Background
William Froude was born on November 28, 1810, in Dartington, Devonshire, United Kingdom. He was the sixth son of Archdeacon Richard Hurrell Froude, rector at Dartington, and Margaret Spedding of Cumberland.
United Kingdom
William Froude
Deans Yard, 17A, London SW1P 3PB, United Kingdom
William was educated at Westminster School.
Oriel College, Oxford OX1 4EW, United Kingdom
William was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, graduating in 1832.
engineer hydrodynamicist scientist naval architect
William Froude was born on November 28, 1810, in Dartington, Devonshire, United Kingdom. He was the sixth son of Archdeacon Richard Hurrell Froude, rector at Dartington, and Margaret Spedding of Cumberland.
William was educated at Westminster School and Oriel College, Oxford, graduating in 1832.
After graduating, Froude was occupied as a civil engineer and came under the influence of I. K. Brunel, builder of both railways and oceangoing steamships, who stimulated his interest in naval architecture. Froude retired from active civil engineering practice at the age of thirty-six, but he continued to give attention to various aspects of ship behavior, both recreational and technical. At Brunel’s request he undertook in 1856 a resistance and rolling study of the Great Eastern, and his analytical and experimental work on the subject, at full as well as reduced scale, extended to many ships over many years. Of even greater importance than his control of rolling by use of bilge keels was his promotion of resistance studies on scale models. His efforts to secure the support of the Admiralty for the construction of a model towing tank at first aroused the opposition of John Scott Russell and other members of the Institution of Naval Architects, and it was not till 1870 that the sum of £2,000 was granted for this purpose. The original tank, 250 feet in length, was built on Froude’s own land at Torquay only eight years before his death. He was ably assisted by his son, Robert Edmund Froude, who later built the Admiralty tank at Haslar.
William Froude’s great manual skill was of inestimable value in the construction and operation of the tank, and many of his model and prototype processes and instruments continue to be employed: the use of paraffin and waterline cutting machines for models; resistance recorders; governors; roll indicators; and propeller-engine dynamometers. Use of the scale model for resistance studies was based upon his hypothesis that the total resistance could be considered the sum of wave formation and skin friction and that each could be scaled independently. He showed that the wave effects would be similar in model and prototype if the velocity were reduced in proportion to the square root of the length. This is known as Froude’s law of similarity, even though it had been published by Ferdinand Reech, a professor in the school of naval architecture at Paris, in 1852 and purportedly introduced in his lectures as early as 1831. Froude formulated the law of skin-friction similarity after towing streamlined catamaran planks of various lengths and surface finishes through water over a wide range of speeds. The resistance of the smooth surfaces was found to vary with no more than the 1.85 power of the velocity, and only for the roughest did the power reach 2.0. His perceptive understanding of the effect of surface length was in close accord with present-day boundary-layer theory.
Froude's many writings are to be found in the Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects and in reports to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Froude’s last paper, published a year before his death, was on the subject of screw propulsion, one of his early interests.
Froude was a fellow of the Royal Society of London.
William was married to Catherine Henrietta Elizabeth Holdsworth, daughter of the Governor of Dartmouth Castle, mercantile magnate and member of Parliament Arthur Howe Holdsworth.