Word: designate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...design Stephens finally picked, after long sessions with seven models in the testing tanks at Hoboken's Stevens Institute of Technology, shows he had his weather eye cocked more on September than on summer. "Columbia differs from Vim only in a matter of inches," says he. But inches are as vital to a racing hull as to a fashion model. Columbia's bow sweeps gracefully into a full-bodied hull-a shape that helps her go swiftly to windward against a running sea. Stephens' calculations show that Columbia should do her best in the heavy weather that...
...this basic design Stephens added the lightest equipment money could buy, e.g., an extruded aluminum mast, was thereby able to put the boat's weight where it would do the most good: a 20-ton keel to keep Columbia from heeling excessively under a stiff wind. So carefully did Precisionist Stephens figure his boat's total weight that he even weighed the paper drinking cups and the Tollhouse cookies that went aboard. He added sails for every kind of weather-four mainsails, twelve jibs, eight spinnakers. When he was done, the Columbia's syndicate, headed by Financier...
Blue-Water Racer. Ever since he learned to sail as a boy on Cape Cod, Designer Stephens has shown the same loving and calculating care for boats. Son of a prosperous Bronx coal dealer, he completed one year at M.I.T., got jaundice, never went back to college. Instead, he studied ship design so thoroughly by himself that when he was only 19 Marine Architect Drake H. Sparkman asked him to form a partnership. Later, Architect W. Starling Burgess invited Stephens to collaborate on the J-Boat Ranger, the fastest yacht in history,* which defended the America...
Stephens was 22 when he took a vacation from his drawing board and, with his father and brother Rod as crew members, astounded the blue-water racers by skippering his 52-ft. yawl Dorade to victory in a transatlantic race to England. The experience helped him go on to design deep-keeled, fast cruising yawls with flashy racing lines, such as Baruna and Bolero, and the shallow-keeled, sturdy Finisterre, that came to dominate blue-water racing against schooners and ketches...
...Take the argument over chrome. People said they didn't want chrome. But in a good year we loaded the cars with chrome, and they sold extremely well. In many of these areas it is as much an art as a science to design a product that will sell. The successful corporation is the one that masters the art as well as the science...