654 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



necessary to apply to their designs such stability calculations 

 as had been rendered possible by the researches of mathema- 

 ticians. These were, for the most part, embalmed in abstruse 

 treatises, but had been, in the years 1860, 1861, and 1868, made 

 the subject of papers read before the Institution of Naval 

 Architects in London by Mr. F. K. Barnes, Dr. Woolley, and 

 Mr. E. J. Eeed. The paper read by the latter gentleman, 

 then Chief Constructor of the Navy, in 1868, was " on the 

 stability of monitors under canvas," and in it he showed the 

 danger of carrying canvas on low-sided vessels. A proposal 

 had been made to cut down some of our old wooden walls, to 

 add armour-plating to their sides, and to rig them for sea- 

 service. The " Captain" was projected by a naval officer as 

 a, rigged sea-going vessel to carry guns in round turrets above 

 a low freeboard. Mr. Eeed opposed both proposals ; but so 

 little value was attached to his calculations that the Admiralty 

 devoted the money for Captain Cowper Coles to go to a private 

 firm and get his vessel built. Controversy is probably dead 

 now as to the personal details, and I allude to them not for 

 the purpose of reviving them, but in order to emphasize the 

 danger of ignoring the warnings of science. 



In 1871 Mr. Barnaby, President of the Council of Con- 

 struction to the Admiralty, read a paper in which the following 

 paragraph occurs: "It is just three years since curves of 

 stability were first introduced to public notice in a paper read 

 here by the late Chief Constructor of the Navy. Few of us 

 supposed then that they would receive such a melancholy 

 notoriety as has since befallen them, and no one attached 

 ■enough importance to them to calculate them for an actual 

 ship until last August, when, unhappily, the curve only served 

 to show clearly why the ship was lost, instead of preventing 

 the calamity." 



The above quotation refers to the initiation of curves of 

 stability. It had been up to this time the practice at the 

 Admiralty to calculate the stability at 7° and 10° inclination, 

 and if satisfactory at these small angles the design was passed. 

 To construct the curve referred to by Mr. Barnaby it was 

 necessary to calculate the stability at several other and larger 

 angles of inclination. When the stability had been thus as- 

 certained the results were plotted upon a scale, and the line 

 drawn through the spots formed a " curve of stability " from 

 W'hich could be read off the stability at any other desired angle 

 within the limits for which it had been calculated. It will be 

 •seen that this development of the practice in 1868 was a most 

 important one, and that had it been applied to the case of the 

 " Captain " the peculiar danger to which she was subject 

 would have been observed, and a modification of the design 

 would probably have followed. 



