Karl Burnett — Active Contributor

Accelerated life tests are used to help predict the rate of failure of components. Capacitors are frequent victims of accelerated life testing, and have a distant relationship with one of the earliest documented accelerated life tests: the unit of capacitance, the farad, is named for Sir Michael Faraday. 

Michael Faraday remains one of the most important scientists of all time. He made foundational discoveries in electricity, magnetism, and electrochemistry. Today, Faraday is less well known for documenting the Royal Navy’s results of accelerated life tests on dry rot of wood.

Failure of Ship Hulls Due to Rot

British oak forests provided the wood to build the fleets that fought the Seven Years’ War, American Revolutionary War, French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. New trees had to mature for 80-120 years for shipbuilding. By the early 1800s, three-quarters of British oak forests had been harvested to fight a half century of naval wars. Additionally, a scourge of dry rot reduced the service life of Britain’s main battle ships from the historical 25 years to less than 7 years. Britain had a severe national security problem – the Timber Crisis.

R. James Abernathy was a writer who specialized in flour and grain mills in the late 1800s. In 1880, he authored Practical Hints on Mill Building. Early in this 350-page technical manual, he wrote that millwright skill was declining. He thought the reason was that the millwrights were assembling mills from pre-fabricated components, instead of having to manufacture parts by hand. The manual was published in the United States and England, and remained an authority for several decades. It remains a reference for assessing mills for their historic value, such as applications for national historic registers.

In the 19th century, factories and mills were major concentrations of capital. Manufacturing completed for investment money, and business cases could be as closely examined as any other risky investment. In 1884, Edwin Matheson wrote about how maintenance affected accounting and business prospects in The Depreciation of Factories and their Valuation. Matheson’s book became the basis of modern views of depreciation.

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Ships Don’t Last Like They Used To

Robert G. Albion was a notable historian of maritime affairs. He taught at Princeton and Harvard, and was one of the US Navy’s chief historians during World War II. In one of his books, Albion examined how timber management in Britain affected naval shipbuilding and maintenance policies.

In the late 1700s, the British Empire was more dependent on the navy for power projection, home defense, and security of maritime trade. In the age of sail, the average ship life was between 10 and 20 years. In the 17th century, British naval ships lasted 25-30 years. Albion found their average service life to be only 13 years in 1771. By 1792, service life fell to 12 years. In the Napoleonic period, the lifespan fell to only 8 years.  

“The ‘life’ or duration of a ship was reckoned from the date of her launching to the time when her condition necessitated repairs as costly as the construction of a new ship.” The British determined service life by a basic level of repair analysis.

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“His Majesty Will Have A Fleet Upon The Durability Of Which There May Be Some Dependence.”

Balancing Fleet Size with Workforce Size

In 1763, the Seven Years’ War ended and the Royal Navy demobilized. The Earl of Sandwich left the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty for the second time. At the end of the war, Britain had 149 ships of the line. Scrapping, retirement, and storage reduced the fleet size and  maintenance requirements. The navy was trying to manage a shrinking fleet with a shrinking budget. 

In 1763, the Admiralty requested a report of the total value of all ships and their stores, and an analysis of the “annual cost of replacing them in cycles between twelve and sixteen years,” according to historian N. A. M. Rodger. The Admiralty also asked for an estimate for annual repair and maintenance at task work rates if they expanded the number of shipwrights to 3000. (Shipwrights were the carpenters in dockyards who built and repaired ships.)

By 1765, only 47 of the 140 ships were in good condition. The Navy Board made a plan to increase the number of ships in good condition to from 47 to 63, but the plan required three years and an extra £2,000,000. Once restored to good condition, the plan assumed that the existing shipwright workforce could maintain a fleet of 90 ships. This approach would only work if the shipwrights were allowed to maximize overtime all summer, for every summer to come…the workforce and labor budget were at maximum capacity. To actually maintain 140 ships in good condition, the shipwright workforce would have to be expanded from 3,150 to 4,200. The government did not want to expand its civilian industrial labor base at a time when it expected a peace dividend.

By 1792, six Royal Navy dockyards employed about 1500 workers each. The dockyards had a wider variety of technical specialties than was found in any other manufacturing enterprise. The dockyards “were some of the largest manufactories in Europe and dwarfed almost all private industries.” (Morriss) The dockyards built new ships, but maintaining ships was just as important. The Royal Navy’s dockyards constituted one of the largest industrial maintenance organizations in the world…and their only peer organizations in terms of the scale of maintenance management were the dockyards of other superpower navies.

