Trickle-up technology
I’m planning a boat build. 16’ balanced-lug dinghy for daysailing. Light and portable but capacious for what it is. Anyway, the designer, Michael Storer, drew the boat the same year “our” oldest kid was born (1993); he came up in dinghy racing in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s. With no commercial viability for the production of racing dinghies there, the whole scene was garage/backyard builds. The aficionados were, according to Storer, “brainy” people—engineers, scientists—people who could work with physics and materials. And people who loved to experiment. This was a highly-organized sport, even though the production of the boats was DIY—and the rules permitted a degree of idiosyncrasy in design and construction, encouraging experimentation.
In any kind of sailboat racing, from little one-person dinghies to round-the-world ocean yachts, the name of the game is sustainable speed, and the way to achieve that is to maximize sail area and minimize weight and drag. The devil is, as always, in the details; how do you do that, and still have a boat that carries a crew and doesn’t fall apart—at least not until the race is over?
Storer recounts spirited competition with counterparts in the UK, pushing these backyard designers and builders to shed weight, decrease drag, yet build in structural rigidity at the same time so the boats held together. These boats were, of course, built low-cost, and materials were limited to wood, a little fiberglass, and glue.
There was so much innovative experimentation going on that the dinghy designs began to catch the notice of yacht designers—the professionals who drew million-dollar (now multi-multi-million-dollar) racing yachts, owned by rich men and crewed by paid muscle.
Meanwhile, however, racing yacht design in the United States kept the emphasis on “yacht.” The same designers and builders who had long built the “racer-cruisers,” as they were called, for their affluent clientele to enjoy both club racing and leisurely excursions with family and friends, adhered to rather conservative standards of design, build, and comfort.
Fast-forward into the 1980s and Australia won the America’s Cup and took it back to Australia, pretty much traumatizing the American yacht-racing world. Then you get Dennis Conner and the campaign to win it back. Also in the 1980s you have designers start to incorporate racing innovations from the past decade or so into “racer-cruiser” designs. These boats were the boats coming out of the commercial yards and factories, molded in fiberglass, using techniques that were evolving significantly at that point.
It occurs to me that what these DIY dinghy racers were doing in the 60s and 70s turned out to be, in a sense, free R&D for these 80s yacht builders. Think about how expensive it would have been for the commercial builders to experiment with some of this stuff. The sailing-yacht business is a perennially tough one to stay in, as many high-dollar luxury industries are. Even if the result of a failed experiment doesn’t kill anybody—and with seagoing boats, there’s certainly no guarantee of that—it’s still a risk a builder might be forgiven for deciding he can’t afford to take. It isn’t that these companies don’t innovate; it’s that they must do so cautiously; they can’t afford to push it the way a DIY dinghy sailor with a few hundred bucks and half a year’s weekends invested in his boat can. If that boat falls apart, the builder takes a dunking, and then it’s literally back to the drawing board.
Here comes the farther-back historical tie-in. Conservatism in design and construction was even more imperative for builders in the early modern period—well into the nineteenth century. The physics of hydrodynamics are so complex and difficult to derive experimentally, that the best scientists of the time—people like Euler, and even Newton—could not fully work them out. Shipwrights would have been fools not to rely on the long history of operation informing their craft—and they were not fools. It’s not that they didn’t innovate—they did—but they did so cautiously, risking their reputations, their livelihoods, the fortunes of their clients, and the lives of those clients’ crews with every novelty they introduced. The economies of the early modern European empires, dependent as they were on emigration, the transportation of enslaved labor across the oceans, the transportation of the commodities their slaves produced across the oceans, and all the businesses and industries that linked together and served that commodity-trade core, depended on sound ship design and construction—and the affordability of the most expensive and complex technology of their world. It was nothing to play with.
People who can afford to play games can afford to experiment with things that those whose lives and livelihoods depended upon their decisions and crafts cannot. There was yachting in the early modern period—perhaps most notably in the Netherlands, and then in England. It was, of course, the pastime not just of the nobility, but most commonly royalty itself. And yacht design was, just as it is today, a fertile ground for experimentation. Charles II of England (r. 1660—1685) was a keen yachtsman, enjoying a craft built for him by the Dutch; jacht is a Dutch word, and Charles had lived in the Netherlands during the Interregnum. Charles was equally keen on the navy, and was personally involved in, and committed to, the design of new warships. Warship design, in turn, had a strong, but delayed, influence on commercial ship design; the navy was rich, and unconcerned with profit. It could be conservative, but it could also afford to experiment.
There’s not much in the history of technology more interesting than “trickle-up” technology; instances of development at the vernacular level coming to influence what’s going on with big, rich, powerful organizations. In the 1920s, the Ford Motor Company had to reckon with American farmers adapting its cars to power farm equipment and even run household devices like washing machines. Would it try to capitalize on these developments—of which it had not, itself, thought—or would it try to squash them, especially out of concern for liability?
Royal yacht design was not, of course, a vernacular pursuit, but it did take place outside the mainstream of commercial design and construction, and so it also prompts us to think about how technological influence comes in from the side as well as from underneath.
It’s a long way, in one sense, from Charles II’s yachts to people learning how to fix their own iPhones, but now we have a growing vernacular technological literacy with these digital electronic devices, and there is no way we will not see some innovative pressure from that. We already are; it’s those who have to repair something who figure out how a design should be changed to make it more repairable. And more repairable means more sustainable. Keeping an eye on backyard, garage, and dining-room-table experimentation is a good idea. That’s where a lot of tomorrow’s solutions to today’s challenges will happen.
Dinghy Cruising Association, “Michael Storer talks about his evolution from a dinghy racer to a designer of multi-role boats,” YouTube, accessed 25 Nov. 2023
J. David Davies, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2017).
Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture 37:4 (Oct. 1996), pp. 763—95.