DEL DERECHO DE USUFRUCTO

1836–1900

ONE OF THE ADMIRABLE traditions of shipbuilding is that the credit for a new ship is given not to individuals

but collectively to the builders. Most naval architects have shared in the team pride as a ‘new-building’ leaves the yard for the sea. However, from time to time an individual ship is attributed publicly to her designer, and two notable examples come to mind, both ships with an imperishable name. The Clyde-built clipper ship Cutty Sark designed by Hercules Linton, and her most deadly rival, the Aberdeen built

Thermopylæ which came from the drawing board of Bernard Waymouth.

Hercules Linton was born in Inverbervie, a small town 40km (25 miles) south of Aberdeen, then in the County of Kincardineshire. Schooling was at the nearby village of Arbuthnott, and later at Arbroath Academy. His father had trained as a shipwright, and was an independent ship surveyor and was friendly with the Hall family of Aberdeen, the proprietors of the shipyard of Alexander Hall and Company, which had been founded in 1790. The first concrete evidence of Hercules Linton’s career is that on 1 January he was indentured to Alexander Hall and then served five years as an apprentice. Clearly his unusually late start did him little harm as he was ‘fast-tracked’ for promotion and rose to a position of some responsibility within the company. Hall’s were a distinguished yard, having in 1840 built the Scottish

Maid, the forerunners of the Aberdeen Clippers, and during the period Linton served there (from 1855 to

c 1863) he had wide experience working on their considerable output including several full-rigged ships like the Robin Hood and the Friar Tuck for the China tea trade.

Small, fine -line d and with a sharp e ntry, Cutty Sark was what has come to be de fine d as an e xtre me clippe r, a spe cialist ship built for spe e d in the valuable China te a trade . This was at a time whe n the de ve lopme nt of ste am and the building of the Sue z Canal

sounde d the de ath-kne ll of the fast sailing ship. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, PO2414)

A few years later he moved into the service of the Liverpool Underwriters’ Registry as a surveyor, ultimately becoming an independent surveyor and working from time to time with Lloyd’s Register. During this period, and while he resided in Glasgow, he became friendly with a much younger man, William Dundas Scott. They decided to enter shipbuilding as partners and after looking at various sites, settled on Dumbarton and rented a part of the Wood Yard of William Denny’s shipyard. Linton’s duties were to handle the design and construction, while Scott was to deal with office and engineering matters. The yard, which commenced operations on Whitsunday 1868, had ceased operations by January 1870, but despite this had built seven ships and nearly completed two others in that very short period and with a

turnover of something close to £40,000. It is said that Scott’s ineptitude was the main cause of the cash- flow problems that beset them from the beginning, as the quality of work was good. Incidentally their fourth contract was an early ‘knock-down’ hull for the Japanese, then a new and growing market.

Scott and Linton, the name of this short-lived shipyard, will be inscribed forever in the shipbuilding halls of fame, as they were the main constructors of the composite-built tea clipper Cutty Sark. The order was placed under quite punishing terms at a mere £17 per ton, for a composite hull formed of iron skeletal framework with timber hull sheathing and decks of timber of the highest quality. (Generally the Aberdeen yards had better rates, were in areas with lower labour costs, had completed several hundred large sailing ships, and had a great deal of experience under their belts.) Despite the novelty of the work all proceeded well, except that some costly additions were demanded during construction, and that nearing completion time, Scott and Linton had to borrow from creditors including Matthew Paul, marine engineer and Provost of Dumbarton. It is said that Paul and the Denny’s made it difficult for the new shipyard to remain open, and in the end the company was declared bankrupt, the Cutty Sark was towed across to Denny’s outfit quay and completed there at the end of November 1869. At the end of the whole sorry proceedings it became clear that the forced liquidation of Scott and Linton had been a mistake, as no-one gained anything from the action, and an up-and-coming shipyard had been obliterated.

