Industrializing American Shipbuilding: The Transformation of Ship Design and Construction, 1820-1920 (review)

Industrializing American Shipbuilding is an ambitious and detailed examination of the development of American ship design and construction during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thiesen is primarily interested in the design and construction of ship hulls, but he includes their propulsion systems in this study.

The thesis of the book can be quickly summarized. New technology led to the divergence of shipbuilding methods in Great Britain and America by the early nineteenth century. Thereafter American shipbuilding changed gradually until the 1880s, when the U.S. Navy transferred British methods of design to American shipyards. Those methods transformed shipbuilding into an engineering-based industry that borrowed not only new sources of power and machinery from other industries, but also new ways of organizing the shipyard and the flow of production in it.

Prior to 1775 wooden ships in Great Britain and North America were designed and built in ways similar to those used by medieval shipwrights. By the early nineteenth century, the British, faced with a shortage of wood, began building iron ships, aided by civil engineers with experience in designing iron bridges. Even though American shipbuilders soon began using iron, too, they designed and built iron ships much as they had wooden ships—relying on intuition and half-hull models instead of detailed drawings and mathematical calculations. It was not until the 1880s that Americans adopted the "theoretical" or "scientific" methods of design and construction used by the British.

The real strength of this book lies in Thiesen's understanding of nineteenth-century ships and shipbuilding. His discussion of the continuity between wooden and iron shipbuilding methods in America is fascinating and persuasive. He explains technical matters in ways that even I can understand. For example, in his chapter on "Building Iron Ships in a Wooden Shipbuilding Culture," he offers a marvelous description of the construction of the iron steamer Saratoga in the 1870s. As I read about the tools and methods used by different gangs of workmen to build this vessel, I could not help but compare and contrast what I was reading with the discussion of how wooden ships were built in the preceding two chapters.

I was less satisfied with the way in which Thiesen sometimes dealt with decisions to accept or reject new shipbuilding methods. He argues that congressional retrenchment after the Civil War brought on the navy's "Dark Ages." While true, that does not explain why only three of the twenty-two ships that the navy began building in this period had iron hulls. One must also take into account the failure of the Civil War monitor program and its effect on postwar technology—a topic explored by William H. Roberts (no relation to the reviewer) in his important study of Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Thiesen's discussion of the failure of the monitor program illustrates some of the drawbacks of building iron ships with wooden shipbuilding methods, yet makes no reference to Roberts or his argument.

In similar fashion, I thought the author could have done more with the transformation of the American shipbuilding industry. As part of "a long-term campaign to reform itself" (p. 143), the navy sent a few deserving young engineers and constructors overseas from 1880 until the mid-1890s for postgraduate study under scholars such as William H. White at the Royal School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. When these officers returned home, they not only helped to build the navy's first steel warships, but some of them also went on to run civilian shipyards. Others taught or directed ship design programs at schools such as M.I.T. and Cornell. In these and other ways, they introduced British methods of shipbuilding to America.

These officers might have found a less receptive audience upon their return, however...