[BITList] Fwd: Ship's shape

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2016-09-20



Reed, Sir  Edward James  (1830-1906), naval architect, was born at Sheerness on 20 September 1830, the son of John Reed. He became an apprentice at Sheerness Dockyard where his outstanding ability led to selection in 1849 for the Central School of Mathematics and Naval Architecture at Portsmouth, which had opened the previous year with Dr Joseph Wooley as principal. There were nine students in his year, several of whom were to become his assistants in later years. In 1851 he married Rosetta Barnaby, sister of Nathaniel Barnaby, a fellow student, and eldest daughter of Nathaniel Barnaby of Sheerness. Reed graduated in 1852, and was appointed a supernumerary draughtsman, working in the mould loft at Sheerness. Although this was a normal first appointment Reed found the work frustrating and lacking in responsibility, and even his first book of poetry, Corona and other Poems (1857), failed to satisfy his creative instincts. It is said that he regarded compulsory service in the militia as the last straw.

In 1853 Reed accepted the post of editor of the Mechanic's Magazine, an influential journal widely read among the rising number of engineers and technicians. The following year he offered the Admiralty a design for an armoured frigate but the concept was ahead of its time and, engaged in war with Russia, the Admiralty saw no requirement for such a ship. At the end of 1859 Scott Russell called a meeting which led to the formation of the Institution of Naval Architects, and at the first meeting in January 1860 Reed was appointed secretary and editor of the Transactions.

Early responsibility

In 1861 Reed sent a design to the Admiralty for an armoured corvette, acknowledging the help of his brother-in-law. In the following year he proposed a scheme for converting wooden sloops into armoured ships and was invited to develop these ideas within the Admiralty. He also produced, with assistance from Barnaby, designs for larger ships for which he was later to receive an ex gratia payment of £5000 from the Admiralty. When Isaac Watts retired in 1863 the first lord (the duke of Somerset) invited Reed to become the chief constructor. This appointment was criticized in parliament on the grounds of Reed's lack of experience but he defended himself vigorously, and to such an extent that he was forced to apologize.

As more and more powerful guns became available, ships required thicker protective armour, but the weight of armour meant that the area to be protected had to be reduced. Reed tackled this in two ways: he concentrated the armour in a shallow waterline belt with a short armoured battery amidships; and he made his ships relatively shorter. The length of the ship was determined by the number of guns carried and his short ship was possible only because fewer of the new, bigger guns were required. There was a considerable power penalty for the shorter ship but the overall cost was less. Particularly after the battle of Lissa (1866) there was emphasis on end-on attack, including ramming. Reed developed a number of features such as movable bulwarks and recessed gunports, which were not entirely satisfactory, to enable guns in his central battery to fire parallel to the keel. In the Bellerophon, and other earlier ships, a lightly protected battery was arranged in the bow. Reed and Barnaby saved further weight in the Bellerophon by a lighter structure, better aligned to the loading. This system, known as the 'bracket frame' system, was also easier to build and had been little changed in principle when the long reign of the battleship ended in the Second World War.

In 1865 Reed was given permission to design the Fatikh for Turkey, later sold to Germany, which was to influence the double deck height battery in the British Audacious class, designed with a shallow draught for overseas service. This class introduced further weight-saving measures, mainly ones concerned with reducing the thickness of the structure away from amidships. Reed also intended to take account of William Froude's early work on rolling in waves by reducing the metacentric height. It appears that his reduction in stability was too much and the class required a considerable amount of ballast. Once this was installed they proved successful and well-liked ships.

Revolution in ship design

Under Reed there was a complete revolution in the way ships were designed; rules of thumb gave way to calculations based on theoretically sound principles and careful experiment. He encouraged work on stability by Barnes and others of his staff; with the assistance of White, Reed himself developed a method of calculating loading on a ship at sea which led to a rational structural design method. Both of these advances depended on the accurate estimate of the weights of a new ship. Having adopted Froude's early work on rolling, he encouraged Froude's later work on the use of models to improve hull forms and to estimate power requirements. It was Reed who persuaded the Admiralty to pay for Froude to build the first ship model test tank at Torquay which began to operate in 1872.

