Engineer and applied mathematician, born in Dartington, Devon, SW England, UK, the brother of James Anthony Froude. He studied at Oxford and worked as a railway engineer until 1846, then devoted himself to hydrodynamics and developed a method by which data derived from scale model ships could be applied to the full-size ship. His name is preserved in the Froude dynamometer, a device he designed for measuring the power output of large engines.
William Froude (November 28, 1810, Dartington, Devon, England - May 4, 1879, Simonstown, South Africa) was an engineer, hydrodynamicist and naval architect, and the brother of James Anthony Froude, a historian.
Froude was the first to formulate reliable laws for the resistance that water offers to ships (such as the hull speed equation) and for predicting their stability.
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