William Froude

William Froude (born November 28, 1810, Dartington, Devon, England—died May 4, 1879, Simon’s Town, South Africa) was an English engineer and naval architect who influenced ship design by developing a method of studying scale models propelled through water and applying the information thus obtained to full-size ships. He discovered the laws by which the performance of the model could be extrapolated to the ship when both have the same geometrical shape. A similar technique later was used by pioneers in aerodynamics.

Educated at Westminster School and Oriel College, Oxford, Froude worked as a railway engineer until 1846, when he began his work on ship hydrodynamics. He learned that rolling of ships can be reduced with a deep bilge keel, a finlike projection stretching horizontally along both sides of a ship below the waterline. The device was adopted by the Royal Navy.

After serving in 1868 on a committee to study naval design, he proposed to the British Admiralty a series of experiments using models to determine the physical laws governing full-scale ships. His proposals were accepted in 1870, and at Froude’s home near Torquay a model-testing tank was built. He discovered that the chief components of resistance to motion are skin friction and wave formation.