A Bureaucratic Basis for Maintenance Management 

In 1653, “An Act for Constituting Commissioners for Ordering And Managing the Affairs of the Admiralty And Navy” established the responsibilities of the Admiralty and Commissioners of the Navy. The Commissioners were to make policy for building, fitting out, “repairing and preserving,” and “sale and disposal of old and unserviceable ships and vessels.” Another duty was to conduct a survey (i.e. an inventory) of the nation’s ships and naval stores, an element carried over from Monson’s Tracts in 1624.

William Sutherland was a ship’s master carpenter in the late 1600s. Returning to shore, he became a foreman in the Portsmouth dockyard, then was promoted to be a senior manager at the Deptford yard. Sutherland wrote two books about naval architecture and ship construction. His 1717 book Britain’s Glory: or Ship-Building Unvail’d documented lifecycle maintenance in the Royal Navy.

John Fincham was master shipwright at Chatham and Portsmouth, and the superintendent of the school of naval architecture. He wrote several books about shipbuilding and construction of masts. In 1851, he wrote a history of naval architecture. His history recorded some design changes that the Royal Navy made in the 1700s to improve the reliability of its ships. These changes were important and permanent enough for Fincharm to discuss them 100 years later.

Samuel Pepys is famous for keeping a diary from 1660 to 1669. He recorded details of everyday life in London during the Restoration period, including firsthand accounts of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Pepys spent most of his career managing the Royal Navy’s logistics and shipbuilding programs during the second, third, and fourth Dutch wars. From 1673 to 1679, he was the Secretary for the Admiralty. He fought bureaucratic waste and endemic bribery while building the so-called “Thirty New Ships” of 1677. After infighting between political factions, Pepys resigned in 1679 to face trial for corruption himself.

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Preservation and repair are as old as sailing, but a written record of how this was managed has not always survived. One failure mechanism that has affected wooden vessels for centuries is shipworm – a mollusc that drills deep holes into the hull. 

Shipworm was common in the Mediterranean, so there is a long record of means to combat it. A shipwreck in Kyrenia has been dated to somewhere between 384 BC – 288 BC. The hull was covered with hammered lead sheathing to protect it from shipworm. Archaeological examination concluded that over its lifetime, the ship had received four major repairs, and in-service modification. The Kyrenia ship first sailed with no sheathing, but wooden sheathing was added. Later, lead sheathing was used. (Steffy p. 95)  Archeologists have also observed the use of oche on ship hulls in the Mediterranean and debate if the purpose was preservation of the hull. Several Greek and Roman ships with lead sheathing have been studied. By 1514, Spain was using lead sheathing. An Englishman who had served the Spanish crown sheathed a small English squadron with lead sheathing in 1553. (Wilkinson p. 132)  In 1624, Monson wrote in Monson’s Tracts that the Spanish and Portuguese used lead sheathing, but that it was “not durable” so not in use in England.

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1624 – Monson’s Tracts Describe Basic Asset Management 

In 1585 at the age of 16, William Monson ran away to sea as a privateer. Later, in the English Navy, he served during the defeat of the Spanish Armada. He was a ship captain, squadron commander, admiral, and eventually a member of parliament. Wikipedia quotes the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica in calling him the “first naval officer in the modern sense of the word.” Monson is most famous as an early historian of the Royal Navy. 

Monson’s Tracts are a collection of essays written between 1624 and his death in 1643. The essays were not printed until 1682 and were finally published in 1704. The Tracts contain detailed accounts of the Royal Navy’s battles, tactics, voyages, and expeditions.

Monson’s Tracts also recorded the management structure of the dockyards, duties of specific positions, and some repair management practices of the late 1620s to 1630s. Monson criticized graft, waste, and bad management that reduced the navy’s capabilities. 

1546 – Establishing the Royal Navy

In the 15th century, the English Royal Navy did not exist as a standing force. When needed, the Royal Navy was temporarily assembled using rented merchant ships. Henry VIII expanded England’s fleet from a handful of small converted merchant ships to a force of 30 purpose-built warships. He established government dockyards, the Admiralty, and the Navy Board. Starting in 1546, the Navy Board was a permanent part of the government. 

Warships owned by the government had no other purpose and suddenly gave the government a new kind of asset to manage. 

In 1873, the superintendent of the Montreal Water Works signed out a manual for his organization: 

“Rules and regulations for the employés [sic] in the department of the Montreal Water Works”