Ships And Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600 1800

Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology

by Larrie D. Ferreiro

"Naval architecture was born in the mountains of Peru, in the mind of a French astronomer named Pierre Bouguer who never built a ship in his life." So writes Larrie Ferreiro at the beginning of this pioneering work on the science of naval architecture. Bouguer's monumental book Trait? du navire (Treatise of the Ship) founded a discipline that defined not the rules for building a ship but the theories and tools to predict a ship's characteristics and performance before it was built. In Ships and Science, Ferreiro argues that the birth of naval architecture formed an integral part of the Scientific Revolution. Using Bouguer's work as a cornerstone, Ferreiro traces the intriguing and often unexpected development of this new discipline and describes its practical application to ship design in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on previously untapped primary-source and archival information, he places the development of naval architecture in the contexts of science, navy, and society, across the major shipbuilding nations of Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy. Ferreiro describes the formulation of the three major elements of ship theory (the science of explaining the physical behavior of a ship): maneuvering and sail theory, ship resistance and hydrodynamics, and stability theory. He considers the era's influential books on naval architecture and describes the professionalization of ship constructors that is the true legacy of this period. Finally, looking from the viewpoints of both the constructor and the naval administrator, he explains why the development of ship theory was encouraged, financed, and used in naval shipbuilding. A generous selection of rarely seen archival images accompanies the text.

Genres: History, Science, Nautical, Nonfiction

441 pages, Hardcover

First published November 3, 2006

About the author

Larrie D. Ferreiro FRHistS received his PhD in the History of Science and Technology from Imperial College London.

He teaches history and engineering at George Mason University in Virginia and the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has served for over forty years in the US Navy, US Coast Guard and Department of Defense, and was an exchange engineer in the French Navy.

He is the author of Churchill's American Arsenal: he Partnership Behind the Innovations that Won World War Two; Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It; Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition That Reshaped Our World; and Ships and Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600–1800.

Reviews

[Ellen Church · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book on the history of (one type of) engineering, but it suffers from/is strengthened by its being neither a technical treatise nor a layman's popularization. I am not an engineer, so I had to skim chunks of the books that used calculus to determine some of the properties described in the book. However, I found it fascinating how the science developed, the personalities involved, and WHO was involved. Many names I knew from other fields helped to create the science of naval architecture including Euler, Bernoulli, and Huygens, as well as the not unexpected Archimedes and Newton. Other names like Nelson, Brunel, Napoleon, Franklin, and the Vasa popped up and helped to place what I was learning into context. Of course I now know something about Pierre Bouguer, Jorge Juan y Santacilia, and the Geodesic Mission to Peru in the 1730s.
Finally, something that was not focused on naval architecture, but did have a large effect was the closing of the French Academy of Sciences under the French Revolution. The book reminds us the great chemist Antoine de Lavoisier, discoverer of of oxygen, was caught up in the purge and was executed in 1794 accompanied by (probably apocryphal) statement, "The Revolution has no need of scholars." Eighteen months later he was exonerated, and his personal effects returned with a note, "To the widow of Lavoisier, who was falsely convicted". But the damage was done, let this be a lesson to us all.