Nathanael Greene Herreshoff - Herreshoff Innovations

Herreshoff Innovations

During a career spanning 72 years, Herreshoff:

1. Designed and built five winning America's Cup yachts. He could sail them as well, earning a reputation as a skilled helmsman. Additionally, his firm built the winning Cup yachts Enterprise - 1930, and Rainbow - 1934 (designed by Starling Burgess). Every winning America's Cup Yacht from 1893 to 1934 was built by the Herreshoff yard.
2. Designed well over 2000 craft and produced more than 18,000 drawings. Between 1890 and 1938, the number of yachts he designed that won the Astor Cup, Puritan Cup and Kings Cup outnumbered the winning yachts of all rival yacht designers combined.
3. Built the first torpedo boats for the U.S. Navy.
4. Developed the first handicapping formula (the Herreshoff Rule) to allow yachts of different sizes and types to race together.
5. Developed yacht scantlings (specifications) based on scientific load calculations; prior to Herreshoff, most yacht designers simply relied on traditional rules of thumb to determine the proper dimensions for planks, frames and rigs.
6. Invented streamlined bulb and fin keels.
7. Invented the sail track and slide in its present form along with many other patterns of marine hardware.
8. Developed long overhangs on racing yachts that produced longer immersed waterlines, hence greater speed, when underway.
9. Developed the first light steam engine and fast torpedo boats.
10. Developed nearly all of the methods of constructing light wooden hulls.
11. Introduced screw fastenings for planking to this country.
12. Invented the crosscut sail, with panels running at right angles to the leech, in order to combat cotton canvas' tendency to distort under load.
13. Designed more types of steam engines than anyone else.
14. Designed the web frame and longitudinal construction for metal hulls afterward patented and known as the Isherwood System.
15. Developed light hollow metal spars combined with scientifically engineered rigging.
16. Developed the flat stern form of steam yachts capable of being driven at high speed/length ratios.
17. Designed the first folding propeller.
18. Designed below-deck winches - Reliance 1903.
19. Developed the method of splicing rope to wire.
20. Herreshoff yachts were the first to attach shrouds and stays to mast tangs.
21. Invented the modern turnbuckle.
22. Invented sail tracks on masts and slides attached to the luff of sails to ride in the tracks (up until then, sails had been attached with mast hoops or laced to masts).
23. Invented the modern winch.
24. Received the first U.S. patent on catamaran sailboats (the Amaryllis, 1876).