Hercules Linton continued as a surveyor, working in Glasgow, Aberdeen and the British east coast. Life was quite difficult until he was discharged from the bankruptcy proceedings, but ultimately worked freelance for Gourlay’s of Dundee and then T R Oswald of Pallion, Sunderland, a yard which was later to continue under a different guise as Oswald Mordaunt at Woolston, Southampton. Linton worked at Woolston from 1880 until 1884, during a period of quite innovative shipbuilding. Hercules Linton’s wife died in 1885, leaving him with nine surviving children. Ultimately he returned to the north-east coast of Scotland, settling in Inverbervie where he was a town councillor from 1895 until his death in May 1900. Outside ship design he was a respected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and contributed regularly at their meetings and in their Proceedings. Despite public duties and family affairs, the foreclosure of Scott and Linton was a desperate tragedy which hung over the rest of his life. On a happier note, in a memoir written by his daughter, she mentions that his last years were peaceful and he died as he would have wished on 15 May 1900, seated at the fireside reading The Glasgow

Herald. SOURCES: Brettle, Robert E The Cutty Sark: Her Designer and Builder Hercules Linton Cambridge, 1969 Lubbock, Basil The Log of the Cutty Sark Glasgow, 1924

Wilhelm Bauer

1822–1875 ONE OF THE MOS T inspired engineers of the midnineteenth century, Wilhelm Bauer left a legacy of bright and

stimulating ideas and experiments which were all worthy of closer examination. Possibly his greatest claim to fame is that in 1850, when just twenty-eight years old, he produced a working submarine.

Bauer (the son of an NCO in a Bavarian regiment) was noted for his mechanical ability as well as a lifelong interest in maritime affairs. He learned the trade of a turner, but in May 1840, being unable to find work, followed his father into the army. He was posted to the war zone of Schleswig-Holstein, that part of the peninsula of Jutland which for years had been contested by Prussia and Denmark. Here Bauer had

been amazed at the efficiency of the Royal Danish Navy and in the course of time felt that the only way to neutralise its ships would be by having vessels able to attack them from underwater. The politics of this part of the world were complicated, but it is sufficient to say that on peace being declared between Denmark and the future Germany, a further battle continued between Denmark and powers in Schleswig- Holstein that were looking for independence. Bauer threw in his lot with the latter and persuaded them that he could build a submarine.

With contributions from friends and from sources within the army a working model was constructed and then between 1850 and 1851 a fullsized boat was manufactured at Kiel. As ever, the construction had been compromised by cost-cutting, and on the first dive the boat Brandtaucher, as it had been named, took on too much ballast water and stuck on the bottom. With the hull leaking, Bauer calmed his two companions and they waited some hours till the pressure inside and outside the hull equalised and then using a shell door opening from the inside were able to make their escape in a rush of compressed air. Undoubtedly the first submarine escape!

Bauer then tried to interest the Austrians in his submarine designs, but to no avail, and then again the British where despite an introduction to Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, nothing was forthcoming. A short time after he travelled to Russia, where in 1855 under his direction a 15.8m (51ft 10in) submarine was built in St Petersburg. After being named Le Diable Marin (French was the language of the Russian Court), it was transported the 32 km (20 miles) west to the naval base at Kronstadt and there went through a total of 144 trials, some of which had limited success, including the one when Bauer spent fours hours under water during the coronation of Tsar Alexander II. However, everything ended when the boat finally sank for good, fortunately without loss of life. Bauer returned to Germany and produced many original ideas, most of which are beautifully drawn and recorded. In 1870 he drew up the plans of a helicopter-like flying machine called the Deutscher Adler. It was not dissimilar to the helicopter built and flown at the Denny Shipyard of Dumbarton shortly after 1905. In 1861 he was asked to raise the mailship Ludwig which had sunk in Lake Constance; for this successful operation he used two ships acting as camels, hundreds of empty barrels and two steam tugs. It was reported, however, that the costs of the recovery outweighed the receipts from the sale of the Ludwig and all the associated gear. As a postscript the former German submarine U-2540, which was built at Hamburg in 1945, has been restored and renamed Wilhelm Bauer. She is preserved afloat at Bremerhaven. SOURCES: Denny, Dumbarton 1844–1932 Wm Denny and Bros Ltd, 1932 Science and Technology in 19th Century Germany (Exhibition Handbook of Goethe-Institut, London, 1982)

Jakob Amsler-Laffon

1823–1912

THE BEAUTIFUL LAKES of Switzerland are host to fleets of elegant and well-operated excursion steamers; the

country has a sizeable merchant marine operating worldwide and a great tradition of marine engineering. However, the success of Swiss naval architects is legendary, and in this field the contribution of Jakob Amsler was supreme. His mathematical research was nothing short of fundamental in the development of naval architecture, and until the 1970s, the family name was known in every ship design office throughout the world.

