Shipmaking Tautly Taught

From Jason's Argo to the America's Cup winner Constellation, good ship architecture has always depended heavily on intuition. But feel-of-the-sea design is increasingly tested and checked by the complex sciences of fluid dynamics and molecular stress. Nowhere in the U.S. are ancient skills and new techniques taught more tautly than at New York's Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, a Long Island college whose 70 students get room, board, books and tuition free, and almost always wind up at the top of their profession.

For centuries master shipwrights taught their jealously guarded trade by word of mouth to a handful of working apprentices. Webb Institute's founder, William Henry Webb, learned the business from his father Isaac, a flourishing New York shipbuilder of the early 1800s. Taking over in 1840, he turned out 138 major vessels during the next three decades. Among them were the clipper ships Challenge, which had a 210-ft. mainmast (the tallest ever built) with almost three acres of sail, and the Comet, which set the record (76 days) for sailing round the Horn from San Francisco to New York.

When steam forced Webb to close his yards, he became an investor. In 1889, with big profits from the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. and the Panama Railroad, he created Webb's Academy and Home for Shipbuilders-the first and still the only college in the U.S. devoted solely to naval architecture and marine engineering (though comparable courses are offered by M.I.T. and the University of Michigan). Webb's bequest of $2,500,000, now grown to $8,000,000, pays 70% of the school's operating expenses. Alumni and industry make up the rest, helping to pay the salaries of 14 faculty members under President William T. Alexander, 63, former dean of engineering at Boston's Northeastern University.

Cleaning Bilges. The college offers no electives, no languages, and only one humanities course, a three-year smattering of history, literature and art. School begins in August, allowing time for a ten-week "work term" in the win ter. Last week, while most U.S. college students were home for Christmas, Webb freshmen worked as ship fitters in yards from Puget Sound to Newport News. Sophomores were off at sea as grease monkeys on freighters; upperclassmen were apprenticed to firms of naval architects and marine engineers. "We want them to clean bilges and stand watches," says Alexander. "These men are all headed for management jobs and their training allows them to speak with authority."

One Webb man who headed for top management and got there is Edward Teale ('34), president of New York Shipbuilding Corp., which built the nuclear-powered ship Savannah. Owen Oakley ('37) is director of preliminary ship design for the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Ships, where John Nachtsheim ('47) is chief naval architect. J. J. Henry ('35) heads his own top firm, lately designed the naval icebreaker Glacier, and helped develop a fleet of ships to take liquefied gas from Algeria to London and from the Persian Gulf to Tokyo. Several Webb alumni, including John Parkinson ('29), NASA's chief of aerodynamic programs, have switched from designing ships to exploring space.

A Ban on Beards. A Webb student is invariably expelled if he flunks two courses. Competition is sharp, honed by the familiarity of living together in a stately Glen Cove mansion that lies between the Soviet U.N. delegation's weekend estate and Bobby Kennedy's new residence. "You know every one of your classmates," says Roger R. Compton, a 1961 graduate and now a research associate. "And you're out to beat every one of them." In the current freshman class of 20, eight scored 770 or better in a math achievement test with a top score of 800.

Webb makes no apologies for its narrow specialization or rigor. Undergraduates seem to thrive on the combination. A spartan student government has banned beards, liquor on campus, and visits by girls to dorms. Student courts can penalize a student for coming late to class or expel him for cheating on the honor system. "Most of us realize what a tremendous gift this is," says Senior Karl L. Kirkman of Catonsville, Md. "We would hate to have it spoiled for the next guy."

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