Above: three-time Cup winner Mike Vanderbilt, photographed at the wheel of his ‘Super-J’ Ranger in 1937. Though he supported earlier Herreshoff-designed Cup defenders the J-Class yachts that he sailed in the Cup himself were drawn by others, with Herreshoff now long retired. Rod and Olin Stephens are on the left. Left: a quest for innovation that ran in the blood, this is the 30m2 Oriole designed in 1930 by L Francis Herreshoff – surely testing the limits of headsail overlap?


have a keen competition with the 30s. They were fast and so easily driven that it was unknown not to get back at the necessary time in daylight.’ By then Nat was thinking of developing


boats that were created as members of one-design classes. The Herreshoffs improved the sport not


only by establishing new construction and design standards. As a young man Nat created easily used time allowance tables for racing by different boats under mea- surement rules; the tables were still in use a century later. In the 1890s he first worked with the novel concept of one-design sailing,


42 SEAHORSE


without handicaps by identical boats, when he designed and built a class called the Newport 30, and found instant success with as many as 40 starts a summer on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. ED Morgan was one of many big-boat


sailors who said they never knew racing could be so simple and so much fun. ‘It was delightful in those days in Newport,’ Morgan wrote in his autobiography. ‘One could go out most days of the week and


a new measurement rule of his own that eliminated the problems and excesses of the Seawanhaka Rule that had created Gloriana but also other more extreme yachts, like the enormous America’s Cup boat Reliance that he was then designing – the largest yacht ever to contest the Cup. Out of this work came the Universal Rule, introduced in 1905. The Herreshoffs used the rule for several new restricted-design classes they themselves developed – the Ms, Ss, Rs and Qs and, of course, the Js, which were the America’s Cup boats that would be used throughout the 1930s. The new rule’s first use, however, was


for a new class created by the New York Yacht Club: a 44ft one-design sloop called the New York 30. Built on an assembly line at the Herreshoff yard, the 18 New York 30s were delivered at $4,000 each fully equipped to sail and cruise with an inventory of 88 separate items, including


MIT MUSEUM


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