William Froude was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 engineer, hydrodynamicist and naval architect

Naval architecture

Naval architecture is an engineering discipline dealing with the design, construction, maintenance and operation of marine vessels and structures. Naval architecture involves basic and applied research, design, development, design evaluation and calculations during all stages of the life of a...

. He was the first to formulate reliable laws for the resistance that water offers to ships (such as the hull speed

Hull speed

Hull speed, sometimes referred to as displacement speed, is the speed of a boat at which the bow and stern waves interfere constructively, creating relatively large waves, and thus a relatively large value of wave drag...

 equation) and for predicting their stability.
Froude was born at Dartington

Dartington

Dartington is a village in Devon, England. Its population is 1,917. It is located west of the River Dart, south of Dartington Hall and about two miles from Totnes...

, Devon

Devon

Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...

, England and was educated at Westminster School

Westminster School

The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain...

 and Oriel College, Oxford, graduating with a first

British undergraduate degree classification

The British undergraduate degree classification system is a grading scheme for undergraduate degrees in the United Kingdom...

 in mathematics in 1832.

His first employment was as a surveyor on the South Eastern Railway

South Eastern Railway (UK)

The South Eastern Railway was a railway company in south-eastern England from 1836 until 1922. The company was formed to construct a route from London to Dover. Branch lines were later opened to Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Canterbury and other places in Kent...

 which, in 1837, led to Brunel

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, FRS , was a British civil engineer who built bridges and dockyards including the construction of the first major British railway, the Great Western Railway; a series of steamships, including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship; and numerous important bridges...

 giving him responsibility for the construction of a section of the Bristol and Exeter Railway

Bristol and Exeter Railway

The Bristol & Exeter Railway was a railway company formed to connect Bristol and Exeter.The company's head office was situated outside their Bristol station...

. It was here that he developed his empirical method of setting out track transition curves and introduced an
alternative design to the helicoidal skew arch

Skew arch

A skew arch is a method of construction that enables an arch bridge to span an obstacle at some angle other than a right angle. This results in the faces of the arch not being perpendicular to its abutments and its plan view being a parallelogram, rather than the rectangle that is the plan view of...

 bridge at Rewe

Rewe

Rewe is a village and civil parish in the county of Devon in England. It lies on the river Culm, north of the city of Exeter and south of the town of Tiverton. Rewe is a linear village, with most of its buildings lying along the A396 road about north of the larger village of Stoke Canon...

 and Cowley Bridge Junction, near Exeter

Exeter

Exeter is a historic city in Devon, England. It lies within the ceremonial county of Devon, of which it is the county town as well as the home of Devon County Council. Currently the administrative area has the status of a non-metropolitan district, and is therefore under the administration of the...

.

At Brunel's invitation Froude turned his attention to the stability of ships in a seaway and his 1861 paper to the Institution of Naval Architects

Royal Institution of Naval Architects

The Royal Institution of Naval Architects is an international organisation representing naval architects. It is an international professional institution whose members are involved world-wide at all levels in the design, construction, repair and operation of ships, boats and marine...

 became influential in ship design. This led to a commission to identify the most efficient hull shape, which he was able to fulfil by reference to scale models: he established a formula (now known as the Froude number

Froude number

The Froude number is a dimensionless number defined as the ratio of a characteristic velocity to a gravitational wave velocity. It may equivalently be defined as the ratio of a body's inertia to gravitational forces. In fluid mechanics, the Froude number is used to determine the resistance of an...

) by which the results of small-scale tests could be used to predict the behaviour of full-sized hulls. His experiments were vindicated in full-scale trials conducted by the Admiralty

Admiralty

The Admiralty was formerly the authority in the Kingdom of England, and later in the United Kingdom, responsible for the command of the Royal Navy...

 and as a result the first ship test tank

Ship model basin

A ship model basin may be defined as one of two separate yet related entities, namely:* a physical basin or tank used to carry out hydrodynamic tests with ship models, for the purpose of designing a new ship, or refining the design of a ship to improve the ship's performance at sea;* the...

 was built, at public expense, at his home in Torquay. Here he was able to combine mathematical expertise with practical experimentation to such good effect that his methods are still followed today.

He died while on holiday (as an official guest of the Royal Navy) in Simonstown, South Africa and was buried there with full naval honours. He was the brother of James Anthony Froude

James Anthony Froude

James Anthony Froude , 23 April 1818–20 October 1894, was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church,...

, a historian, and Hurrell Froude, writer and priest. William was married to the former Catherine Henrietta Elizabeth Holdsworth, daughter of Dartmouth

Dartmouth, Devon

Dartmouth is a town and civil parish in the English county of Devon. It is a tourist destination set on the banks of the estuary of the River Dart, which is a long narrow tidal ria that runs inland as far as Totnes...

 Governor, mercantile magnate and member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

 Arthur Howe Holdsworth

Arthur Howe Holdsworth

Arthur Howe Holdsworth was a Devon merchant named Governor of Dartmouth Castle, a position held by his father Arthur from 1760 to 1777, in 1809. He was elected member of Parliament for Dartmouth in 1802, holding the seat until December 1819, when he vacated it in favour of Charles Milner Ricketts,...

.

External links

• http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Biographies/MainBiographies/F/Froude/1.html
• "Froude, William." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 29 April 2007.