How did the old timers design hulls

I think you may have the brothers mixed up.It was the hugely talented Nathanael who kept his sight and did the designing and his methodical and blind brother John who ran the business side of things.The two brothers had several siblings who had the misfortune to lose their sight.

 

YES, And maybe a little intuition added to that?

Can we compare it to Land Transportation and the the development of the wheel? I doubt that the first humans started by using random shapes or solid blocks to try to roll things, possibly The Next Step Up compared to sliding / dragging them?


Perhaps a rough concept of hull speed came early, with observations that adding rowers Beyond a certain point didn't help much with speed as compared to other things that could be done, like increasing the length?

That would be my two cents worth, anyway..

 

No, I do not have them mixed up. And Nathanael would agree with me. Beside the often made comment that no lines were finalized until JB approved them, NG himself complained that others in a biography of JB implied that "John’s success at every stage of his career was primarily dependent upon an associate; first his father, then Stone and finally Nat.". Where as the truth was "John’s strength of character and ability to “see” i.e. “think” through a problem better than anyone else in the room is not acknowledged." See the comments of the Curator of the Herreshoff Marine Museum & America's Cup Hall of Fame below.

April 2019 – Herreshoff Marine Museum & America's Cup Hall of Fame https://herreshoff.wordpress.com/2019/04/

 

I find that quite interesting.
One designer the consummate pragmatist, the other the artist with a flair.
One that produced designs that were open to interpretation by the builder, the other who would get close to the point of specifying how the slots in the screws should be lined up.
Both of them hold high honor from me in the design world.

 

Old timers based their designs on previous proven one. The improvements were usually done in small increments. The succesful designs and builds were made by people that took the time and effort to learn from the past; respectfully.

 

That link makes no mention of who carved anything.I am sure most of us would have considerable reserves of admiration for a man who overcame the loss of his sight in his teenage years and who then went on to run a very successful business.

I have in my house both L.F.Herreshoff's biography of his father and Constance Buell Burnett's "Let the Best Boat Win".Both are quite clear that the Herreshoff who carved half models was Nathanael.Which does make it clear that while the carving of half models was done by the sighted sibling,his blind brother may,or may not have used his renowned sense of touch to assess the result but he played no part in the actual carving.Which is what post #5 would erroneously suggest.

"They had their blind brother carve the hulls for them....(truth is stranger than fiction)."

 

Yep, basic genetic algorithm - If it came back to port, it had a better chance of being copied. There is a well-studied case of two fishing villages on opposite sides of a small peninsula. Both fished for the same fish in the same waters, but one had to sail around the little spit to get out to sea and the other harbor was more exposed and just headed straight out to sea. They were only a couple miles apart by land, but the boats looked totally different for a couple hundred years. On the return, one had to sail around the spit and then head upwind into a protected harbor, and the other had to get in to the harbor in confused tradewind-driven seas.

Also, the lead builders tended to be old sailors, so there was considerable selection pressure on the knowledge of construction as well as the prototype geometry.

 

"Every boat is copied from another boat... Let’s reason as follows in the manner of Darwin. It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages, and thus never be copied... One could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others."
Émile-Auguste Chartier

 

If only the same were true of ideas...

 

The link @jehardiman posted is really interesting. History is written after the fact - and by persons with positions, allegiances, and opinions. It's de-facto not objective. Very possible JB Herreschoff had an innate gift for understanding solutions to hydrodynamic and structural solutions to problems in his head, particularly as he'd had time to see much before he lost sight. Perhaps Nathaniel's gift for carving hull forms was not just a means of sharing information with JB, but a (genetic?) proclivity to thinking in 3D. In the end, who really cares who designed the boat? It's the methods developed and results that matter.

 

My understanding is that Nat was graduate of MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering, and L. Francis had a degree in, (dare I say it,) Agriculture, (jeepers, a farmer).
Anyway, both of them were always in search of lightweight construction and speed.
We know that to obtain both, that the highest standards of quality of materials and workmanship must be used.
That's one reason that their boats catered to the "carriage trade", to those who could afford a higher standard.
Nat would frequently make a scale model of some contraption and test it to destruction in order to verify that it would have the strengths necessary without a pound of extra weight.
He also developed his own published scantling rules for yacht construction, and in "Elements of Yacht Design", Francis Kinney wrote that one should not attempt to go lighter "lest the boat break up".
I've often thought that if they were in business today that both of them would be up to their elbows in high-tech laminates and all kinds of epoxy and adhesives.
Oh, the universal standard for rigging turnbuckles, (the open body forged bronze Merriman,) you can thank Nat for that.
In fact, Nat developed an early relationship with the Merriman brothers to produce much of the early bronze yacht hardware that was used on boats built by the Herreschoff Manufacturing Co.
Interesting that it was a "Manufacturing" company, not just a "Boat building" company.
Nat developed the process of "manufacturing" boats in an "assembly line" process, particularly for the various series of "one design" boats that frequently went to members of the New York Yacht Club, (the rich guys).
They also built their own steam engines.

 

He said he would never allow one of his designs to be built with frozen snot (fiberglass).

 

Yes, WP Stephens wrote about John's ability to see a hull's lines (and "see" is John's term) by feeling it from the inside.

 

I've seen comments somewhere that claim that Francis' opposition to GRP has become exaggerated by legend.

I've read most of the letters between Francis and his father on the Mystic Seaport site. Francis was often a fearful snob despite the fact that even in middle age he was often relying on his father's money. He, and others, had the strange characteristic of being very complimentary about the ability of the shipwrights of the day and very dismissive of their rights to a decent living; they were shocked that these excellent tradesmen should dare to think that they should be able to afford cars, for instance.

 

alden carved them, like i do