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| William Francis Gibbs (The Mariners' Museum Library) |
America forgets its heroes at a dispiritingly rapid rate. Barely does a statue go up in, say, Manhattan’s Bryant Park or Farragut Square in Washington, D.C., before passersby have to stop to read the plaque to figure out whom they’re looking at. Soon after, no one stops to read at all. The whole history of the Gold Rush and the founding of California as a U.S. state is told in the statuary of San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, yet among the thousands who wander through every day, how many could name a single likeness?
William Francis Gibbs, America’s foremost naval architect, never even got a statue. Ironically, his greatest work endures, rusting at a Philadelphia pier, nearly as unloved and unknown as her maker.
Gibbs is important for at least four reasons. First, he designed the SS United States, which may have been the greatest ocean liner of all time. It’s the fastest and finest single-hulled non-military vessel ever built in an American yard, and it will almost certainly never be surpassed.
Second, he was crucial to the Allied victory in World War II: Gibbs’s firm designed 70 percent of the American naval and merchant tonnage built during the war, including the iconic Liberty ships.
Third, techniques Gibbs pioneered to make construction of the Liberty ships cheaper and faster helped to revolutionize post-war manufacturing.
Fourth, Gibbs was responsible for more advances in marine engineering — fireproofing, compartmentalization, and high-pressure, high-temperature steam, to name a few — than any of his peers.
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