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Technology and Culture, Volume 52, Number 2, April 2011, pp. 335-359(Article)

P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/tech.2011.0055

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With our new name for the research note, Inside the Black Box, we highlightthe special character (and appeal) of these articles: their tight focus on partic-ular artifacts, historical moments, or debates within the field. This month wehave a supplemental way to see inside the black box—visit etc.technologyandculture.net for a slide show on the history of the bulbous bow with additionalimages and narration by Dr. Ferreiro—Ed.

The bulbous bow is the most visible technological artifact of contemporarynaval architecture. The ISO bulbous-bow symbol is seen on every type ofvessel, from passenger ships to crude oil carriers (fig. 1). The modernunderwater bulb that projects from the front of the ship partially cancelsout waves formed at the bow, thereby reducing resistance and improvingefficiency. But the use of projecting bulbs on ships dates back to antiquity.Despite the continuity of the artifact itself, both the purpose and percep-tion of the bulbous bow have changed over the years.1

Its first incarnation was as the ram, the iconic weapon of Greek andRoman war galleys, but its utility faded with the rise of gun-carrying sailingwarships. Reborn during the 1800s in the image of those galleys, the ram be-came the weapon of choice for early ironclads of limited firepower. Its sym-

Dr. Ferreiro is a naval architect and historian of science, technology, and engineering. Heis currently director of research at the Defense Acquisition University (Ft. Belvoir, Vir-ginia), and adjunct professor of systems engineering at The Catholic University in Wash-ington, D.C. His book Ships and Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the ScientificRevolution, 1600–1800 (2007) received the North American Society for Oceanic HistoryJohn Lyman Award for best book in science and technology. Dr. Ferreiro thanks themany people who provided information and insights for this article, including T&C edi-tor Suzanne Moon and the three anonymous referees. He reserves special thanks forHitoshi Narita and Takao Inui.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.0040-165X/11/5202-0006/335–59

1. The idea of tracing the evolution of the bulbous bow from the ram to the mod-ern Inui bulb is not new; see, for example, Erwin Strohbusch, “Vorstevenformen undBugwulst,” Marine-Rundschau 73 (1976): 210–16, which gives a concise technical over-view of these developments.

I N S I D E T H E B L A C K B O X

The Social History of the Bulbous Bow

L A R R I E D . F E R R E I R O

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bolic hold over naval planners and pundits as the emblem of Roman-eraheroism ensured its continued existence, even as it became obvious that theram was deadlier in accident than in war, and long after warships hadacquired the improved gunnery that made ramming an anachronism. In theearly twentieth century, a new type of bulbous bow—the bulbous fore-foot—became the maritime equivalent of Art Deco streamlining that cap-tured the public imagination. The modern Inui bulb found on almost everyvessel is held up as the embodiment of applied science in contemporaryshipbuilding, although the danger of wreaking severe underwater damagewhen one ship accidentally rams another remains a major problem.

This article examines both the social and cultural contexts in which thebulbous bow has evolved over the course of three millennia. “Guns, likeeverything else, have their social history,” noted John Ellis in The Social His-tory of the Machine Gun. In the years since Ellis’s groundbreaking study, his-torians have been investigating and retelling the social and cultural storiessurrounding technological artifacts. The works of Wiebe Bijker and TrevorPinch, in particular, have examined the social factors that influence the

FIG. 1 Bulbous bow on a Chinese merchant ship, with the international symbolfor bulbous bows (ISO standard 6050:1987) just to the left of the anchor.(Source: Alexandre Sheldon-Duplaix.)

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course of their technological development; other authors, notably EricSchatzberg, demonstrate how technologies can be shaped by culture andideology.2 The case of the bulbous bow shows how, during the nineteenthcentury, the cultural symbolism attached to the ram inspired a militarymindset that rejected firepower in favor of the nautical equivalent of thebayonet charge; and in the modern age, how its imagery as a work of bothaesthetic and scientific progress has all but blinded the public to its poten-tial as an unintended weapon.

The Bow as a Weapon: The Ram in the Era of Oared Warships

The origins of the ram bow are only sketchily known. It was used as aweapon only in Mediterranean fleets, such as those of Greece, Phoenicia, andRome.3 Iconographic representations of ships with elongated bows date backas far as circa 1200 BCE, although the earliest known mentions of the rambow in battle are from circa 535 BCE.4 The most famous type of ram warshipwas the trieres (better known as the trireme), with three banks of oarsmen toprovide the speed necessary to punch a hole in an enemy ship (typically fromfour to eight knots). At the battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, the effectiveness ofthe ram was demonstrated when roughly 380 Greek triremes defeated aflotilla of about a thousand Persian and Phoenician galleys, which were builtnot for ramming, but rather for grappling and boarding.

By the time of Salamis, the design of the ram bow was fairly standard-ized. Made of cast bronze, the rams varied in length and weight based uponthe size of the vessel (roughly 200 kilograms for a trireme) and were stur-dily fixed to the keel structure to absorb the shock of holing the enemy ves-sel near the waterline (fig. 2). They were cast with three horizontal fins that

2. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (New York, 1975), quote on 9.See also, for example, Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., TheSocial Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); and Eric Schatz-berg,Wings of Wood,Wings of Metal (Princeton, N.J., 1998). For comparisons to culturalhistory, see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transforma-tion (Chicago, 2005); and Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004).

3. The ram was apparently unique to navies operating in the calm waters of theMediterranean. It does not appear in any known Nordic vessels (thanks to Fred Hockerof the Vasa Museum, Stockholm, for confirming this), nor did Asian navies adopt it as aprimary fighting weapon (see, for example, Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation inChina, vol. 4: Physics and Physical Technology, pt. 3, “Civil Engineering and Nautics”[Cambridge, 1971], 678–82).

4. The state powers necessary to organize the investment in manning, training, andlogistics to successfully use the ram did not appear much before the fifth century BCE. SeeHerman T. Wallinga, Ships and Sea-Power before the Great Persian War: The Ancestry ofthe Ancient Trireme (Leiden, Netherlands, 1993), 20; and Samuel Mark, “The EarliestNaval Ram,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 37 (2008): 253–72, at 269–70.The ram’s origins are still debated by scholars; compare Samuel Mark,Homeric Seafaring(College Station, Tex., 2005), 104–14, 185–86, with Wallinga, 38.



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would break apart the longitudinal planking of the rammed ship, yet wouldpenetrate only to a shallow depth so that they could be extricated by back-ing oars. Rams were typically the only part of a trireme that was retrievedfor reuse when it was demolished at the end of its life.5

The act of ramming involved not speed, but intricate maneuvering, re-quiring close coordination of the oarsmen to rapidly changing commandsand a keen eye to judge distance and angle of attack. Oared warships werehighly vulnerable to having their oars swept away by an attacking ship, sothe typical fleet formation consisted of ships in a tight line abreast to pro-tect one another’s flanks. Opposing fleets attempted to outflank or breakthrough the lines to attack individual vessels.6

In spite of the well-known Greek successes with triremes, the Romannavy was slow to adopt the ram. In its first major sea battle with Carthage in260 BCE, Roman warships equipped with grappling bridges acted more astroop transports to attack and board the ram-bowed Carthaginian galleys.Although the tactics of the Roman admiral Gaius Duilius carried the day, theRomans themselves were impressed with the Carthaginian rams and erecteda pair of triumphal columns to Duilius on which the bronze rams of cap-tured vessels were mounted. The Romans also used the knowledge gleanedfrom these captured ships to commence building ram fleets of their own.

The ram bow was soon a standard feature on Roman warships acrossthe Mediterranean, becoming the most recognizable symbol of naval might

5. Robert Gardiner, ed., The Age of the Galley: Mediterranean Oared Vessels since Pre-Classical Times (London, 1995). In 1985 the Greek navy co-sponsored the constructionof a replica trireme, named the Olympias, designed by the late British naval constructorJohn F. Coates; see John S. Morrison, John F. Coates, and N. Boris Rankov, The AthenianTrireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient GreekWarship (Cambridge, 2000).

