Early Life and Career
Taylor was born in Louisa County, Va. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1881, after graduating from Randolph-Macon College where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi. He graduated from the Academy in 1885 at the head of his class, setting a scholarship record. He was sent to Greenwich, England in 1885 and received the highest honors of the Royal Naval College in 1888, again setting a record.
In August 1886, Taylor was appointed an assistant naval constructor. Early in his naval career he served on various stations and in 1909 acted as chief of the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair. In 1895 he was the first American honored by award of a gold medal of the British Institute of Naval Architects.
In 1898 he constructed and had charge of the first experimental tank for models of war vessels built in the United States. He was connected with boards dealing with hull changes of naval vessels. In probably the greatest achievement of his career he created the "Taylor Standard Series" of 80 models with systematically varying proportions and prismatic coefficient. This series is still used for preliminary estimates of ship resistance for twin screw, moderate to high speed naval ships. The book was revised in 1933 with the addition of data on 40 new models. The series data was re-analyzed using more recent methods of evaluating friction resistance, and the results were published in 1954. Both "Speed and Power" and the Reanalysis were republished by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers in 1998, the centennial of the EMB.
The Taylor Series allows variation of the slenderness ratio, beam to draft ratio, and prismatic coefficient. While these are far from the only parameters that can be varied in a warship's hull design, it is possible to get a preliminary estimate of ship resistance from the series for essentially all warships, and many merchant ships, built since Taylor's time. Taylor's main contribution was to recognize that these three simple parameters were the critical ones for ship performance. A Taylor series estimate is accurate enough to plan the model test and to develop an idea of how much power will be required to achieve design speed, prior to model testing the actual hull form. Today the Taylor Series has been programmed in electronic form and is used in several ship "synthesis models" to do feasibility studies for new ships.
After the RMS Titanic disaster of 1912, he was assigned to investigate the problem of making ships more seaworthy through better hull construction. On this duty, he served under the Secretary of Commerce and took a leading part in the International Conference on Safety at Sea, which grew out of the Titanic sinking.
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