David Watson Taylor

David Watson Taylor (date unknown)

David Watson Taylor (March 4, 1864 in Louisa County , † July 29, 1940 in Washington, DC ) was an American naval engineer and rear admiral whose main focus was on the design of ships.

Life

Taylor was born on his parents' farm in Louisa County, Virginia in 1864. At the age of 13 he entered the Randolph Macon Colledge, graduated there in 1881 and then studied at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis . There he passed his exam in 1885 as the best of his year. After a brief training at sea, Taylor completed his academic training at the Royal Naval College , Greenwich . There he reached in 1888 the highest degree ever made by a foreign graduate.

After his return to the United States, Taylor began as an assistant to the naval construction supervision of the US Navy and published his first book, Resistance of Ships and Screw Propulsion , in 1893 , which quickly became the standard work. The following year he moved to the Navy Department in Washington, where he served as assistant to the chief designer in the repair and construction office of the US Navy. Taylor recognized the value of William Froude's towing tests early on and designed the first US test tank based on Froude's model in Washington . In order to better research the influence of the shape parameters, Taylor introduced mathematical expressions of simplified ship shapes in 1902 after 15 years of research in towing tests with models of the British armored cruiser Leviathan . From this series of tests, the systematic resistance tests, later used worldwide as the Taylor Standard Series, developed . In 1910 Taylor published the Speed ​​and Power of Ships, a Manual of Marine Propulsion, another internationally recognized work, and in 1911, at the request of the British government, he investigated the collision between the HMS Hawke and the RMS Olympic .

In addition to the tow test tanks, Taylor also introduced propeller test tanks, which other research institutes used as models for their own comparable systems. In 1914 Taylor was raised to the rank of Rear Admiral and in 1923 he retired from the US Navy. By then around a thousand ships had been built with his collaboration. After retiring from the Navy, Taylor worked primarily as an advisor to the United States Shipping Board , the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the New York marine engineering firm Gibbs Brothers .

Taylor gave numerous lectures and published a number of scientific papers throughout his life. In 1895 he received the gold medal of the London Institution of Naval Architects for his lecture there on flow forms and in 1901 a comparable honor from the American Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers for a lecture on the mass balancing of ship engines. In 1918 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1936 the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers donated a gold medal in his honor, which was awarded to Taylor himself in the first year. In the following year, the newly founded shipbuilding research institute in Carderock was named after Taylor. Taylor received other honors from George Washington University and the Randolph Macon Colledge, and the Institution of Naval Architects made him Honorary Vice President.

In his final years, Taylor worked on a revised edition of his The Speed ​​and Power of Ships . He died on July 29, 1940 in Washington DC

Fonts (selection)

• Solid Stream Forms and the Depth of Water neccessary for Avoid Abnormal Resistance of Ships , Transitions of the Institution of Naval Architects, Volume 36, London, 1895
• The theoretical and practical Methodes of Balancing Marine Engines , Transitions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Volume 9, New York, 1901
• Wave Propeller Coefficients , Transitions of the Institution of Naval Architects, Volume 67, London, 1925

literature

• David Watson Taylor , In: Shipbuilding Society: 100 Years Shipbuilding Society - Biographies on the History of Shipbuilding , Springer, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-540-64150-5 , pp. 487/488.