lesson learned was that too much wood-work in an iron-clad vessel is a dangerous feature, and naval architects have since done their best to avoid this weak point in the construction of ships-of-war. ”

“ An immense space, enclosed by crenellated walls, contains four docks for large ships, yards for building those ships, establishments for all that concerns the military and merchant navy, from the rope-yard to the gun-foundry, from the work-shop where they carve the oar of the gondola to that where they square the keel of a seventy-four, from the rooms devoted to the old armour captured in Constantinople, in Cyprus, in the Morea, at Lepanto to the rooms in which modern armour is exhibited: the whole mingled with galleries, columns, works of architecture raised and designed by the chief masters. ”

“ With a desire to furnish ship-builders, and others interested in naval construction, a plan of the ship, D. J. Lawlor, Esq., naval architect, has constructed a model of the hull, including the upper works, as they must have originally existed. ”

“ Cheap steel and modern shipyard facilities have made it possible to build a ship of the size and unsinkable characteristics of the Great Eastern, with a reduction in the cost of twenty to thirty per cent.
VI. The principles of unsinkable construction, as formulated by Brunel and worked out in this remarkable ship, have been adopted in their entirety by naval constructors, and are to be found embodied in every modern warship. These elements—the double skin, transverse and longitudinal bulkheads, and watertight decks—are the sine qua non of warship construction ”