Throughout the 19th century, the shipbuilding industry in America was both art and craft, one based on tradition, instinct, hand tools, and handmade ship models. Even as mechanization was introduced, the trade supported a system of apprenticeship, master builders, and family dynasties, and aesthetics remained the basis for design. Spanning the transition from wood to iron shipbuilding in America, Thiesen's history tells how practical and nontheoretical methods of shipbuilding began to be discarded by the 1880s in favor of technical and scientific methods. Perceiving that British warships were superior to its own, the United States Navy set out to adopt British design principles and methods. American shipbuilders wanted only to build better warships, but embracing British practices exposed them to new methods and technologies that aided in the transformation of American shipbuilding into an engineering-based industry. American shipbuilders soon improvised ways to turn U.S. shipyards into state-of-the-art facilities and, by the early 20th century, they forged ahead of the British in construction and production methods. The history of shipbuilding in America is a story of culture dictating technology. Thiesen describes the trans-Atlantic exchange of technical information that took place during this era and the role of the U.S. Navy in that transfer. He also profiles the lives of individual shipbuilders. Their stories will inspire enthusiasts of ships, shipbuilding, and shipbuilding technology, as well as historians and students of maritime history and the history of technology.

The first Mississippi steamboat was a packet, the New Orleans, a side-wheeler built at Pittsburgh in 1811, designed for the New Orleans-Natchez trade. Packets dominated during the first forty years of steam providing the quickest passenger transportation throughout mid-continent America. The packets remained fairly numerous even into the first two decades of the twentieth century when old age or calamity overtook them. By the 1930s the flock was severely depleted, and today the packet is extinct. Containing almost 6,000 entries, the directory includes a majority of combination passenger and freight steamers, but includes in a broader sense all types of passenger carriers propelled by steam that plied the waters of the Mississippi System. Each entry describes its steamboat by rig, class, engines, boilers, the shipyard where and when built, along with tidbits of historical interest on its use, demise, and/or conversion. Also included are today's steam-powered river passenger carriers, the excursion boats Belle of Louisville, Natchez, and Julia Belle Swain, and the two tourist steamers, Mississippi Queen and Delta Queen.

The proceedings of the Second International Conference on [title] held in Barcelona, Spain, September/October 1991, comprise papers on topics in ocean circulation, wave structure interaction, water quality and biological modeli harbor resonance, coastal circulation, random waves description, sedimen

This book contains updated, reviewed versions of the best papers on "Modelling Coastal Sea Processes" presented at the International Ocean and Atmosphere Pacific Conference, held in Adelaide, South Australia, on 23-27 October 1995. The articles were selected on both scientific merit and usefulness to coastal engineers, physical oceanographers and marine biologists. They cover a range of topics including the modelling of tides and storm surges (especially inundation due to surges), the analysis of modelled or recorded data to permit prediction of tide heights over tidal flats and tidal currents in the presence of coastal eddies, and the modelling of dispersion of fish larvae from spawning grounds to coastal nurseries. Computational techniques are emphasised in line with modern applications, but some analytical techniques have also been included.

Building on prior RAND research, this monograph explores the need for and retention of technical skills in the UK1s maritime industry, particularly among designers and engineers involved with surface ship and submarine acquisition and support. The results reveal that the UK1s future naval programme likely will have to be modified or augmented to sustain these technical skills in the long term.