Bridging the Seas

"Bridging the Seas portrays the rise of naval architecture as an integral part of the Industrial Age, describing how shipbuilders, ship owners and navies sponsored and incorporated ship theory into design and engineering in order to gain a competitive edge over their adversaries. It picks up the history of naval architecture where his previous book, Ships and Science, left off: at the turn of the 19th century, when the structures of Europe's Scientific Revolution came crashing down as the result of the Napoleonic Wars, while a new British-dominated Industrial Revolution was restructuring commerce and empires around the world. Bridging the Seas frames these developments around the fundamental change in shipbuilding from sail and wood to steam, iron and steel. Bridging the Seas shows that the introduction of steam, iron and steel required new rules for designing and building ships, which meant that characteristics of performance had to be first measured (e.g., horsepower), followed by new theories developed to predict them. The book then explores how ship theory led to quantifiable standards that would ensure adequate safety and quality as demanded by industry and governments, and how this in turn led to the professionalization of naval architecture as an engineering discipline. The book considers the changeover from laissez-faire research in naval architecture in the 19th century, to more structured approaches in government-sponsored testing tanks and laboratories in the 20th-century. Finally, it shows how computer-aided design has altered the social order of engineering design and project management, and how those changes will likely affect the discipline of naval architecture at the dawn of 21st-century Information Age."