Neptune's Needle

Steam engineer and yacht designer. By twelve he was a proficient draftsman and boat modeler as well as a skilled yacht racing helmsman and navigator. By the time he graduated from high school (1865), he was playing an important role in the design of small craft being built at his brother's newly formed Herreshoff & Stone boat works.

Nathanael Herreshoff left Corliss in 1878 to become his brother's business partner in Herreshoff Manufacturing Company (HMCo.) at Bristol. He had full charge of the company's engineering and design departments until 1915; thereafter he superintended most design work until his full retirement in 1930.

Although the 33' 5" racing sloop Shadow (1871) and the revolutionary catamaran Amyrillis (1876) brought him early fame as a designer of fast sailing yachts, Herreshoff's main work through 1891 was with light high-performance steam engines and steam-driven hulls for naval and recreational use. He brought to its highest development the coil boiler that had been introduced in 1873 by his oldest brother, the inventor James Brown Herreshoff. He designed Lightning, the first purpose-built U.S. Navy torpedo boat, in 1875 and, in 1885, the 90' Stiletto, arguably America's first high-speed steam yacht. HMCo. built no naval vessels between 1897 and the war year of 1917. But its production of outstanding Herreshoff-designed steam yachts and launches continued steadily (and profitably) throughout the partnership of Herreshoff and his brother John. In 1891 Herreshoff designed the sloop Gloriana for the then hotly competitive 46' yacht racing class; in construction and rigging detail, as well as in hull form, the Gloriana was well ahead of its time and became, perhaps, Herreshoff's single most influential design.

Herreshoff was a logical choice to design a boat for the 1893 America's Cup trials. He actually designed two--Colonia and Vigilant. His 86' Vigilant successfully defended the Cup against the British challenger, Valkyrie (II). Over the next twenty-six years there were five more challengers for America's Cup. And five more times huge (up to 150 tons displacement, up to 80 crewmen, up to 15,000 square feet of sail area), gaff-rigged Herreshoff sloops prevailed.

In a period of unprecedented popular interest in yachting, the austere, taciturn, secretive Herreshoff soon became internationally famous as the "Wizard of Bristol" or, to his workmen and customers, "Captain Nat." His wizardry was amply displayed in a succession of sailboat classes of uniform design and construction in waterline lengths from 12.5 to 70 feet that pioneered and for years dominated yacht racing in the United States. He also devised the Universal Rule for yacht measurement (1903), which became the dominant American measurement rule of the period. And in the years before World War I he designed a series of large racing schooners.

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Peter Richards