there is a renaissance or efflorescence of ideas, a great expansion 

 of new things in the subject. 



I am thinking, for example, of what I might call the super 

 ship, changing very rapidly from ships whose tonnage was measured 

 in tens of thousands to ships whose tonnage is measured in hundreds 

 of thousands. I am thinking also of the fact that the hydrofoil has 

 come from being a curiosity to being a useful vessel not only in a 

 naval warfare sense but, as importantly, in the sense of transpor- 

 tation. I have been in several European cities in which the hydrofoil 

 is beginning to be part of the bus transportation of the city or the 

 region, and I think we shall see this more and more. As I look at 

 my own country and particularly my own locality of Washington DC 

 I know that we have available, already constructed by nature, a 

 number of highways that we do not use. You have begun to use them 

 in Europe with hydrofoils and I think this will spread all over the 

 world so that the waterways may become the autoroutes for many 

 places where it is possible to do this. 



Along with the hydrofoils we have begun to exploit the sur- 

 face effects vehicles in the same way, first for transportation, but 

 several navies are looking at them as possible advanced warships. 



As an entirely different trend of development, but also 

 important in the development of ships for the future and growing, 

 as far as I can tell, from the floating oil platform techniques which 

 Mr. Blancard has mentioned and separately coming together from a 

 very old technique, the catamaran, we have now the various versions 

 of what might be called low water plane catamaran or the semi- 

 submerged ship that are being looked at in several countries and 

 will probably have a place for ship transportation somewhere inter- 

 mediate between the monohull of the conventional type and the hydro- 

 foil or surface effect ship. But that, of course, remains for the 

 future and perhaps this is the first international symposium in which 

 that kind of ship will be discussed in some detail. 



These transportation modes, as I might call them, are all 

 obvious contributions not only to naval matters in the specific sense 

 but to ocean matters in the general transportation sense. This is 

 extremely important because for all the improvements in air trans- 

 portation still most of the trade and tonnage of the world moves by 

 sea and it appears to me that the laws of nature are such that this 

 will go on perhaps indefinitely, at least so far as aerodynamics do 

 not permit us to produce an aircraft which can go a long distance 

 and carry enough fuel to get back as well as any cargo, so that all 