6. John S. Morrison, Greek and Roman Oared Warships (Oxford, 1996), 360–69;André Wegener Sleeswyk, “Ramming Trim of Ships,” Tropis 4 (1991): 429–49.

FIG. 2 The ram bow of Olympias, a modern replica of a Greek trireme.(Source: Ford Weiskittel/Trireme Trust USA.)


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in the ancient world. Bronze rams from captured warships were promi-nently displayed on many public monuments, especially in the Roman Em-pire; our word “rostrum,” meaning public-speaking platform, came fromthe main speaker’s platform in Rome, to which were affixed six bronzerams (called “beak,” or “rostrum,” in Latin) from a battle fought in 338 BCE.Coins and friezes from around the Mediterranean often depicted the rambow as the symbol of naval power, in lieu of depicting the entire warship;the most famous example of this symbolism is today in the Louvre, wherethe Winged Victory of Samothrace (ca. 180 BCE) stands impressively atopthe massive ram bow of a galley. But perhaps the most remarkable expres-sion of the ram’s importance was the monument commemorating the vic-tory of Octavian’s fleet over Antony and Cleopatra near Actium (in mod-ern Greece) in 31 BCE. The Campsite Memorial, overlooking the site ofbattle, had one massive stone wall prominently sporting twenty-threebronze rams from the enemy fleets (fig. 3).7

7. On the public displays of captured ram bows, see William M. Murray and Pho-

FIG. 3 Reconstruction of the Actium Campsite Memorial, with the capturedbronze rams of Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet. (Source: William M. Murray.)



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The end of the Roman Empire and the rise of Byzantium saw a markedchange in the nature of naval warfare. The manpower-intensive galleyswith multiple tiers of oarsmen gave way to smaller, single-banked vesselswith sails that could be quickly lowered for battle. The waterline ram wasgradually replaced by an above-water, iron-tipped spur, which was nolonger a ship-killing weapon, but a means of locking one ship to another inpreparation for boarding. With the introduction of gunpowder during the1400s, even this vestige of the ancient ram bow began to disappear. In theBattle of Lepanto in 1571—the last great battle between oared warships—it was not ramming, but rather a combination of cannon, small arms, andboarding tactics that gave the Venetian, Spanish, and Genoese fleets a deci-sive victory over the Ottomans. The cannon-armed sailing warship becamethe means of projecting power at sea, putting an end to the ram for overtwo centuries.8

The Bow as a Weapon: The Ram in the Era of Iron and Steam

Even in the modern era, the ancient tactic of ramming was never farfrom the minds of naval officers.Nicolas-Hippolyte Labrousse was a brillianttwenty-two-year-old lieutenant in the French Navy when in 1839 he wit-nessed the trials of the British steamship Archimedes, one of the first to usethe newfangled screw propeller. He quickly realized that this new method ofpropulsion, independent of wind and tide, could be harnessed to turn theship into a ram like that of the Greek and Roman galleys. Labrousse draftedhis ideas the following year in a widely read memorandum that argued forbolstering the French fleet’s inferior position with respect to the largerBritish fleet through the “absolute” combat of ramming. Evoking classicalimagery, he said that “as in Rome, the ram will re-establish equilibrium infavor of courage, and diminish superiority founded on greater numbers.”9

But French industry was still in its infancy and unable to produce theiron, steam, and propeller technologies necessary to realize this vision. La-brousse continued to study these technologies for some years, while theAdmiralty Council ordered land-based experiments on ramming. During1843–44 in Brittany, engineers conducted tests using a fifty-ton chest

tios M. Petsas, Octavian’s Campsite Memorial for the Actian War (Philadelphia, 1996).The iconography of rams is extensively covered in Morrison, 177–254.

8. William L. Rodgers, Naval Warfare under Oars, 4th to 16th Centuries: A Study ofStrategy, Tactics, and Ship Design (Annapolis, Md., 1967); Lionel Casson, Ships andSeamanship in the Ancient World (Baltimore, 1995); John B. Hattendorf and Richard W.Unger, eds., War at Sea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Rochester, N.Y., 2003).For guns as principal weapons of oared and sailing warships, see John Francis Guilmar-tin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea inthe 16th Century (Annapolis, Md., 2004).

9. Joseph Bertrand, “Transformation de la Marine de Guerre,” Journal des Savants(1867): 333–44, at 340.


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tipped with a spur that was slid down an inclined ramp to ram various tar-gets representing ship hulls. These tests showed that the ram inflicted con-siderable damage, prompting another flurry of memos from Labrousse andothers on the need to create a fleet of ram warships, but the AdmiraltyCouncil demurred, citing budgetary restrictions.10

The Crimean War (1853–56) confirmed the military advantages ofarmor and steam propulsion for both the French and British navies,launching an arms race to build ever-more-powerful warships. In 1858 thefirst modern French ironclad Gloire was laid down, followed by three near-sister ships. During the following year the British Navy laid down Warriorand Black Prince, each of which had almost twice the displacement ofGloire. This caused alarms to sound within the French Admiralty Council,therefore it and chief naval constructor Stanislas-Charles-Henri Dupuy deLôme decided the time was ripe to incorporate Labrousse’s ram into iron-clads Solférino and Magenta, both of which were launched in 1861. Thestate of the French iron industry did not allow Dupuy de Lôme to buildironclads as large as the British ones, but he argued that each vessel,equipped with a two-meter-long, fourteen-ton steel ram, would “rip openby the shock, at even a moderate speed, any armored ship it attacked.”11

Meanwhile in Britain the debate over the ram, which had begun in 1845,had reached a fever pitch via the writings and political maneuverings ofVice-Admiral George Rose Sartorius. When the huge size and cost of theWarrior class led the navy in 1861 to order a smaller pair of ships,Resistanceand Defence, they were equipped with rams. By 1863 the race to perfect theram was on.12

10. Nicolas-Hippolyte Labrousse,Application des Bateaux à Vapeur à la Guerre Mari-time, 6DD1 24 dossier 465, 25 December 1840, Service Historique de la Défense, Dé-partement Marine, Vincennes; and Labrousse, Des Navires à Éperon (Paris, 1864). Seealso James Finney Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship (Annapolis, Md.,2000), 27–28. On the strategies of ramming, see Michèle Battesti, La Marine de NapoléonIII (Paris, 1997), 94, 193–96; Dominique Brisou, Accueil, Introduction et Développementde l’Energie Vapeur dans la Marine Militaire Française au XIXe Siècle (Paris, 2001), 582–88; and Baxter, 57–58, 339–40.

11. Battesti, 195–96; Brisou, 711; Stanislas-Charles-Henri Dupuy de Lôme, Noticesur les Travaux Scientifiques de M. Dupuy de Lôme (Paris, 1866), 41–42; Oscar Parkes,British Battleships “Warrior” 1860 to “Vanguard” 1950: A History of Design, Constructionand Armament (London, 1957), 25–29. On French industry, see Jacques Chantriot, “LaFrégate-Cuirassée La Gloire,” in Marine et Technique au XIXe Siècle (Vincennes, 1988),347–76.

