William Froude (; 28 November 1810 – 4 May 1879) was an English engineer, hydrodynamicist and naval architect. He was the first to formulate reliable laws for the resistance that water offers to ships (such as the hull speed equation) and for predicting their stability.
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Biography
Froude was born at Dartington, Devon, England, the son of Robert Froude, Archdeacon of Totnes, and was educated at Westminster School and Oriel College, Oxford, graduating with a first in mathematics in 1832.
His first employment was as a surveyor on the South Eastern Railway, which, in 1837, led to Isambard Kingdom Brunel giving him responsibility for the construction of a section of the Bristol & Exeter Railway. It was here that he developed his empirical method of setting out track transition curves and introduced an alternative design to the helicoidal skew arch bridge at Rewe and Cowley Bridge Junction, near Exeter. During this period he lived in Cullompton and was Vicar's Warden at St Andrew's Church from 1842 to 1844. He organised and paid a large amount for the rebuilding of the chancel and other restoration work. He also offered to pay to restore the nave if local people would pay 10% of the cost, but this offer was refused. On completion of the Bristol to Exeter line in 1844 he left the town.
At Brunel's invitation, Froude turned his attention to the stability of ships in a seaway, and his 1861 paper to the Institution of Naval Architects became influential in ship design. This led to a commission to identify the most efficient hull shape, which he was able to fulfil by reference to scale models: he established a formula (now known as the Froude number) by which the results of small-scale tests could be used to predict the behaviour of full-sized hulls. He built a sequence of 3, 6, and (shown in the picture) 12-foot scale models and used them in towing trials to establish resistance and scaling laws.