114 Transactions of the Royal Canadian Institute 



rough waters of Northern Europe and thoroughly suited for the condi- 

 tions which tViey had to encounter. The Vikings of that time dominated 

 not only their own waters but the English Channel and the seas around 

 Great Britain. Only about 900 A.D., when King Alfred the Great had 

 learned how to build better ships than those of the Vikings, did the British 

 Islanders show ability to cope with the Northmen, and the command of 

 the sea which Great Britain has held intermittently ever since dates 

 back to the improved ships of King Alfred. 



The ships of these ancient days were undoubtedly developed by 

 trial and error and built largely by rule of thumb. The science acquired 

 by each successive builder must have largely died with him. 



The application of science, as we now understand it, to naval archi- 

 tecture is not much more than one hundred and fifty years old, and the 

 progress of the application of science to shipbuilding du'ring the last sixty 

 years accompanying the development of iron and steel shipbuilding, has 

 been greater than that of all previous time. 



The French as early as the seventeenth century began applying the 

 science of mathematics to shipbuilding, but probably the first scientific 

 treatment of the whole subject was that of the famous Swedish naval 

 architect and shipbuilder, Henry de Chapman, who published a treatise 

 on shipbuilding in 1775. While English speaking people were leaders 

 in the art they seem to have long been rather backward in the science. 

 Fo,r instance, the dearth of scientific literature on shipbuilding in the 

 English language was so great that as late as 1820, Doctor Inman, the 

 head of the Royal Naval College and School of Naval Architects in 

 Portsmouth Dockyard, England, which was established about that time, 

 published a translation of Chapman's work, then nearly fifty years old, 

 for the instruction of English students of naval architecture. Chap- 

 man's work, as might be expected, consisted largely of empirical rules 

 and, although far in advance of his day and much of it still applicable 

 to sailing ships, many of his ideas are now known tb have been erroneous. 

 Toward the end of the sailing-ship era we find Ruskin summing up 

 an opinion of the ships of his day. In a famoute passage he said : 



"Take it all in all, a ship of the line is the most honorable thing 

 that man as a gregarious animal has ever produced. By himself, 

 unaided, he can do better things than ships of the line; he can do 

 poems and pictures and other combinations of what is best in him. 

 But as a being living in flocks and hammering out with alternate 

 strokes and mutual agreement what is necessary for him in those 

 places, to get or produce the ship of the line is his first work. Into 

 that he has put as much human patience, common sense, forethought, 

 experimental philosophy, self-control, habits of order and obedience, 



