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.

Warship Builders is the first scholarly study of the U.S. naval shipbuilding industry from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, when American shipyards produced the world's largest fleet that helped defeat the Axis powers in all corners of the globe. A colossal endeavor that absorbed billions and employed virtual armies of skilled workers, naval construction mobilized the nation's leading industrial enterprises in the shipbuilding, engineering, and steel industries to deliver warships whose technical complexity dwarfed that of any other weapons platform. Based on systematic comparisons with British, Japanese, and German naval construction, Thomas Heinrich pinpoints the distinct features of American shipbuilding methods, technology development, and management practices that enabled U.S. yards to vastly outproduce their foreign counterparts. Throughout the book, comparative analyses reveal differences and similarities in American, British, Japanese, and German naval construction. Heinrich shows that U.S. and German shipyards introduced electric arc welding and prefabrication methods to a far greater extent than their British and Japanese counterparts between the wars, laying the groundwork for their impressive production records in World War II. While the American and Japanese navies relied heavily on government-owned navy yards, the British and German navies had most of their combatants built in corporately-owned yards, contradicting the widespread notion that only U.S. industrial mobilization depended on private enterprise. Lastly, the U.S. government's investments into shipbuilding facilities in both private and government-owned shipyards dwarfed the sums British, Japanese, and German counterparts expended. This enabled American builders to deliver a vast fleet that played a pivotal role in global naval combat.

The U.S. shipbuilding industry now confronts grave challenges in providing essential support of national objectives. With recent emphasis on renewal of the U.S. naval fleet, followed by the defense builddown, U.S. shipbuilders have fallen far behind in commercial ship construction, and face powerful new competition from abroad. This book examines ways to reestablish the U.S. industry, to provide a technology base and R&D infrastructure sustaining both commercial and military goals. Comparing U.S. and foreign shipbuilders in four technological areas, the authors find that U.S. builders lag most severely in business process technologies, and in technologies of new products and materials. New advances in system technologies, such as simulation, are also needed, as are continuing developments in shipyard production technologies. The report identifies roles that various government agencies, academia, and, especially, industry itself must play for the U.S. shipbuilding industry to attempt a turnaround.

Hall Brothers designed and built some of the finest sailing ships ever constructed on the Pacific coast. Isaac, Winslow, and Henry Knox Hall acquired their shipbuilding training at the center of America's boatbuilding industry in Cohasset, Massachusetts, during the 1840s. Following the Gold Rush of 1849, Winslow Hall migrated to San Francisco. In 1863, he built the Sarah Louise, which was the first Hall vessel to be launched from the West Coast. Eleven years later, the Hall Brothers Shipyard was established at Port Ludlow in the Washington Territory. In 1881, the shipyard was moved to Port Blakely on Bainbridge Island. From the launching of the Annie Gee in 1874 to their last ship, the five-masted schooner George E. Billings, built in 1903, Hall Brothers constructed 108 vessels for merchants in the Northwest, San Francisco, and Hawaii.

An extraordinary story of American can-do, an inside look at the building of the most dangerous aircraft carrier in the world, the John F. Kennedy. Tip the Empire State Building onto its side and you’ll have a sense of the length of the United States Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the most powerful in the world: the USS John F. Kennedy. Weighing 100,000 tons, Kennedy features the most futuristic technology ever put to sea, making it the most agile and lethal global weapon of war. Only one place possesses the brawn, brains and brass to transform naval warfare with such a creation – the Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia and its 30,000 employees and shipyard workers. This is their story, the riggers, fitters, welders, electricians, machinists and other steelworkers who built the next-generation aircraft carrier. Heavy Metal puts us on the waterfront and into the lives of these men and women as they battle layoffs, the elements, impossible deadlines, extraordinary pressure, workplace dangers and a pandemic to complete a ship that will be essential to protect America’s way of life. The city of Newport News owes its very existence to the company that bears its name. The shipyard dominates the town—physically, politically, financially, socially, and culturally. Thanks to the yard, the city grew from a backwater to be the home of the premier naval contractor in the United States. Heavy Metal captures an indelible moment in the history of a shipyard, a city, and a country.

A chronicle of America's intensive shipbuilding programme during World War II, this explores the development of revolutionary construction methods and the recruitment, training, housing and union activities of the workers.