At the General Meeting of the Institution of Naval Architects in their old headquarters at Adelphi Terrace, London, in 1884, seven papers – a remarkable number on ship stability – were presented. This

upsurge in research was the inevitable reflection on the mounting ship losses of the time, culminating in the disastrous capsize of the SS Daphne after her launch into the Clyde in 1883. One of the papers at this

historic gathering was presented by an Associate, Dr A Amsler from Switzerland, who described the Integrator designed by his father, an instrument which had eased and transformed the work of naval architects in preceding years, and which enabled extremely accurate stability information to be obtained. Using both integrators and planimeters, high-quality work was assured provided the ship plans were drawn to exacting standards. In the discussion following Dr Amsler’s paper, Mr R E Froude, speaking on behalf of the Admiralty Experiment Tank at Torquay, said: ‘We use almost nothing else for calculations of displacement, and hardly ever use the [Simpson’s] rule at all … we have found the planimeter calculation to be more correct than the rule …’. Presumably there was pressure at Torquay to spend more time on resistance, propulsion and similar matters, and the planimeter, which saved time, had become their first choice for working on hull hydrostatics and stability.

A Polar Planime te r de signe d to calculate the are a within an irre gular shape , by tracing the outline of the shape and the n noting the diffe re nce in the dial re ading. This figure , whe n multiplie d by a pre viously-calculate d constant, give s the are a within the

shape . (Author)

The man who developed and marketed the planimeter was Jakob Amsler. Born into a farming family in Switzerland, he grew up in Stalden, a town on the banks of the River Rhone. Then as now, Swiss education was excellent, and Amsler qualified to enter the University of Jena to study divinity, but later on changing to another German university, that of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), he developed a passion for mathematics and physics, and in the fullness of time returned to his native country with a science doctorate. After working for a year at the Geneva Observatory he moved to Zurich to teach and then moved again to the north of Switzerland and the Gymnasium at Schaffhausen where he had time to engage in mathematical research. It was here that he learned of the pioneering work of Poisson and others in the early years of the nineteenth century, and must have been shown the earliest-known planimeter which it is believed was invented in 1814. The planimeter is an instrument where a tracing arm, taken round the outline of an irregular plane shape, records the area within the boundary.

The year 1854 was of considerable importance, as it was then that Amsler took the matter further by inventing the polar planimeter, and it was also the year of his marriage to Elise Laffon, the daughter of a prominent scientist. It has been suggested that he adopted the name Amsler-Laffon to reap the benefit of this marital connection, but it is more likely to have been no more than a courtesy to his wife in a country with a tradition of using both surnames in marriage. This is borne out by the fact that his sons did not

follow this tradition and reverted to the name Amsler. In the year of his marriage, he set up a workshop for precision mathematical instruments at Schaffhausen, and this became his main source of income. In the first thirty years of operation alone over 12,000 planimeters were produced and sold all over the world. Sales remained buoyant for years through careful marketing, high-quality construction and reasonable cost. In time his eldest son Dr Albert Amsler (1857–1940, and an associate of the INA) became involved and the father-and-son team produced some remarkable instruments including not just planimeters but also integrators and integraphs. Among the most advanced instruments were planimeters which were able to measure areas from maps produced in turn from unusual projections not necessarily giving true areas on their expanded profiles. The young Dr Amsler is known to have worked for a while in the Scientific Department of Denny’s Dumbarton shipyard.

