THE DEPARTMENT OF NAVAL ARCHITECTURE AND MARINE ENGINEERING
THE history of instruction in ship design at the University of Michigan is closely associated with the growth and development of the College of Engineering. When Mortimer Cooley, assistant engineer in the United States Navy, was detailed to the University as Professor of Steam Engineering and Iron Shipbuilding in 1881, twenty-five students were enrolled in civil engineering; in the following year more than sixty were enrolled. Courses in naval architecture were established and taught during alternate semesters by Cooley and were first listed in the Calendar for 1881-82 as follows:
The textbooks used at that time were Thearle's Theoretical Naval Architecture and Seaton's Marine Engineering.Naval Architecture. — The instruction in this branch comprises a course of lectures on the nature of the resistance of ships, the computation of augmented surface, probable resistance, the power necessary to secure a given speed, buoyancy, stability, wave motion, steadiness, determination of centre of gravity and metacentre, causes of rolling, causes of stability, and similar topics.
The growing importance of instruction in marine design from 1883 to 1893 — at which time three courses, Naval Architecture, Marine Engines, and Ship Building, were given — resulted from the increased enrollment in engineering, a demand for technically trained designers in the marine field, in which the trend was toward larger and faster ships, and a realization of the coming expansion of shipping on the Great Lakes. Michigan has a shoreline of 2,213 miles on the lakes and connecting rivers, and a tremendous amount of water-borne commerce annually passes through her waters. In 1952 tonnage on the Detroit River was five times the normal foreign tonnage of New York Harbor and greater than the combined tonnage of Hamburg, Liverpool, and London.
At the February, 1898, meeting of the Regents President Angell presented