12. Many individuals claimed paternity of the ram bow. George Sartorius said thathe first proposed the idea of “shot-proof iron-clad ships . . . fitted with rams” in 1855,during the waning days of the Crimean War (Sartorius, “On the Forms, Armament,Materials, and Construction of Ships of War,” Transactions of the Institution of NavalArchitects [hereafter TINA] 5 [1864]: 135–45, quote on 135). However, his proposals wereactually submitted during the years 1857 to 1859 (UK National Archives, ADM 92, vol.19, 25 March 1857, and vol. 20, 30 September 1858 and 24 March 1859). Mechanical en-gineer James Nasmyth claimed to have invented the iron ram in 1838, but did not show



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Although the French and British navies were the first to incorporaterams in warships, ramming had been in the works in many countries onboth sides of the Atlantic. The Russian Navy did not even wait for theFrench and British ram ships to hit the water, in 1861 ordering the ironcladPervenetz, which sported an enormous ram bow, from the same Britishshipyard that built Warrior. In 1862 the Spanish Navy ordered the ironcladram frigate Numancia from a French shipyard. In the United States, theidea of a ram warship had been considered since the 1830s, but it took theCivil War to spawn the first ram warship used in modern-day battle.13 Theironclad Virginia was rebuilt in 1861 on the burned-out wreck of the steamfrigate Merrimack as a shot-proof ironclad that could break the Union’smaritime stranglehold. Two naval engineers, John Brooke and John Porter,fitted the ship with a two-foot-long cast-iron wedge to serve as a batteringram, which Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory hopedwould allow the ship to be effective despite the scarcity of ammunition inthe resource-starved South.14

The subsequent clash between Virginia and the Union fleet at the Battleof Hampton Roads on 8 March 1862 was not only the first use of an iron-clad in battle, it also marked the first significant military use of the rambow since the time of the Romans. Still untested after its extensive rebuild,Virginia’s first cruise brought it straight into battle. It targeted the woodenfrigate Cumberland, shrugging off a hail of fire to ram a hole “large enoughto drive a horse and cart through,” thereby sinking it.Virginia’s hastily con-structed iron ram was wrenched off in the process. The very next day, theUnion ironclad Monitor arrived and engaged its Confederate counterpartin a three-hour gun duel that changed the face of naval warfare. Neithership was able to penetrate the other’s iron armor, but Confederate officerswere convinced that, if Virginia’s ram were still intact, it could have sunkMonitor.15 The Confederacy, now convinced of the effectiveness of the ramas a principal naval weapon and lacking the industrial resources to reliablymanufacture naval artillery, quickly commenced both building steam ramsand buying them from France and Britain. The Union navy, confident of its

it to the Admiralty until 1845 (John P. Drake, “Steam Rams,” Mechanics Magazine 64[July–December 1858]: 424–25; James Nasmyth and Samuel Smiles, James Nasmyth En-gineer: An Autobiography [New York, 1883], 422–24).

13. The first recorded U.S. proposal for steam rams was the subject of the U.S. Houseof Representatives (23rd Cong., 2d sess.) bill HR 707 (4 February 1835) authorizing theconstruction of a “steam prow ship” under the direction of James Barron for $75,000, al-though it was never built.

14. John M. Brooke and John L. Porter, “The Plan and Construction of the ‘Merri-mac,’” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols., ed. Robert Underwood Johnson andClarence Clough Buel (New York, 1887), 1:715–17; James Tertius deKay, Monitor (NewYork, 1997), 130–32.

15. Dinwiddie B. Philips, “Notes on the Monitor–Merrimac Fight,” in Johnson andBuel, 718–27, at 718; deKay, 163–67, quote on 164.


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16. On the comparison between the Union and Confederate naval industries, seeDean C. Allard, “Naval Technology during the American Civil War,” in Marine et Tech-nique au XIXe Siècle (n. 11 above), 385–401. Lenthall’s quote is from Baxter (n. 10 above),242. Note that it was the Union army, not the navy, which built an inland ram fleet at thebehest of bridge engineer Charles Ellet, who had earlier recommended steam rams inCoast and Harbour Defenses, or The Substitution of Steam Battering Rams for Ships of War(Philadelphia, 1855). See John S. C. Abbott, “Charles Ellet and His Naval Steam Rams,”Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 32, no. 189 (1866): 295–312; Warren D. Crandall andIsaac D. Newell, History of the Ram Fleet and the Mississippi Marine Brigade in the Warfor the Union on the Mississippi and Its Tributaries: The Story of the Ellets and Their Men(St. Louis, 1907); Lee Nathaniel Newcomer, “The Battle of the Rams,”American Neptune25 (April 1965): 128–39; and Chester G. Hearn, Ellet’s Brigade: The Strangest Outfit of All(Baton Rouge, La., 2006).

17. On Taureau, see Battesti (n. 10 above), 715–17; OnHotspur and Rupert, see Parkes(n. 11 above), 175–85.

18. Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani, Ironclads at War (Conshohocken, Pa.,1998), 211–41.

19. On Butakov’s experiment, see Stephen McLaughlin, Russian and Soviet Battle-

ability to furnish guns and ammunition for its ironclads, paid compara-tively little attention to the ram, chief constructor John Lenthall deemingthem “a very old idea . . . [and] not recommended.”16

The experience of American ironclads highlighted the tactical void thatmany navies hoped the ram would fill. The modern iron warship carried rel-atively few guns compared with its wooden predecessors, and these guns(which were massive in order to pierce armor) were cumbersome to handle,had a slow rate of fire, and were often unreliable. Moreover, experience hadshown how difficult it was for shells or shot to penetrate the iron armor inbattle. Naval planners argued that the ram, backed by thousands of tons ofiron and thousands of steam horsepower, was certain to penetrate the hullof any enemy warship. France built the coastal ironclad Taureau in 1863,whose primary weapon was the ram; the British Navy followed suit withHotspur and Rupert, both equipped with rams.17 The naval ram took centerstage when the Austrian Navy defeated the nascent Italian Navy at the Battleof Lissa in the Adriatic on 20 July 1866. At the height of the battle, AustrianRear Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff threw his ram-equipped flagshipErzherzog Ferdinand Max against the Italian flagship Re d’Italia, sinking itand sealing his victory. The fact that Re d’Italia was nearly immobile at thetime of collision went unnoticed by all but the keenest military observers.18

The question of whether the ram was effective against a maneuveringwarship was soon taken up by Russian Admiral Grigory Ivanovich Butakov,then commander of the Baltic fleet and already an author of fleet ram tac-tics. In 1868 he staged the only known full-scale trials of ramming, equip-ping two gunboats with protective fenders and having them attempt to rameach other. The trials showed that the ram was indeed effective, althoughmost of the blows were at glancing angles that would have disabled, thoughnot destroyed, an opponent’s ship.19 With these trials and the victories at



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ships (Annapolis, Md., 2003), 18–19. Butakov’s work on fleet tactics,Novye SobrazheniyaParokhodnoj Taktiki (Saint Petersburg, 1863), appeared in French as Nouvelles Bases deTactique Navale (Paris, 1864).

20. In Britain, ram tactics were extensively discussed in Gerard Henry Uchtred Noel,John Knox Laughton, and Charles Campbell,The Gun, Ram, and Torpedo (1874; reprint,Boston, 2005); George Elliot, “The Ram: The Prominent Feature of Future Naval Vic-tories,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 28 (1884): 357–78; and George RoseSartorius, in Thomas Brassey, The British Navy: Its Strength, Resources, and Administra-tion, 3 vols. (London, 1882), Sartorius’s quote on 3:65. In France ram tactics were dis-cussed in the semi-official Revue Maritime et Coloniale (hereafter RMC): for example,Arnaud de Keranstret, “Des Ordres de Bataille dans les Combats à Éperon,” RMC 23(1868): 628–57; and George Elliot, “Du Choc dans une Bataille Navale,”RMC 82 (1884):680–98. See also Louis Grivel, De la Guerre Maritime avant et depuis les Nouvelles Inven-tions (Paris, 1869). For modern discussions of the ram in the evolution of French navalstrategy, see Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy1871–1904 (Annapolis, Md., 1987); Charles I. Hamilton, Anglo-French Naval Rivalry1840–1870 (Oxford, 1993), 112–17; Michel Depeyre, Entre Vent et Eau, un Siècle d’Hés-itations Tactiques et Stratégiques 1790–1890 (Paris, 2003); and Depeyre, Éperon et Bélier,entre Histoire et Techniques, http://www.stratisc.org/pn7_depeyre.html (accessed 12March 2009).

21. The only noteworthy employment of the ram after Lissa was during the Battle ofIquique during the War of the Pacific in 1879, when the Peruvian ironclad Huáscarrammed and sank the obsolete, almost-stationary Chilean wooden corvette Esmeralda,which was already at the point of surrender. William Laird Clowes argues that ramsrarely produced significant damage, nor were they a decisive factor in battles; see his

Hampton Roads and Lissa, naval planners believed the ram to be the ulti-mate naval weapon.