Jakob Amsler, a former candidate for the Church who was to find his true vocation in science, died after a long and productive life in 1912 at Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Nowadays planimeters are rarely used, but with the growing importance of collections of scientific memorabilia, the name Amsler is unlikely to be forgotten. SOURCES: Amsler, A ‘On the Uses of J Amsler-Laffon’s Integrator in Naval Architecture’, Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects Vol 25 (1884) Baxandall, D (revised by Pugh, Jane) Calculating Machines and Instruments Catalogue of the Science Museum, London, 1975 Robb, A M Theory of Naval Architecture London, 1952 In Chapter 2 of this wide ranging text book, clear descriptions with background theory are given on planimeters, integrators and other instruments.

Frederick Kynaston Barnes

1828–1908

FREDERICK BARNES WAS one of the first eight Dockyard employees to attend the Admiralty ‘second’ school of

naval architecture at Portsmouth, an opportunity which he grasped with both hands, graduating with distinction.

Barnes was born in Pembroke in 1828, commenced training at Pembroke Dockyard sixteen years later and then in 1848 was selected as one of the eight men to study at Portsmouth under the Rev Joseph Woolley, formerly of Cambridge, and left in 1851 as a prizeman. He spent his whole career working for the Admiralty, rising steadily in rank and acclaim. In 1864 he was one of three Constructors reporting directly to Sir Edward Reed and from 1872 until 1886 when he retired he held the appointment of Surveyor of Dockyards, a post then changed to Director of Dockyards.

His great legacy to the Navy was the introduction of the systematic study of and the testing of ships using the Stability Experiment (better known as the Inclining Experiment). In 1853 he was asked to conduct inclining tests on a series of ships, starting with HM S Perseverance which had capsized at

Woolwich. This laid down a formal and disciplined approach to the subject through which he became well acquainted with George Atwood’s ‘transfer of wedges’ theory. The calculations for this had been cumbersome, but after careful study, Barnes introduced a simplified method which was used by some naval architects up until the twentieth century. He was a regular contributor to learned journals and was one of the ‘four’ who contributed to Professor Rankine’s illustrious tome on shipbuilding. In 1860 he was

one of the signatories of the memorandum setting up the INA.

He was well-liked and with his fellow ‘second’ school contemporaries had considerable influence in the final establishment of the Royal School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at South Kensington in 1864. He died at Llandridod Wells in 1908. SOURCES: Barnes, F K Five papers (four on stability) published in the Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects Vols 1–7 (1860–6) Rankine, W J M, Watts, I, Napier, J R, and Barnes F K Shipbuilding, Theoretical and Practical London, 1866

Samuel Plimsoll

1824–1898

IT IS REMARKABLE THAT Samuel Plimsoll (remembered as the ‘Sailors’ Friend’), and a man destined to leave

his name stamped imperishably in the shipping and shipbuilding world, had little connection with the sea for the first forty years of his life. One of a large family, he was born in Bristol, spending his first four years there, followed by ten in Penrith. When he was fourteen, the family moved to Sheffield and a year later he obtained his first job with a local firm of solicitors, but after two years become a clerk to a brewery. With the death of his father, Samuel moved house again, where he had considerable responsibility for his five younger siblings, as by this time six older ones had flown the nest. The family were close knit and as active members of the Congregational Church practised kindness and showed social responsibility. While still a humble clerk and in his twenties, Samuel undertook two mammoth tasks. The first was acting as Honorary Secretary to the Sheffield committee for the 1851 Exhibition and organising the city’s stand at the Crystal Palace. The second task, raising a relief fund for the widows and orphans of a colliery disaster, typified his concern for others.

Mode rn load line s, ofte n re fe rre d to as ‘Plimsoll Marks’ and found on all me rchant ships, be came compulsory thanks to the e fforts of Samue l Plimsoll. The e xample he re shows line s for tropical fre sh wate r (TF), fre sh wate r (F), tropical se a wate r (T),

summe r se a wate r (S), winte r se a wate r (W), and winte r North Atlantic wate r (WNA). (Author)

In 1853, he moved to London and set up as a coal merchant, working from a room in the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street. Fortune did not smile on him for some years, and he experienced the pain and humiliation of bankruptcy, made even harder by suspension from his Church at that time. However,

business was to improve, the suspension was rescinded and following his marriage he bought a large

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