R.I.P. Jerry Milgram

Discussion in 'Boat Design' started by Lord Booster, Feb 27, 2022.

  1. Lord Booster
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    Lord Booster Junior Member

  2. wet feet
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    wet feet Senior Member

    May he indeed RIP. I remember his design Cascade tweaked the tail of the IOR establishment when shown to the world.He just identified a way to avoid some of the penalties by choosing a cat ketch and was rewarded with a hefty rating penalty for his creativity.
     
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  3. Lord Booster
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    Lord Booster Junior Member

    MIT professor Jerry Milgram's (RIP) response to the IOR rule. SORC
    Phil Uhl Photo, Cascade
    [​IMG]
    Log into Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/203537404677541/posts/429738472057432
     
  4. CT249
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    CT249 Senior Member

    While I love odd boats, I don't understand why Cascade is so often seen as a sort of hero that showed the IOR's faults. Yes, there was basically an error in the IOR's treatment of the cat ketch - but to a large extent, so what? As I understand it the IOR's formulation was a voluntary project. So OK, the architects missed a couple of things - but to me anyone who sits on the side and freely throws abuse at volunteers is generally basically a bit of a dill. I think Olin explained that they lifted that part of the rule from the CCA. Given the reality of volunteer work and the reality that if you make a rule longer people start whining it's pretty likely that something of the sort will happen. Of course you could make the rule more complex and develop it more slowly, but then the same people who whine about loopholes will whine about the rules being too complex and too slow.

    Milgrams' attitude was pretty selfish IMHO. When it was pointed out that Cascade could make thousands of existing boats obsolete he showed not the slighest comprehension or care for the effect that would have on many thousands of other people or the sport as a whole. If I recall correctly, he rejected any sort of compromise.

    If you take Milgram's attitude then if there was a printing error in the IOR that allowed a weird 80 footer that went as fast as a 30 footer but rated as a 25 footer, you'd just have to accept that such boats would be the only way to achieve success, even if that destroyed almost the whole sport.

    If we look at Cascade's performance, we see that she was really, really slow for her size. Some people talk about the fact that she didn't need a big genoa or spinnaker, but it we play with normal ORC/PHRF corrections we see that even if you took the genoa and spinnaker of a good conventional boat of the same length and era, Cascade would still be far slower most of the time.

    Cascade was a 37 footer that went like a 33 footer but rated like a 30 footer, which is not many people's definition of a good boat. She actually lost the US half ton championship against a Scampi 30 because she damaged rigging in one race and was beaten in light airs by another.

    But while Cascade was a slow 37, she was still fast enough that if she had not been penalised, she'd normally have beaten boats like the first Farr lightweights, the first Euro lightweights, Ganbare, etc. Is anyone really going to say that sailing would be better if instead of Ganbare, 45 Degrees South, Prospect of Ponsonby, Windward Passage, Improbable, Robber etc we'd have had fleets of bigger, slower cat ketches?
     
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  5. Lord Booster
    Joined: Dec 2021
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    Lord Booster Junior Member

    I really don't know. I guess the exploration of the IOR rule, in such cases as Cascade, is a kind of intellectual challenge. In the case of going for minimum beam in the America's Cup a similar intellectual challenge may have been at hand:
    "Doug Peterson (left) and Jerry Milgram, an ocean engineering professor at MIT, were part of the design team for America Cubed, which won the America's Cup in 1992.", see: Designer Doug PetersonWas A Change Agent https://www.soundingsonline.com/voices/designer-doug-peterson-was-a-change-agent
    [​IMG]
     
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