From 1870 until World War I the ram bow was a standard fixture inevery navy, on every capital ship (i.e. major warships, in that era battleshipsand armored cruisers). Most rams were of cast iron or bronze, projectingtwo to three meters just below the waterline and reinforced by a strengthdeck (fig. 4). Naval tacticians echoed Labrousse’s heroic Roman narrativethat rams “re-establish equilibrium in favor of courage.” Sartorius, now Ad-miral of the Fleet, argued that the ram should be the only naval weapon:“My reason for refusing guns to the unarmored ram is that there should beno possible cause or temptation to distract the attention of the ram power.”In France, Admiral Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez suggested that the ramfavored the natural élan (fighting spirit) of the French sailor over the morestaid British. Admiral Louis-Antoine-Richild Grivel argued, in an earlyexample of what we call today “asymmetric warfare,” that the ram was aneffective technology against superior British gunnery. Both academics andup-and-coming naval officers, eager to gain favor with their flag officers,enthusiastically wrote elaborate treatises on the employment of the ram inwarfare, arguing that even with improved gunnery, it could still deliver thecoup de grâce in battle.20 These armchair tactics were illusionary, however,for although they all pointed to Lissa as the paradigm, in actual fact the ramwas almost never used in any other battle to any real effect.21


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“The Ram, in Action and Accident,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 38(1894): 223–41. Nevertheless, the ram retained its hold upon the popular imagination:see the prominent fictional accounts of ramming in warfare in Frederick Thomas Jane,Blake of the Rattlesnake (London, 1895) and William Laird Clowes, Trafalgar Refought(London, 1905). In H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London, 1898), the torpedo ramThunder Child cut down the Martians, not with its guns, but by ramming them.

FIG. 4 Cross-section of the ram bow of armored cruiser Fürst Bismarck (1896),from Johann Theodor Adolf van Hüllen, Leitfaden für den Unterricht imSchiffbau (Berlin, 1908), plate 9. (Source: U.S. Naval Historical Center.)



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22. John Beeler, Birth of the Battleship (London, 2001), 106–7, 154–55.23. Ibid.24. See Jean-Pierre-Edmond Jurien de la Gravière’s report on the maneuvering tri-

als of the ironclads Caton, Solferino, Provence, and Couronne, in Mémorial du Génie Mar-itime 2, no. 1 (1866): 249–51; Siméon Bourgois, “Théorie du Gouvernail et ses Applica-tions aux Mouvements Giratoires des Navires a Vapeur,” RMC 25 (1869): 537–70, RMC26 (1869): 255–93, and RMC 27 (1869): 65–105; M. Schvérer, “Procédé pour Déterminerdes Courbes d’Évolution des Navires a Vapeur,” RMC 47 (1875): 13–28; and M. Besson,“Étude sur les Combats de Mer,”RMC 79 (1883): 63–113. The Italian Navy also encour-aged research into ship maneuvering: see Giuseppe Gavotti, “Sulla Potenza di rotazionedelle navi,”Rivista Marittima 12 (1879): 241–65, and Gavotti, “Evoluzionio Navali,”Riv-ista Marittima 32 (1899): 243–58. Improvements in rudder and steering-engine designsto facilitate ramming were the subject of two British papers: Nathaniel Barnaby, “On theSteering of Ships,”TINA 4 (1863): 56–78, and Henry Lumley, “On the Steering of Ships,”TINA 5 (1864): 128–34. In 1870 Joseph Joëssel developed and tested his novel concept ofthe balanced rudder, in which the axis of rotation is placed not at the leading edge but aquarter of the way behind; because this is the center of pressure of the foil, it allows formuch easier and more responsive steering. Modern rudders are almost all of the bal-anced type. See Joëssel, “Rapport sur les Expériences Relatives aux Gouvernails, FaitsDevant Indret en 1873, Suivi des Projets des Gouvernails Équilibrés Sous Tous lesAngles,”Mémorial du Génie Maritime 2, no. 2 (1873): 213–32; and Wilhelmus Petrus An-tonius van Lammeren, Resistance, Propulsion and Steering of Ships (Haarlem, Nether-lands, 1948), 322–23.

Naval officers insisted on equipping their ships with rams, although theengineers who were charged with carrying out the design and constructionat first doubted their effectiveness in the real world. Britain’s chief construc-tors Edward Reed and Nathaniel Barnaby insisted that “the ram will neverbe a favourite system of warfare among navies,” and that “it could not beemployed as a means of attack by and against first-class battle ships.”22 Inparticular, they were concerned that, as with the Roman galleys of old, theram depended not on speed, but on intricate, split-second maneuveringagainst moving targets that was almost impossible in sluggish steamships.

Nonetheless, the public and official hype surrounding the ram soonturned these same engineers into reluctant, then enthusiastic, advocates.Reed later gushed that “the ram will work the greatest destruction in a navalaction,” while Barnaby claimed paternity for “introducing [the ram] intoevery ship of war.”23 Always fascinated by a good technical challenge, navalengineers threw themselves into developing a systematic theory of maneu-vering under propulsive power, testing their ideas in trials to determine theeffect of the rudder-and-hull form upon the turning behavior of ships.They also developed novel technologies to improve maneuverability, suchas Joseph Joëssel’s groundbreaking balanced rudder, which is in almost uni-versal use today.24

However, both the public and professionals were curiously blind to theenormous damage that rams caused in unintentional collisions. Large holespunched below the waterline frequently caused struck vessels to founder. InGibraltar in 1891 the passenger ship Utopia collided with the ram bow of


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25. Comparisons of ramming both accidental and intentional are given in Stanley L.Sandler, “The Day of the Ram,”Military Affairs 40 (1976): 175–78; and David K. Brownand Philip Pugh, “Ramming,” in Warship 1990, ed. Robert Gardiner (Annapolis, Md.,1990).

26. Norman Friedman, U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis,Md., 1985), 54.

27. Captain Smith’s comment, which concerned the accident between Hawke andOlympic, was recounted by a former Olympic passenger in the Washington Times on 16April 1912 (p. 4), the day after Titanic sank. The “unsinkable” quotation, which Smithmade well before the fatal voyage, debunks recent allegations that the idea of an “unsink-able” Titanic was the invention of newspapers after the accident had occurred.

28. Parkes (n. 11 above), 471–76; John H. Narbeth, “A Naval Architect’s PracticalExperiences in the Behaviour of Ships,” TINA 83 (1941): 140–89. Model tests of Dread-nought showed that the ram bow slightly improved speed over the straight stem,although with increased deck wetness at the bow; see David K. Brown, From Warrior to

the British battleship Anson, slashing the hull and causing the liner to sinkin ten minutes, with 530 passengers lost. In 1875 Iron Duke accidentallysank Vanguard in a fog; in 1878 KönigWilhelm holed and sank Grosser Kur-fürst during an emergency turn to avoid another collision. Such devastationwas not limited to peacetime accidents; during several naval engagements,allied ships inadvertently rammed one another in the melee of maneuver-ing (for example, at the Battle of Lissa when the Italian ironclad Anconarammed its own escort Varese). In fact, from 1865 to 1905 more ships weresunk by accident than by intention in battle, yet there was no reconsideringof the ram to protect ships.25

By the turn of the twentieth century, advances in technology and tac-tics greatly increased the range and effectiveness of naval guns and torpe-does, making them the uncontested choice for fleet armament. The use ofthe ram in the face of such weaponry became the equivalent of the bayonetcharge against gun emplacements. It was eliminated from U.S. warships in1904, and in France, the birthplace of the ram, it was absent beginning withthe 1906 Danton class.26 Yet even in decline, the ram bow lingered. In 1911the newly built passenger ship Olympic was struck by the British cruiserHawke off the Isle of Wight. Hawke’s ram bow tore into Olympic, floodingseveral compartments, but its captain, Edward Smith,managed to bring theship back to port for repairs. Absolved of any blame for the incident, hesoon was given command of the Olympic’s sister ship Titanic. CaptainSmith was so impressed by Olympic’s ability to withstand ramming by amajor warship that he declared “the Olympic is unsinkable, and the Titanicwill be the same when she is put in commission.”27 When he commandedTitanic on its ill-fated maiden voyage Smith’s perception that his ship wasimpervious to damage may have contributed to his decision not to slowdown in the face of icebergs. In Britain, the ram bow had become so em-blematic that First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher, although admitting that the ramhad outlived its usefulness, insisted upon a ram bow for his groundbreak-ing, all-big-gun battleship Dreadnought.28 Nevertheless, the ram bow con-



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Dreadnought (London, 1997), 191.Dreadnought did in fact ram and sink a submarine inWorld War I, as did many destroyers in both world wars.

