Prolegomena of a discipline that will become science: the design of a ship in the Modern age

In the fifteenth century, thanks to the farsighted pre-visions and initiatives of Henry the Navigator (1394 - 1460) and Christopher Columbus (1451 - 1506), to cite only the best known among the many, new horizons opened up for exploration, navigation and maritime trade thanks to the new routes in the Atlantic, which led to the discovery of new lands and new riches. The necessity and the desire to cross the ocean in the shortest possible time and with the maximum chance of success required a renewal of the European fleets because galleys, cogs and carracks could no longer be considered reliable vessels for the great ocean sea as they were for the Mediterranean or for coastal navigation along the European coasts. This need for renewal required a change of paradigm in shipbuilding that involved a major study and a deepening of the construction techniques for the building of ever larger, strong and reliable vessels in navigation in the high sea. This need was answered in the sixteenth century when they start to realize the construction plans of ships; these scale drawings of boats became a fundamental tool for shipbuilding and a new winning way to have a reliable idea of what would have been the new ship, thanks also to the integration of the project with the new disciplines that were developing more and more in those years: arithmetic, geometry and technical drawing. Beyond the knowledge of the master carpenters, this new way of designing began with scholars such as the Portuguese Fernando Oliveira (1507 - c. 1581), who wrote one of the first shipbuilding treatises in 1580, the Livro da Fabrica das Naus, the English Matthew Baker (c. 1530 - 1613), with particular reference to his manuscript Fragment of Early English Shipwrightry of 1586, and the Italian Bartolomeo Crescenzio (second half of the 16th - 15th centuries), who beckoned of this new way of understanding the design of the boat in its Nautica Mediterranea treatise of 1607, to arrive a few years later to the fundamental treatise Architectural Navalis (1629) by Joseph Furttenbach (1591 - 1667). In this short note, we want to trace a brief history of this change of paradigm in the naval construction that has anticipated the linguistic revolution, which will see its maximum expression in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe.