William Froude

William Froude was an English engineer who founded the modern practice of ship hull design through scaled hydrodynamic testing. He developed the mathematical relationship now called the Froude number, which allows the wave-making resistance measured on a small scaled model in a towing tank to be reliably translated into the resistance a full-size ship hull will experience, and he built the first ship-model towing tank at Torquay in the 1870s to put the method into practice for the Royal Navy. His techniques for predicting hull resistance and rolling behavior from model tests became standard practice in naval architecture and marine engineering worldwide.