What was the biggest step forward in boat design or building?

The title says it.Your opinions please,was it moving from dugouts to planked hulls? The acceptance of planing hulls? Foiling sailboats?The replacement of sail for shipping?Metal ships?

 

Without a doubt, the transition from sail to steam, in the sphere of shipping

 

The development of sufficiently sophisticated communication (language) to allow collaborative effort, sharing of ideas and specialisation.

 

Navigation (Vikings) and Sail-to-Steam.
So two, it was a tie for me.

 

A very good point.It must also have occurred in several places rather than rippling out from one location.In a slightly different sense it is also a development that enables us to discuss such notions here via the medium of 0's and 1's.

 

Eureka!

You know what I'm talking about. Engineering and design of boats has been influenced by that moment right up to today and will be as long as boats float.

-Will

 

1) The concept that things that float can support things that don't float.

2) The concept that the load capacity of materials that float can be increased by shaping the floating body.

3) The concept that materials that don't float can be shaped in such a way that they do float.

 

I think it is the modern screw propeller. Prior to it's development, which people struggled with for centuries in one way or another, all we had was oars, paddle wheels and sails.

 

Internal combustion with a rotary screw or the modern container.

 

Steam was the greatest quantum leap in transport and industrialization, otherwise it would be sails on the water, or animals, windmills and watermills on land.

 

If you look at disruptive advancements, early boats had to compete with caravans for coastal and long distance transport. This was easy in the Mediterranean where the water route was maybe a tenth the land route. This was not so easy from Shanghai to the Malabar Coast.

Boats had to defend themselves and their cargo. Being able to construct seagoing vessels that could house 100 people for 3 months was necessary for basic cargo security. Once you could house an army, you could compete with long distance caravans that had been the standard shipping option for hundreds of years.

Now all you had to do was navigate the seas and oceans for a few months. The Arabs had some tricks for doing that that gave then a complete lock on ship navigation for about 150 years. For a while, the richest man on Earth controlled a stretch of the Silk Road to the far east in what is now Afghanistan - until boats undercut him. When you take down the richest guy on earth, that tends to be important. Seagoing trade connecting the orient to India, Africa, and eventually Europe, utterly changed life for quite a lot of the people on the planet.

So with navigation, a boat could arrive at the intended destination after months at sea, and when boats became floating fortified caravanserai, their cargo could arrive at the intended destination too.

Ever since then, it has just been a matter of boats competing with other boats. Boats got better in fits and starts, but boats have ruled supreme since the 15th century.

 

I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned the big step of being able to join pieces so that boats could be longer,wider and deeper than the biggest tree in the vicinity of the piece of water it would be used on.

 

Life rafts / life boats

 

I'm surprised you didn't say "steel", Wynand N, it certainly changed the practical size of vessels dramatically