Throughout the 19th century, the shipbuilding industry in America was both art and craft, one based on tradition, instinct, hand tools, and handmade ship models. Even as mechanization was introduced, the trade supported a system of apprenticeship, master builders, and family dynasties, and aesthetics remained the basis for design. Spanning the transition from wood to iron shipbuilding in America, Thiesen s history tells how practical and nontheoretical methods of shipbuilding began to be discarded by the 1880s in favor of technical and scientific methods. Perceiving that British warships were...