Britton Chance Jr., an innovative yacht designer for three America's Cup winners, died on Friday in Branford, Conn. He was 72.
Associated Press
Britton Chance Jr., an innovative yacht designer for three America's Cup winners, was known for having a mathematician's precision and a renegade's willingness to experiment.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his sister Jan Chance O'Malley said.
As a designer, Mr. Chance was known for having a mathematician's precision and a renegade's willingness to experiment; he developed, for example, a retractable keel that reduced the drag on a boat headed downwind.
"He was one of the biggest innovators of the 1970s and '80s," said Jonathan Wright, a friend who crewed on many of Mr. Chance's boats, including Stars and Stripes, which was captained by Dennis Conner. In 1987, that boat reclaimed the Cup for the United States after its 132-year winning streak had been interrupted by an Australian victory four years earlier.
Mr. Chance, who came from a sailing and scientific family — his father, a leading biophysicist, was also an Olympic yachtsman — made a controversial entrance into the high-stakes and highly nationalistic world of the Cup. In 1967, the yacht Intrepid captured the Cup for the New York Yacht Club, and Mr. Chance was subsequently hired to design a so-called trial horse — a development boat to test design elements — for a French team that was preparing to challenge Intrepid in 1970.
Criticized by some for bringing American know-how to a foreign team, Mr. Chance said at the time that he hoped to use the experience to help him build an even better boat for the United States.
Indeed, though the French did not succeed — the 1970 challenger was Australian — Mr. Chance was subsequently hired to help improve the performance of Intrepid. He lengthened the waterline — the length of the boat that has contact with the water — and it won the America's Cup again.
"Britt was commissioned by Bill Ficker, who captained the 1970 Intrepid," Mr. Wright said in an interview Tuesday. "He made the boat fuller in the stern, making the waterline longer by increasing the buoyancy in the back of the boat."
In 1988, a New Zealand team, exploiting a loophole in the America's Cup rules, declared a challenge with a 90-foot boat that dwarfed those in the Cup's traditional 12-meter class. The result was a bit of a farce; in response, Mr. Conner countered with a smaller, swifter catamaran, designed partly by Mr. Chance, and the Cup races were conducted between two entirely different styles of boats.
The Americans won easily, and legal action ensued. The courts eventually kept the Cup with the Americans, and for succeeding competitions a new class of boat, the America's Cup class, was defined, ensuring that a similar fiasco would not occur again.
Mr. Chance was born in Philadelphia on June 12, 1940, and grew up in Mantoloking, N.J., on Barnegat Bay, where he spent much of his childhood on the water.
He studied physics at the University of Rochester and mathematics at Columbia, and though he later taught classes in naval architecture and engineering at Yale, Wesleyan and Trinity, he never earned a college degree. He dropped out to work with the boat designers Ray Hunt and Ted Hood.
In addition to his work on America's Cup yachts, he was president of Chance & Company, a naval architecture firm in Essex, Conn.; he designed rowing sculls and sailboats in the 5.5-meter class that raced in the Olympics.
Mr. Chance, who lived in Lyme, Conn., was married and divorced twice. In addition to his sister Ms. O'Malley, he is survived by his mother, Jane Earle Lindemayer; a daughter, Tamsin Chance Blue; another sister, Eleanor Chance Burgess; a brother, Peter Earle Chance; four step-siblings; and five half-siblings.
An accomplished sailor himself, Mr. Chance competed in both the America's Cup trials and the Olympic trials, but that was not where his passion was.
"It's nice out there," he said, when asked why he liked ocean sailing. But his main interest was in creating speed.
"He was a good skipper," his father told Sports Illustrated in 1970, "but basically he always wanted to know why the boat was going fast or slow and what he could do to make her go faster. He's been that way from the beginning."
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Britton Chance Jr., Designer of America’s Cup Boats, Dies at 72
Dengan url
http://suporterfanatikos.blogspot.com/2012/10/britton-chance-jr-designer-of-americaas.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Britton Chance Jr., Designer of America’s Cup Boats, Dies at 72
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Britton Chance Jr., Designer of America’s Cup Boats, Dies at 72
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar