Industrializing American Shipbuilding: The Transformation of Ship Design and Construction (review)

William Thiesen has studied ships and shipbuilding from many different angles and the richness of his knowledge is reflected throughout this pathbreaking study of American shipbuilding. Thiesen has worked as an apprentice shipwright and a mate on a Maine schooner; studied maritime history and nautical archaeology at East Carolina University; completed his doctoral studies and written the dissertation on which this book is based in the University of Delaware's Hagley Program in the History of Technology; and served as curator and director of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum. His multiple perspectives have enabled him to construct an insightful, informative, and well-documented history of the rise of industrial shipbuilding in the United States. Far from being yet another catalog of places, people, and vessels, Thiesen's book is maritime and technological history at its best. It commands attention and rewards it with understanding.

After beginning with a brief chapter on "the origins of practical [i.e., wooden] shipbuilding methods," Thiesen describes "the growth of scientific shipbuilding in Great Britain." Here he makes the important point that the British advocates of "scientific shipbuilding" were not trying to develop a deductive theory of their art, but were, rather, trying to "base naval architecture on the rationalism of system and mathematics" (p. 16). Leading British shipbuilders focused their attention on hull design and built model basins to test resistance and stability. In chapter 3 these nineteenth-century advances in Great Britain are contrasted with practical shipbuilding as it had developed in the United States.

The next three chapters pick up the story in the United States. Chapter 4 describes "the golden era of urban American shipbuilding," the age of globe-ranging wooden-hulled sailing ships. The next chapter describes how the Civil War transformed American shipbuilding and how shipyards responded to the demand for iron-hulled and steam-powered ships. But after the Civil War, as Thiesen points out in chapter 6, there was little pressure for continued innovation. It was an era in which the U.S. Navy stagnated and the American merchant marine retreated from international competition, and the practices employed in American shipyards became increasingly archaic.

The turnaround came in the 1870s, when the founders of the U.S. Naval Institute and advocates of Admiral Alfred Mahan's theory of sea power began to reinvigorate the U.S. Navy. Suddenly mastering the advanced methods of shipbuilding developed in Europe became important, and model basins were constructed, naval architecture programs were begun at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and elsewhere, and the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers was founded. Thiesen emphasizes the importance of this turning point by saying that the "systematic approach," which we consider the method of modern naval architecture, did not emerge as an outgrowth of American industrialization. It was a "strategic response by the navy to the rapid advances in weapons technology being developed overseas in the late nineteenth century" (p. 167). Whereas the British had developed naval architecture and modern methods of shipbuilding primarily to meet commercial challenges within merchant shipping, in America this shift was driven by naval demands. This is an important conclusion, for it challenges several assumptions widely held by American naval historians, maritime historians, and historians of technology.

Thiesen's final chapter, "The New American Style of Shipbuilding," carries the story up to World War I and anticipates the enormous naval and merchant shipbuilding programs of World War II. Once the United States had committed itself to an overseas war, and in World War II to a two-ocean war, the nation had to ramp up its naval and merchant shipbuilding to an unprecedented degree. These heroic building programs have long dominated histories of the American navy and merchant marine in the first half of the twentieth century. Now that we have Thiesen's work, however, if we want to understand how the technology of shipbuilding in America evolved, we must learn to see it...