Froude, William

Froude, William (frd), 1810–79, English engineer and naval architect, brother of J. Anthony Froude; educated at Oxford. In 1837 he worked on the Bristol and Exeter railroad, constructing the line from the Whitehall tunnel to Exeter. He studied the motion of a ship among waves, demonstrating that the rolling of a ship could be reduced by a deep bilge keel. This fact and his conclusions on the relationship between construction design, efficiency, and power in screwships were extensively used by the Royal Navy. He also constructed a dynamometer for measuring the power of large marine engines.

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Froude, William

(born Nov. 28, 1810, Dartington, Devon, Eng.—died May 4, 1879, Simonstown, S.Af.) British engineer and naval architect. He was the brother of James Anthony Froude. In 1837 he became an assistant to I.K. Brunel, for whom he oversaw railway construction. For the British Admiralty he conducted experiments using scale models of ships to determine the physical laws governing full-sized ships, using a testing tank he built at his home. The Froude number, expressed as the ratio of a vessel's velocity to the square root of the product of its waterline length and the acceleration of gravity, is still used by marine architects to predict the behaviour of ships from scale models.