Shipbuilding

Shipbuilding is the construction of ships and other floating vessels. In modern times, it normally takes place in a specialized facility known as a shipyard. Shipbuilders, also called shipwrights, follow a specialized occupation that traces its roots to before recorded history. Until recently, with the development of complex non-maritime technologies during the industrial revolution, a ship has often represented the most advanced structure that the society building it could produce. Some key industrial advances were developed to support shipbuilding, for instance the sawing of timbers by mechanical saws propelled by windmills in Dutch shipyards during the first half of the 17th century. The design process saw the early adoption of the logarithm (invented in 1615) to generate the curves used to produce the shape of a hull, especially when scaling up these curves accurately in the mould loft. Shipbuilding and ship repairs, both commercial and military, are referred to as naval engineering. The construction of boats is a similar activity called boat building. The dismantling of ships is called ship breaking. The earliest evidence of maritime transport by modern humans is the settlement of Australia between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. This almost certainly involved rafts, possibly equipped with some sort of sail. Much of the development beyond that raft technology occurred in the "nursery" areas of the Mediterranean and in Maritime Southeast Asia. Favoured by warmer waters and a number of inter-visible islands, boats (and, later, ships) with water-tight hulls (unlike the "flow through" structure of a raft) could be developed. The ships of ancient Egypt were built by joining the hull planks together, edge to edge, with tenons set in mortices cut in the mating edges. A similar technique, but with the tenons being pinned in position by dowels, was used in the Mediterranean for most of classical...