Reed was always interested in technical education, and strongly supported the establishment of the Royal School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at South Kensington in 1864. This school was transferred to the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, in 1872 and moved to University College, London, in 1967. He contributed to the work of the school and helped to progress the careers of its graduates. From 1872 to 1875 he was proprietor and editor of Naval Science, an influential technical quarterly, and contributed many articles himself.

Outstanding team leader

This era shows Reed at his best, initiating work himself, encouraging his staff-he was far more willing to give credit to his assistants than most men of his age-and also adopting and supporting work from outside. Less obvious, these new procedures marked the change from the individual designer to the leader of a team. Reed owed much to the wise guidance of the controller, Spencer Robinson.

Reed developed the centre battery ship with full sailing rig in a number of successful designs such as that of the Hercules and the Sultan. In 1866 the government of the colony of Victoria asked the Admiralty to design a low freeboard coastal defence turret ship based on Ericsson's Monitor. Though Reed was impressed by many features of Ericsson's ship he thought the low freeboard unsafe, and in developing the design of Cerberus he added an armoured breastwork which raised the turrets and provided protected access and ventilation for the low main hull. The remains of Cerberus may be seen today in the outskirts of Melbourne. He designed similar ships for India and for the Royal Navy, culminating in 1869 with the design of the much larger Devastation for the Royal Navy. She was the first battleship for the navy designed without sailing rig and her style may be seen as the prototype for all later battleships. Her two main turrets were mounted high up on the breastwork at each end, and this gave them wide arcs of fire. Her sister, Thunderer, introduced hydraulic loading for her 12 inch muzzle loaders. The low freeboard of the main hull made these vessels poor seaboats, and they lost speed rapidly in a head sea.

Quarrels and controversies

In the meantime Captain Coles, the designer of the turret gun mounting, was agitating for a low-freeboard, fully-rigged sailing battleship. Reed and many seamen felt that the combination of sails and low freeboard was unsafe and after a searching inquiry in 1865 the Admiralty decided to build a rigged turret ship but with a considerable freeboard. Reed designed the Monarch on this basis but though she had a long career and was liked in the service, Reed felt that she offered no advantage over a centre battery ship. Coles, too, was unhappy and eventually persuaded the first lord (Somerset) to agree to a ship of his concept. The design work was carried out by Lairds but the design revolution described above had not reached Birkenhead and the company greatly underestimated the weight of such a ship while its estimate of the height of the centre of gravity was an inaccurate guess.

Reed and Spencer Robinson gave specific warnings of the dangers of the proposed ship but the first lord (Pakington) ordered the Captain to be built by Lairds who were entirely responsible for her. Technical evidence of serious problems accumulated during her building and she completed grossly overweight, floating 22 inches deeper than intended; this further reduced her already inadequate freeboard to 6 feet 7 inches. She performed well on her first two voyages but prior to the third an inclining experiment was carried out to measure her stability. It was found to be perfectly adequate for small angles of heel but disappeared at larger angles. The theory of large angle stability was known from Attwood's work in the late eighteenth century but the solution of the equations was too difficult until one of Reed's assistants, Barnes, developed a practical method in the late 1860s, the Captain being only the second ship to which it was applied.

Unfortunately the Captain had sailed on her third voyage before Barnes completed his calculations on the vessel, which showed her to be unsafe at over 20 degrees heel. This result was confirmed when she capsized on 6 September 1870 with the loss of nearly 500 men, including Coles. By this time Reed had already resigned, tired of quarrels with ministers over Captain and other technical issues, though the prolonged argument over his salary in 1869-70 may have contributed to his decision. He joined Whitworth briefly but in 1871 he became chairman of Earle's shipyard in Hull while at the same time launching his own naval architecture consultancy in London.

Later years

Reed designed ships for other countries, including Germany, Brazil, and Chile. One of these, a turret ship generally similar to the Monarch, was purchased for the Royal Navy as the Neptune. Though these ships were reasonably successful they lacked the originality of his earlier work, confirming that Reed was a brilliant team leader, working best with guidance from above and support from his staff. His last major design was for two Chilean battleships which were bought for the Royal Navy as the Swiftsure and the Triumph. His paper on their design to the Institution of Naval Architects drew strong criticism: they were seen as a mere copy of White's big cruisers.