29. Note that protruding ram-type bows have recently made a comeback in warshipdesign (for example, the U.S. Navy’s DDG 1000), although this is due to requirementsfor managing the overall radar signature.

30. Charles Bossut, “Nouvelles Expériences sur la Résistance des Fluids,” in Histoireet Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris (Paris, 1778), 353–80. Bossut fit-ted a small triangular wedge to the front of a canal-boat model and found that it reducedresistance by about 12 percent.

31. William Froude, “Explanations,” appended to the British Association for the Ad-vancement of Science Committee Report,The State of Existing Knowledge on the Stability,Propulsion and Sea-Going Qualities of Ships (London, 1869).

32. Richard W. L. Gawn, “Historical Notes on the Investigations at the Admiralty Ex-periment Works, Torquay,” TINA 83 (1941): 80–139. Froude’s experiments during the1870s and 1880s demonstrated that for a given displacement above a certain speed, alonger ship will exhibit less wave-making resistance than a shorter ship.However, the effectwas known as early as 1865, when side-by-side trials of two near-identical vessels showedthat the one with a projecting ram-type bow was a knot faster. The mathematician JosephWoolley explored the hydrodynamic benefits of its form compared with a straight-stemmed vessel in “On the Bows of the Helicon and the Salamis,”TINA 7 (1866): 1–12.

tinued to fade in popularity and disappeared from all new naval designs byWorld War I.29

The Bow as Applied Science: The Bulbous Forefoot

During the period that the ram bow was experiencing a resurgence as aweapon, a few contemporaneous thinkers wondered whether it might serveanother purpose: to reduce the resistance of a vessel. French scientistCharles Bossut first explored this idea in 1778 by using small-scale-modelexperiments near the Seine to verify his hypothesis, though his idea wasnever put into practice by French naval constructors.30 In 1867 British civilengineer William Froude took up the idea, using small-scale models to pre-dict a ship’s performance. When he pitted a fine-hulled model called Ravenagainst another model named Swan, which had “large rounded ends,” hefound to his surprise that the latter had less resistance at high speeds thandid the former.31 Within a few years he established his now-famous “tow-ing tank,”which revolutionized the study of naval hydrodynamics by exam-ining at scale two separate components of ship resistance: friction andwave-making. Froude went on to test hundreds of models, noting that theram bow did, in fact, diminish wave-making resistance, although he erro-neously attributed the mechanism to the effective lengthening of the hull,by then a well-known phenomenon.32

The development of the bulbous forefoot and the discovery of the mech-anism for its function were directly inspired by the Swan experiments.Moreover, experimenters on both sides of the Atlantic (namely, the UnitedStates and Russia) independently and nearly simultaneously came up with


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33. On simultaneous inventions and discoveries (“multiples”), see Robert K. Mer-ton, The Sociology of Science (Chicago, 1973).

34. David W. Taylor, “Some Model Basin Investigations of the Influence of the Formof Ships upon Their Resistance,” Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects andMarine Engineers (hereafter TSNAME) 19 (1911): 59–66; and Taylor, The Speed andPower of Ships (New York, 1911), 93–94. Taylor had first learned of Froude’s work onSwan as a student of naval architecture in Great Britain.

35. David W. Taylor, “The Influence of the Bulbous Bow upon Resistance,” MarineEngineering and Shipbuilding Age (1923): 440–49, quote on 440.

36. Peter C. Kohler and William T. Tilley, “Matson’s Flying Fish: SS Malolo,” Steam-boat Bill 243 (2002): 173–99.

37. Frank O. Braynard, The Bremen & the Europa (Bronx, N.Y., 2005), 6. Descrip-tions of the use of the bulbous forefoot on Bremen and Europa are from Rob Napier,“The North German Lloyd and Bremen (IV) 1929,” Nautical Research Journal 31, no. 4

the same design.33 On the U.S. side, in 1905 David Taylor, a naval captain incharge of the U.S. Navy’s Experimental Model Basin who had direct knowl-edge of Froude’s work, envisioned a bulb at the foot of the bow that wouldreduce wave-making resistance at high speeds.After a limited series of exper-iments, Taylor and his colleagues designed the battleship Delaware with apear-shaped bulbous forefoot.34 Consequently, from that time up till themid-1960s all U.S. capital ships were built with the bulbous forefoot, whichwas sometimes referred to as the “Taylor bulb.” In 1923, after his retirement,Taylor published an article in Marine Engineering and Shipbuilding Age thatfor the first time articulated the wave-cancellation effect of the bulb:

The bulbous bow was not altogether the result of hit or miss meth-ods. In the literature of ship resistance I had seen a reference (byMr. William Froude) to a so-called swan model having full but nar-row water lines close to the bow . . . the theory seemed to be to havefirst a false bow as it were, corresponding to a small ship. This wouldcreate a small bow wave and in its hollow was located the second ortrue bow, making a second bow wave that would neutralize the first.35

The Taylor bulb spread quickly throughout the commercial marinemarket, starting in 1925 with the American passenger ship Malolo, whichwas built for the Hawaiian trade.36 In 1926 German shipping companyLloyd planned a pair of fast transatlantic liners—Bremen and Europa—tocompete for the famed Blue Riband, the prestigious award given for thefastest crossing of the North Atlantic. German naval architects experi-mented with various configurations of the bulb, using slightly differentdesigns on sister ships. They aimed to increase a ship’s speed by “applyingto water navigation the principles discovered in aerodynamics when devel-oping the increased speed for airplanes,” which included a rounded deck-house and low, teardrop-shaped funnels and attracted much public com-ment. The “low stacks and bulbous bows were the most talked-aboutfeatures” in the press.37 The bulbs certainly helped. Both ships, launched in



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(1985): 169–85; Arnold Kludas, Die Schnelldampfer Bremen und Europa (Herford, UK,1993), 14; Jobst Lessenich, “Neue Schiffsformen,” www.dsm.museum/DBSchiff/pdf_files/lessenich_neuform.pdf (accessed 6 March 2009); and Rudolf Brenke, “Bremen,Turbinen-Schnelldampfer, 1929,” http://www.dsm.museum/DBSchiff/pdf_files/brenke_bremen.pdf (accessed 6 March 2009).

38. The remarkable story of Bremen’s escape is told in Peter A. Huchthausen,Shadow Voyage: The Extraordinary Wartime Escape of the Legendary Liner S.S. Bremen(Hoboken, N.J., 2005).

39. Edward M. Bragg, “Results of Experiments upon Bulbous Bows,” TSNAME 38(1930): 147–58; Sergei Vinogradov, Poslednie Ispoliny Rossiiskogo Imperatorskogo Flota(Saint Petersburg, 1999), 294–95, 366–67. On the Borodino (Izmail) class, see McLaugh-lin (n. 19 above), 243–58. Artseulov (also spelled Artsayooloff) and Yourkevitch bothwrote about the same 1911 bulb tests, but neither one mentions the other; it would ap-pear that they were co-inventors of the Russian bulbous forefoot.

40. Some of Yourkevitch’s biographical information is from the Russian Academy ofSciences web article by Vasily Petrovich Borisov and Andrey Volkov, “Novye Materialy oZhizni i Dejatel’nosti V. I. Jurkevicha,” http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/papers/viet/2000/2/36-44.pdf (accessed 30 March 2009). However, the majority of the informationis from a series of telephone and email interviews I conducted with Yourkevitch’s sonGeorge Yourke, from November 2004 to April 2009. Alternate anglicized spellings ofYourkevitch’s name are: Yurkevich, Iurkevich, and Jurkevich.

