Froude, William

Froude, William fro͞od [key], 1810–79, English engineer and naval architect, brother of J. Anthony Froude; educated at Oxford. In 1837 he worked on the Bristol and Exeter railroad, constructing the line from the Whitehall tunnel to Exeter. He studied the motion of a ship among waves, demonstrating that the rolling of a ship could be reduced by a deep bilge keel. This fact and his conclusions on the relationship between construction design, efficiency, and power in screwships were extensively used by the Royal Navy. He also constructed a dynamometer for measuring the power of large marine engines.

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