History Lesson

[Pete B]

http://vintageraceboatshop.com/SteppedHullDesign.htm

[Ratickle]

Cool story. Well written......

[Serious News]

They started to work, Smith and his sons. They built the first single-step hydroplane in America.

The idea behind it was simple. It's a break, a step, on the bottom of the hull, about halfway between the bow and the stern. The step permits the boat to ride on just two short planes, one plane at the step, another at the stern. It reduces the wetted surface, the water friction, thus reducing the resistance. The step really takes the boat out of the water, allows it to skim the surface, thus stepping up the speed 15 per cent or more over the ordinary type displacement boat.

Before the step was introduced, speedboats ran through the water. They are called displacement boats. But the stepped-boats, the hydroplanes, run on top of the water.

The hydroplane is the greatest advance in the history of hull construction. Were it not for the step, No-mile-an-hour boats would not be possible today. Fauber was probably not the first man to conceive the hydroplane idea. But he was the first man to patent the accepted type of hydroplane construction.

While Smith was busy with the hull of his first hydroplane, Jack Beebe went to work on the engines. Baldy Ryan sat on the dock drinking beer. Smith and Ryan bought a new 150-horsepower Sterling engine which Charles Criqui, of the Sterling Engine Co., had developed at Buffalo. They needed power for the tiny twenty-foot hull. And light weight. That has been the aim of speedboat builders since the coming of the gasoline engine-light weight and high power.

Chris Smith could get the power easily enough by buying it. But his biggest problem was to keep down the overall weight. He was more successful at it than other American boatbuilders. He lightened the heavy cast-iron engine by boring holes through the connecting rods; by cutting whole sections out of the crankcase and replacing the heavy cast iron with lighter brass. When Smith and Jack Beebe finished with the new Sterling engine they had the lightest marine engine for its power in America. They put it into their new boat, Baby Reliance I, and took it out on the river. Vacuum formed in the pocket of the step. To break the vacuum, Chris Smith put an air hole in the perpendicular portion of the step. The air rushed in, the vacuum broke. The boat rose faster. That was the answer in 1912.

[Serious News]

Chris Smith & His Boats

Back in the Dark Ages, fifteen years or more ago, when we thought boats ought to run on an even keel and when racers were classed for time allowance by overall length, we in the East considered that we had practically a monopoly of the art of speed boat designing. Our naval architects were all scientifically trained men and we thought that the ‘wild and wooly’ knew little about fast boats. Now and then, rumors of high speed craft came from somewhere out in the Middle West, but even in the East, almost every new record made was assailed on the ground that the course was short of the timing inaccurate. Those were the days when the big boat was the fast boat. We raced with 60-footers and the British International Trophy was contested by 40-footers. When the British team brought over Miranda, that little Thornycroft double ender, she looked like a toy alongside the Pioneer, a 40-footer. This was in 1910. and although Pioneer did not take the cup home with her, due to a bunch of seaweed in her water intake pipe, she traveled at such a pace that the attention of all speed boat designers was turned toward the hydroplane. True, we had read much of experiments made abroad but, as holders of the world’s recognized speed trophy, we had not attached a great deal of importance to these reports.

But we were due for an awakening. In 1911 we had disturbing reports of little single stop hydroplanes which were built somewhere near Detroit by a man named Smith. We did not have to wait long for confirmation, for in the Spring of 1912, Chris Smith sent a 20-footer to the East which showed a speed of better than 40 mph in carefully timed trials held over an accurately surveyed course. In that same year, two boats designed and built by this same Chris Smith, swept practically everything before them, cleaning up the 20-foot, 26-foot, 32-foot and 40-foot Mississippi Valley championships and winning the Mississippi Valley mile dash in the races at Davenport, Iowa, in the July 4, 5 and 6 regatta. They repeated at Chicago the next month in the regatta of Western Power Boat Association and the Baby Reliance II, the faster one of the pair, captured the first heat in the race for the British International Trophy late in August.

At Buffalo, she finished her season by winning the Great Lakes 32-foot championship, the free-for-all, the inter-Lake championship and the championship mile trials.
Compared with the accepted type of racing boat, these little single step hydroplanes were odd looking craft. They were very full forward, their sides being nearly parallel. Their bottoms were almost flat, except for the step amidships, and the turn of the bilge was extremely hard. It somehow did not seem right that a little 20-fotter should be faster than a 40-footer of the accepted type, and yet the Smith wonders showed the way home in every race in which they were entered.

http://acbs-bslol.com/boating-history/porthole/chrissmith/