1928, went on to capture the Blue Riband in 1929, one after the other (theirtop speeds were kept a secret by the company). But the most remarkabledemonstration of the Taylor bulb’s effectiveness came during the dramaticescape of Bremen at the start of World War II, when it played a cat-and-mouse game with British destroyers and submarines to travel from theneutral United States to Germany, avoiding capture or sinking by usingboth inclement weather and spectacular bursts of speed (over 30 knots)made possible by its novel bulbous forefoot.38

Just as Taylor was inventing the bulbous forefoot in the United States, apair of young Russian naval architects developed a similar design at theSaint Petersburg model basin. In 1911 Nikolai Konstanovich Artseulov andVladimir Ivanovich Yourkevitch, both of them also inspired by Froude’sexperiments, tested a pair of models of a new class of battlecruiser—Borodino—one model with a bulbous forefoot and the other without.However, because they found only a slight improvement in powering, thebattlecruisers were built with a traditional cutaway stem.39

Yourkevitch’s name later became associated in the public mind with thebulbous forefoot, due to his innovative hull design for the French linerNormandie (he had ultimately settled in France after leaving Russia duringthe revolution of 1917).40 In 1928 Yourkevitch, at his wife’s urging, had setup a small naval-architecture firm and soon thereafter learned of a newtransatlantic-liner project for the French Line Compagnie Générale Trans-atlantique, to be built at the Penhoët shipyard in Saint-Nazaire.Yourkevitchproposed his concept for what he called a “violin”hull: the forward sections


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41. Vladimir Yourkevitch, “Schiffsform,” German patent 587,761, filed on 8 May1928 and approved on 22 May 1932. Yourkevitch subsequently patented this hull formin many other countries, including the United States (U.S. patent 1,831,643, filed on 3October 1929 and approved on 10 November 1931). Yourkevitch’s patent claims are ex-amined in Lammeren (n. 24 above), 97–98.

42. Harvey Ardman, Normandie: Her Life and Times (New York, 1985), 41–43;Jamie H. Cockfield,With Snow on Their Boots: The Tragic Odyssey of the Russian Expedi-tionary Force in France during World War I (New York, 1999), 312–19.

43. For information on Normandie’s performance, see The French Line Quadruple-screw Turbo-electric North Atlantic Steamship Normandie: The World’s Largest Liner;Souvenir Number of the Shipbuilder and Marine Engine-Builder (1935; reprint, New York,1972).

44. This information comes from an archive of original plans, drawings, and reportsfor Normandie from the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Ship Design TechnicalLibrary, file F-25-1, which the U.S. Navy recovered from Normandie itself in 1942 whenit was being converted to the troopship Lafayette. (While I was working at NAVSEA Iconsulted the library before its files were destroyed in 1991.) I obtained additional tech-nical files from the Association French Lines, Le Havre, France.

45. George Yourke was not able to identify the newspaper that published the articleat Olga Krestovsky’s insistence, nor have I yet found it in French archives.

46. For a contemporary account of Yourkevitch’s place in the popular media, seeKenneth W. Swezey, “Battle of the Superliners,” Popular Science 130, no. 5 (1937): 44–45,118–19. For Yourkevitch’s later European work, see Ernst Foerester, “Power, Speed,

narrow at the waterline, with considerable area above and below it, and,most important, sporting a sizable bulbous forefoot.41

Yourkevitch gained an audience with the shipyard in 1930 through theagency of a former Russian admiral, Sergei Pogulaev, who had brieflyserved as a general officer in the French forces during World War I.42 ThePenhoët naval architects worked with Yourkevitch to develop a series ofmodels for testing at the Hamburg model basin, which showed a 5 percentimprovement in resistance for his hull and bulbous forefoot, comparedwith the more traditional hull.43 In 1931 Penhoët drafted the final plansand specifications for Normandie using Yourkevitch’s hull though not hisname, nor was he given any credit in press releases.44 Although it is difficultto substantiate, one story has it that Yourkevitch’s wife Olga Krestovskycontacted a Paris newspaper publisher she knew and convinced him to runthe story of how her husband was in fact the real “father” of France’s newestliner.45 Penhoët, its hand forced, now graciously acknowledged its debt toYourkevitch, whose name soon became synonymous in the popular mediawith both Normandie and the bulbous forefoot. Aiming to capitalize on hiscelebrity, Yourkevitch formed a private company to promote his “Y hullform” to shipyards worldwide.46 WhenNormandie was launched in 1932 itsgraceful lines and prominent bulb made it symbols of French technologi-cal prowess in the eyes of savvy transatlantic passengers (fig. 5). Your-kevitch himself was aboard the ship in 1935 whenNormandie took the BlueRiband.



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Economy and Seaworthiness of Medium-Sized Liners,”TSNAME 44 (1936): 228–61; andtwo papers by Yourkevitch, “Forme de Carène de Moindre Résistance,” Bulletin de l’As-sociation Technique Maritime et Aéronautique 36 (1932): 687–711, and “Modernisationdes Navires Existants par la Transformation de la Coque et des Machines,” in Congrès In-ternational des Ingénieurs Navals, ed. Georges Thone (Liège, Belgium, 1939), 191–208.

That engineers can be swayed by cultural symbolism may be seen in thedifferent hull-design strategies for Normandie and one of its rivals for theBlue Riband, the Cunard White Star Line’sQueenMary. Although the com-petition between the two passenger-ship companies was fierce, Yourkevitchwrote to Cunard, proposing his novel hull form. Cunard tested it, and al-though its performance was superior to the original shipyard design, thecompany ultimately decided against using the bulbous forefoot, insteadadding 50,000 more horsepower to achieve the required speed. The follow-ing year Queen Mary won the Blue Riband and subsequently retained it for

FIG. 5 The Normandie at its launching in 1932, showing its prominent bulbousforefoot. (Source: Archive Deutsches Museum, Munich.)


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47. Cunard’s decision not to use Yourkevitch’s hull and bulbous forefoot is discussedin Ardman (n. 42 above), 50, 59–60; and Ian Johnston, Ships for a Nation: John Brownand Company Clydebank (West Dumbartonshire, Scotland, 2000), 206–10.

48. On the differing architectural concepts of British and French passenger ships, seePeter Quartermaine, Building on the Sea: Form and Meaning in Modern Ship Architecture(London, 2006). The “secret of streamlining” quote is from Christina Cogdell, EugenicDesign: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia, 2004), 62. The “hole in thewater” quote is from Eric Hodgins, Ocean Express: The Story of the Bremen and the Eu-ropa (New York, 1932), 41. This line is repeated verbatim in many popular books on pas-senger ships; for example, in John Maxtone-Graham, The Only Way to Cross (New York,1972), 250.Normandie’s history and fate are eloquently captured in Bruno Foucart et al.,Normandie: Queen of the Seas (Paris, 1985); and John Maxtone-Graham, Normandie:France’s Legendary Art Deco Ocean Liner (New York, 2007).

49. The literature on wave theory and experimentation during the nineteenth cen-

over a decade.47 The ship was conceived to be the epitome of British gran-deur: its vertical hull lines and stately, squared-off deckhouse conveyedsolidity and strength, and it relied on old-fashioned British marine engi-neering (that is, bigger engines) to render it fit for swift transatlantic cross-ings—an odd-shaped bow bulb certainly having no place in this dignifiedscheme.