Reed wrote clearly and both his technical papers and his more popular works were easily understood. His most important technical works were his Royal Society paper on structural design in 1866 and that on stability of low freeboard sailing ships to the Institution of Naval Architects in 1868. Our Ironclad Ships (1869) was a more popular, though technically correct, justification of his design work. Shipbuilding in Iron and Steel was a very readable textbook on the subject. There were other books and papers on warships, two on travels in Russia and Japan, a novel, and a second book of poems. He wrote frequent letters to The Times and various journals on a range of topics, the majority of these being criticisms of Admiralty design policy. In particular he advocated armour belts from end to end, seeing subdivision as inadequate protection even though some of the last designs while he was chief constructor incorporated this feature.

As a result of one such campaign of criticism a well qualified committee was set up in 1878 to examine the design of the Inflexible, their report dismissing Reed's fears. In 1889 he was to criticize White's design for the Royal Sovereign. White was permitted to present a very detailed paper to the Institution of Naval Architects and in a very long and heated debate fully justified his work with firm evidence to rebut all Reed's allegations.

Reed unsuccessfully contested Hull in 1873 but was elected MP for Pembroke district in 1874. From 1880 to 1895 and from 1900 to 1906 he represented Cardiff district, serving briefly as a lord of the Treasury in 1886. He was a Liberal until March 1905 when he joined the Liberal Unionists. For many years he was a JP in Glamorgan. He served on several parliamentary committees including the Load Line committee of 1884 and the Manning committee of 1894, both of which made important contributions to merchant ship safety. He was the commissioner for the investigation into the capsize of the Daphne on launching with the loss of 124 lives. He advocated the construction of a tubular railway across the bed of the English Channel as an alternative to Sir Edward Watkin's tunnel scheme.

Reed was a strong supporter of the Institution of Naval Architects and was elected to council following his resignation as secretary in 1863; he became vice-president in 1865 and honorary vice-president in 1905, a position in which he served until his death. He presented a number of papers and took an active part in many discussions. Reed was active in other institutions and was a member of council of the Institution of Civil Engineers from 1865 to 1896. He was elected FRS in 1876, created CB in 1868 (advanced to KCB in 1880), and awarded decorations by Russia, Austria, Turkey, and Japan.

A son, Edward Tennyson Reed, was born in 1860 and later became an artist for Punch. In later years his daughter, Emily Sarah, who had a strong mechanical bent, acted as his secretary. She was to persuade Eustace Tennyson-D'Eyncourt to become a naval architect. Reed died at 65 Savoy Court, the Strand, London, on 30 November 1906, and was buried at Putney Vale cemetery.

David K. Brown 

Sources  DNB + Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, 49 (1907) + O. Parkes, British battleships, 'Warrior' 1860 to 'Vanguard' 1950: a history of design, construction, and armament [1957] + D. K. Brown, Warrior to Dreadnought: warship development, 1860-1905 (1997) + Parl. papers + Kelly, Handbk (1893) + WWW, 1897-1915 + WWBMP, vol. 2 + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1907)
Archives BL, corresp. with W. E. Gladstone, Add. MSS 44494-44515, passim + Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Sir William Harcourt
Likenesses  G. Frampton, memorial relief, exh. RA 1917, town hall, Cardiff · Ape [C. Pellegrini], caricature, chromolithograph, NPG; repro. in VF (20 March 1875) · London Stereoscopic Co., photograph, NPG [see illus.] · W. H. Mote, stipple (after photograph), BM · B. Stone, photograph, NPG · portrait, repro. in Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects · wood-engraving (after photograph by John and Charles Watkins), NPG; repro. in ILN (16 Jan 1866)
Wealth at death  £19,022 19s. 7d.: resworn probate, 21 Feb 1907, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



========================================================================
©    Oxford     University    Press,    2004.    See     legal    notice:
http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/legal/

We hope you have enjoyed this Life of The Day, but if you do wish to stop
receiving   these   messages,   please   EITHER   send   a   message   to
LISTSERV at WEBBER.UK.HUB.OUP.COM with

signoff ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L

in the body (not the subject line) of the message

OR

send an  email to  epm-oxforddnb at oup.com, asking us  to stop  sending you
these messages.