Normandie was conceived in the architecture of Art Deco streamlining,inspired by the newly fashionable monocoque airplane. From its violin-shaped hull to its sweptback funnels, the ship was shaped to appear to be inmotion even while standing still.Normandie’s newfangled bulbous forefootwas seen as integral to this concept: “the secret of streamlining, and there-fore of speed [is that] ships beneath the water will be blunt-bowed,” as-serted one newspaper. Transfixed by this novel application of modern sci-ence to the ancient art of ship design, the press competed to (incorrectly)explain the workings of the bulbous forefoot, completely missing the wave-cancellation effect; the most repeated trope was that the bulbous forefoot“makes a hole in the water for the ship to travel in.”48

The Bow as Applied Science: The Inui Bulb

Experimentation with bulbous bows did not end with the Normandie.The modern protruding bulbous bow, originally developed by Takao Inui,is used on almost every type of vessel, from the motor yacht to the super-tanker, as the most effective way to significantly improve powering per-formance. Yet its development was not due to an interest in decreasing shipresistance, but was rather an outgrowth of a careful, scientific study of howto control a ship’s wave-making. The first attempt to improve hull forms byunderstanding and controlling wave-making was made by John Scott Rus-sell, a British shipbuilder with a gift for mathematics, who in 1835 pro-posed the “wave-line hull,” which he later used on his famous steamshipGreat Eastern.49 In 1898 an Australian mathematician named John Henry



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tury century is vast, and includes such luminaries as George Stokes, William Thomson(Lord Kelvin), and William John Macquorn Rankine. Some excellent overviews areThomas Wright, “Ship Hydrodynamics 1710–1880” (Ph.D. diss., University of Man-chester, 1983); Enzo Levi, The Science of Water (New York, 1995); Alex Craik, “TheOrigins of Water Wave Theory,” Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 36 (2004): 1–28; Oli-vier Darrigol, “The Spirited Horse, the Engineer and the Mathematician: Water Waves inNineteenth-Century Hydrodynamics,” Archives for the History of Exact Sciences 58(2003): 21–95; and Darrigol, Worlds of Flow (Oxford, 2005).

50. John Henry Michell, “The Wave Resistance of a Ship,” Philosophical Magazine 5,no. 45 (1893): 106–23. On Michell and the relevance of his formula, see Ernest O. Tuck,“The Wave Resistance Formula of J. H. Michell and Its Significance to Recent Researchin Hydrodynamics,” Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society Series B 30 (1989):365–77. On bow-bulb wave cancellation, see, in particular, Cyril Wigley, “Ship WaveResistance: A Comparison of Mathematical Theory with Experimental Results,”TINA 68(1926): 124–37; Wigley, “The Theory of the Bulbous Bow and Its Practical Application,”Transactions of the North-East Coast of Shipbuilders 52 (1936): 65–88; Georg Weinblum,“Die Theorie der Wulstschiffe,” Schiffbau 37 (1936): 55–65; and Thomas Havelock,“Wave Patterns and Wave Resistance,” TINA 74 (1934): 430–46. Havelock’s papers werecollected and edited by Wigley as The Collected Papers of Sir Thomas Havelock on Hydro-dynamics (Washington, D.C., 1965).

51. Most of the following section is based on my extensive interview with TakaoInui, emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo, conducted at the university on 15October 2003. I am indebted to him for providing me with comprehensive notes andfiles to round out his extraordinary recollections. Additional thanks go to Hitoshi Naritafor assisting in arranging the meeting.

Michell developed a remarkable, complex formula that explained the waveresistance of thin ship forms. During the 1920s and 1930s his work was ex-panded upon by mathematicians, including Thomas Havelock, Cyril Wig-ley, and Georg Weinblum, to explain wave-making—in particular, how adeeply submerged sphere (representing a bulbous bow) could partiallycancel hull waves.50

These works came to the attention of Inui, who was then a twenty-three-year-old graduate researcher in naval architecture at the Tokyo Imperial Uni-versity (now University of Tokyo). At the time Japanese scientists were con-ducting hydrodynamics research on par with their European counterparts,although the information flow was strictly one-way; the Japanese received thelatest technical papers from Britain, France, and Germany, but none of theirown work was published outside Japan. Inui’s research closely followed theworks of Havelock, who had developed a purely analytical approach tounderstanding ship wave-making, compared with Wigley, Weinblum, andothers, who concentrated more on experimental results for predicting shipresistance. During Inui’s graduate research from 1943 to 1946, half of Tokyowas destroyed in bombing raids, but Imperial University was largely sparedand he was able to continue his work almost unhindered.51

Inui was also spared from interruptions due to the fact that, unlike inthe United States and Britain, which enlisted its research universities in thewar effort, Japan kept academic and military research and development


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separated. In fact, researchers at the Naval Technical Research Center, witha model basin at Meguro in Tokyo, had been working independently fromImperial University on a practical problem: how to ensure that their newsuper-battleship Yamato, the largest in the world, would achieve the re-quired speed of 27 knots given its massive displacement and wide beam.After experimenting with over fifty variations of the Taylor bulb, the re-searchers hit upon a novel solution: a large (three-meter) protruding bulb,which reduced resistance by 8 percent. When launched in 1940 Yamato wasthe first vessel with a protruding bulb, a fact that only gradually becameknown to Inui.52

After the war Inui and his colleagues continued their research in wave-making, contributing importantly to the application of the Michell for-mula to ship forms and improving the theory regarding submergedspheres. In 1954 Inui traveled to Oslo to present a compilation of resultsfrom Japanese research to the International Towing-Tank Conference(ITTC), a body of model-basin superintendents and researchers meetingevery three years to coordinate work and compare research. European andAmerican researchers were astonished by how advanced the Japanese workwas, considering the intensity of the war and its consequent deprivations.Moreover, the combination of the (Australian) Michell formula and Inui’simprovements in wave theory marked the first Pacific-centric research ini-tiative in naval architecture, after a century of its being dominated byAtlantic powers.53

Flush with his success in Oslo, Inui now focused his attention on meas-uring wave patterns in order to derive the energy expended by ships in wave-making. In 1956, while still a doctoral candidate and not even a full profes-sor (these would come in 1958), he authorized the University of Tokyomodel basin to be equipped with a novel, and expensive, stereophotogram-metric system to make three-dimensional images of the waves as the modelstraveled down the basin.54 Inui’s wave-pattern experiments, which were in-formed by Yamato’s bulbous bow, soon convinced him that it would be pos-sible to create a “waveless hull form” by placing a protruding underwaterbulb at approximately 6 percent of the ship’s length forward of the bow, with

52. On the Japanese naval research establishments, see David C. Evans and Mark R.Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 (Annapolis, Md., 1997), 207; on the design and testing of Yamato’s bulb, see KitaroMatsumoto, Design and Construction of the Yamato and Musashi (Tokyo, 1961), 198–204. Additional thanks to William Garzke, who related to me his conversations ofNovember 1962 with Inui concerning Yamato’s bulb.

53. Takao Inui, “Japanese Developments on the Theory of Wave-Making and WaveResistance,” paper presented at the International Towing-Tank Conference (ITTC) Sev-enth International Conference on Ship Hydrodynamics, Oslo, 1954.

54. See Takao Inui, “Study on Wave-Making Resistance of Ships,” in Nihon ZosenKiokai [Japan Society of Naval Architects] 60th Anniversary Issue (Tokyo, 1957), 2:173–355. The system was funded with a grant from the Toyo Rayon Company.



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55. Inui’s initial results were presented in 1960 by the Japan Society of Naval Archi-tects, translated as “Three Recent Papers by Japanese Authors on the Effects of Bulbs onWave-Making Resistance of Ships,” in University of Michigan Department of Naval Archi-tecture and Marine Engineering Report, no. 32 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969). His SNAMEpaper was published as “Wavemaking Resistance of Ships,”TSNAME 70 (1962): 282–353.

56. See Tetsuo Takahei’s technical reports while at the University of Michigan’sDepartment of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: “Resistance Test Results onDD Hull with Large Bulbous Bow” (1962) and “Research in Resistance and Propulsion”(1963). It is important to note that many antisubmarine destroyers and frigates since thelate 1950s have been equipped with large sonar domes, protruding forward of and belowthe keel, which resemble bulbous bows. However, they are designed to ensure adequatesonar coverage around the ship, and not specifically for reducing wave-making resistance.

57. Among the variations are nabla-type, surface-piercing, and gooseneck bulbs. Onbulbous-bow development over the years, see Alfred Kracht, “Design of Bulbous Bows,”TSNAME 86 (1978): 197–217; and Rajiv Sharma and Om Prakash Sha, “PracticalHydrodynamic Design of Bulbous Bows for Ships,”Naval Engineers Journal 117 (2005):

a corresponding bulb at the stern, creating a wave pattern that would cancelout both the bow and stern wave patterns. Model tests completed in 1960confirmed that the two bulbs almost completely eliminated wave-makingresistance, and trials of two passenger ferries of the Kansai Steamship Com-pany, one retrofitted with this “waveless bulb,” proved that it reduced the re-quired power for attaining its top speed by 13 percent, or the equivalent of ahalf-knot increase. However, when Inui presented these results to the 1962annual meeting of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers(SNAME) in New York, he was greeted with open skepticism.55

Naval architects were not the only skeptics. In 1961 Inui proposed thebow bulb for the new Japan National Railway ferry between Hokkaido andHonshu, but the ferry captains balked at the idea of a large bulb protrud-ing in front of their ship, claiming that it would interfere with its maneu-verability. Another shipowner, Nedloyd, also balked. It was only in 1963that the NYK Line agreed to have the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard con-struct its newest cargo ship, Yamashiro Maru, with a specially built bulbbased on Inui’s theory, which reduced fuel consumption by almost 25 per-cent in comparison with similar vessels.

By now, initial skepticism had given way to serious interest. One of In-ui’s closest collaborators, Tetsuo Takahei, spent two years at the Universityof Michigan researching the bulbous bow’s application to both merchantships and destroyers, which soon led to the construction of a pair of Essotankers and an NYK containership fitted with bulbs.56 Within a few yearsshipyards and shipping companies were developing their own bulbous-bow designs, often employing Inui’s former students as their consultants.By the 1980s the bow was being designed and built around the world, andtoday it has evolved into numerous shapes and configurations, dependingon usage, although naval architects still give the occasional nod to its inven-tor by referring to it as the “Inui bulb.”57


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57–75. Recent research has shown that bulbous bows have beneficial effects on resistanceapart from reductions in wave-making; see Edward V. Lewis, ed., Principles of NavalArchitecture (Jersey City, N.J., 1988), 2:86.

58. See Inui’s U.S. patents 3,180,299 (1965) and 4,359,010 (1982). Others have alsopatented similar bulbous bows; for example, Esso’s U.S. patent 3,302,603 (1967).

Although Inui acquired patents for his bulbous bow they were for pro-tective purposes only and he has never made any money from it, since pub-lic servants are not allowed to profit from research carried out for the gov-ernment (University of Tokyo is a national research institution).58 He hasreceived worldwide accolades as the “father of the bulbous bow,” includingthe honor of being the only naval architect currently in the Japan Academy.Yet he remains surprisingly humble about his globally recognized inven-tion; to me he expressed only a slight remorse, lamenting that today’s shipdesigners seem to depend on the bulbous bow to make up for any errors, acure for their lack of finesse in designing a proper hull (fig. 6).

FIG. 6 Takao Inui at the model basin of the University of Tokyo (2003).(Photo: author.)



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59. Norman Hooke, Maritime Casualties, 1963–1996 (London, 1997), 371.60. Ibid., 8.61. Ship Structure Committee, Case Study IV: USS Radford Collision at Sea, http://

www.shipstructure.org/radford.shtml (accessed 8 November 2009).62. Sixteenth International Ship and Offshore Structures Congress, “Committee V.1:

Collision and Grounding,” in Proceedings of Sixteenth International Ship and OffshoreStructures Congress (Southampton, UK, 2006), 2:40.

Conclusion: The Bow as Unintended Weapon, Again

In October 1964 Yamashiro Maru—the very first ship equipped, theyear before, with an Inui bulb—collided with the East German cargo shipMagdeburg, which was carrying a load of British freight bound for Cuba.Like the rams at the battles of Actium and Lissa, the bulbous bow of Yama-shiro Maru punched a large underwater hole in Magdeburg, which quicklyheeled over and sank in the middle of the Thames. This incident, occurringjust two years after the Cuban missile crisis, caused an international up-roar, with accusations of cloak-and-dagger sabotage by Western intelli-gence agencies.59 The accident was more than just ironic—it was, in fact, aharbinger of things to come. As with the iron rams of the nineteenth cen-tury, protruding bulbous bows are still a potential weapon because theypose the threat of turning a merely serious collision into a deadly catastro-phe by puncturing the struck vessel below the waterline. The bulbous bowwas implicated in the deadliest peacetime collision since World War II,when in 1986 the passenger ship Admiral Nakhimov was holed by the bulkcarrier Petr Vasev, resulting in 423 fatalities.60 Such collisions are occurringwith increasing frequency within highly trafficked sea-lanes of the world,and even a tightly subdivided warship can suffer serious damage, as hap-pened in 1999 when the container ship Saudi Riyadh struck the U.S. des-troyer Radford off Hampton Roads.61

For many years these dangers had gone unchecked by maritime author-ities and industry. Since the 1990s, however, there has been a growingrecognition by owners, flag authorities, and classification societies of thedanger posed by bulbous bows. Several concepts are now in the works toprotect against bulbous-bow accidents, including blunt “buffer bows” thatcan soften the blow and improved crashworthiness of ship structuresagainst such an impact. These mitigation strategies must eventually be-come mandatory, however, or else result in steep insurance discounts so asto guarantee widespread protection of the global shipping market.62

The maritime industry continues to weigh the dangers of the bulbousbow against its benefits, and for the foreseeable future it shows no sign ofgoing away. Indeed, recent experience has shown that it possesses one moreredeeming feature, though in an unexpected way. Powered ships have, sincetheir inception, run down whales and other marine mammals, leaving be-hind, unnoticed, their lifeless bodies in the open ocean. Since the 1980s,


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63. See “Ships Arriving at Ports with Extra Cargo: Dead Whales,” Associated Press,17 November 2002; and “Accidental Whale Strike,” Canadian Broadcast Corporation, 31July 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC0c7G50x4s (accessed 12 July 2010). Seealso David W. Laist, “Collisions between Ships and Whales,”Marine Mammal Science 17,no. 1 (2001): 35–75.

with the spread of the bulbous bow, these carcasses are often hung up onthe bulb, so that as ships return to port an increasing number of people ob-serve firsthand the very real hazard of ship strikes on whales. In 2002, forexample, a spate of dead fin whales on the bulbous bows of cargo shipsturned up in ports of the states of Washington and Oregon. Tourists de-barking from cruise ships that have struck whales are now videotaping thecarcasses hung up on bulbous bows and sending them to cable television orposting them on the internet. This sudden visibility of shipping hazards towhales has led to a public outcry, sparking many recent efforts by govern-ments and industry to reduce the danger.63

The bulbous bow, and our perception of it, has evolved over the cen-turies: from the iconic weapon of the Greek and Roman galleys to the bally-hooed ram of iron steamships that never lived up to its promise, and fromthe bulbous forefoot invented in the United States and Russia that never-theless became a symbol of French technological prowess to the mathe-matical construct of a waveless hull that took form and became the mostrecognized artifact of contemporary naval architecture. In each incarna-tion, the bulbous bow took on a societal, military, and political significancethat went beyond its original intended purpose: the Roman predilection formounting captured rams in public places gave us the Latin word “rostrum”;the ironclad ram, intended to inflict the coup de grâce in battle, proveddeadlier in peacetime accidents; the bulbous forefoot became the underwa-ter expression of Art Deco streamlining; and the modern Inui bulbous bowhas made the toll of shipping on marine wildlife harshly visible to the pub-lic eye.

The social and cultural symbolism attached to the bulbous bow hasplayed a key role in its continued acceptance, even during those periodswhen its utility was called into question. Today, the bulbous bow is caughtin the trade-off between fuel efficiency and its potential as a maritime haz-ard. The regulatory or insurance measures that may be implemented tomitigate the risks are not yet clear. It is incumbent upon both the public,which dictates societal norms, and the maritime industry, which mustoperate under them, to better understand the social history of the bulbousbow—for how we perceive that technology influences how we control it.


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