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[Music] [Music] uh so hi Steve um I'm here with Steve uh uif fusa uh and Steve is the author of a
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wonderful book uh called a man and his ship America's greatest naval architect
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and his quest to build the SS United States it was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top 10 non-fiction
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books of 2012 uh it's a personal favor to mine uh in doing some research on a book that I
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was writing uh I came across this and actually ended up using uh some of the stories and and the the the personality
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of the William Francis Gibbs the the architect of this great ship uh in uh as an example of some things that I wanted
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to talk about so Steve welcome to knowledge of wardon oh thank you so much for having me um so I I just thought it
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would be interesting if we could chat a little bit about both uh your journey and writing this book and also uh the
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the journey you Chronicle uh William Francis Gibbs and uh his um remarkable achievement in uh in building the SS
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United States so why don't we just start by uh giving you a chance to tell uh
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tell our audience how did you stumble into this topic what was it that prompted you to write about uh about
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this remarkable man well for me I was always interested in um ocean liners for as far back as I could remember and
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ships in the sea in general uh my grandmother uh was a passenger on the SS United States and she told me uh stories
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of what it was like on board and she also told me the story of the Titanic uh which first got me interested in ships
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in the sea when I was around 6 or seven years old and uh it was a personal passion of mine I was a little kid that
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built models of ships in my parents' basement and uh I first saw the SS United States when we were looking at
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colleges my junior year and we were driving over the walw bridge in 1996 and the SS United States once the glory of
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the American passenger Fleet had just arrived in Philadelphia and was sitting there rusted and Abandoned and I pointed
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at said oh there it is there it is and my grandmother was in the car with us and she said oh I remember that ship and
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I ended up coming to Philadelphia for graduate school and uh never leaving been here ever since and back in 2007 um
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I started doing some freelance pieces and one of them was on the SS United States um because I had just been
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fascinated with it and um the editor at plan Philly uh gentleman called Matt gois uh said well we've always wanted to
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have someone write about that how about you tell us more about the man who designed it and then uh it ended up
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evolving into a book proposal and it was published by simonon Schuster after about 5 years of work and for me it
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started off with the interest in the ship as an American icon is a true Masterpiece of American Technology built
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at a time in the 1940s and 50s when America was at the top of its manufacturing prowess and as One
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Maritime historian said this is a ship that was like a cathedral it was built to last forever in terms of how well she
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was built but then I began thinking about what about the man who created the ship that's what ultimately made the
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book is what sort of creative person did it take to design a ship this spectacular and this um strong and fast
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why did he want to build the finest fastest soci liner in the world and then I began looking at William Francis Gibbs
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and discovered this man is on par with uh Frank Lord Wright John Augustus robling who designed the Brooklyn Bridge
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one of these American creative uh individuals who uses the American industrial system the financial system
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and his own creativity and vision to create not just a ship that was built to transport people from A to B but
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something to transcend that to be a floating work of art uh this man was so in love with this ship that he would
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greet it every time he ca every time the ship came into New York and uh someone once asked him Mr Gibbs do you love that
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more than your wife and he responded you're a th% correct what sort of person is this
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someone who's married to his work I guess very much so uh so tell us a little bit about um about the U the
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story that William Francis Gibbs that you uncovered about him what uh what led him to become interested in ships well
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in 1894 when he was an 8-year-old boy he uh was brought by his father to the cramped shipyards in the banks of
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Delaware here in Philadelphia and he saw an ocean L launch called the St Louis and she roared down the ways sending up
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clouds of smoke as she splashed into the Delaware the crowds were cheering the American flags were waving and Gibb said
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from that moment I knew what I wanted to do with my life I knew I wanted to be a
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naval architect his father was an extremely wealthy finer um he was very closely connected with the Widener
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family he was one one of the richest men in Philadelphia and his father said uh that is not a good career to be a naval
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architect and Gibbs ended up going to Harvard in preparation to be a lawyer he proved to be a terrible engineer ing
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student and a math student and uh he had he ultimately and this is the defining event of his life he was brought up in a
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big mansion in writtenhouse square uh all the Comforts and conveniences of the early 1900s Gilded Age America but then
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his senior year his father went bankrupt and the family lost everything this was
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about what 192 1910 okay 1910 and Gibbs would later say if not for the fact that my father
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father had gone bankrupt I never would have amounted to anything in life and that I think really gave him the drive
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to reinvent himself from being the poor little rich boy who loves ships into being someone who's saying you know what
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I'm going to be an AAL architect and I'm going to do it on my terms my father
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pursued this this path and he basically tried to make me do something I didn't
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want to do and I'm going to show him I can do what I want to do so so uh so Gibbs really was a man who
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uh saw the um the dream very early in life uh when he had this experience with the the ship launching and then uh found
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the motivation uh sort of a little bit later while he was in college and then spent
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the rest of his life essentially pursuing the the dream very much so and uh he and his brother Frederick uh
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became very close business partners and they came up with designs in 1914 for a thousand foot long American ocean liner
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and uh this is a time when America was not really building passenger ships and Gibbs who actually ended up finishing
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his training as a lawyer at Colombia he ended up working his way through law school at his father's assistance um
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said I can't be stuck in this profession I can't stand I need to do something I
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really love to do so he ultimately finagled two connections one was to a gentleman called Admiral David W Taylor
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who was Chief Constructor of the US Navy uh who also was uh very interested in America building up its passenger and
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naval fleets at the time uh Taylor ended up meeting this young very nerdy very socially awkward young man from
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Philadelphia and said this kid has some issues with math but he has drive he has
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talent and Taylor ends up taking Gibbs under his wing and providing a lot of the training that Gibbs never had and a
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lot of the support and credentials but then Gibbs also got introduced to JP Morgan Jr uh who was the son of the
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famous banker and JP Morgan Jr had his own issues with shipping because his father was one of the principal actually
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he was the principal investor in the White Star Line that built the RMS Titanic ah so all shipping stories
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either begin end or go through the Titanic uh oddly enough William Francis Gibbs when he was designing the ship
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that became the SS United States his primary uh Focus was I want this ship to be able to withstand the same damage
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that sank the Titanic in 1912 and that was sort of the departure point for ship safety and he felt that a
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lot of shipping companies were skimping on safety on the in the for the sake of Passenger comfort for the sake of
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cost-saving and he would later say that uh it is almost a crime for a company to
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skimp on safety uh for the sake of shortterm uh cost saving because the potential damage that could happen to a
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company when you know hundreds or in the case of the Titanic you know 1500 people
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killed uh is definitely it's actually makes better business sense to over engineer a ship right for safety we're
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we're having a little example of air safety uh even as we do this interview with uh the Boeing Dreamliner the latest
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uh technology of the air having not been completely uh uh flawlessly designed and
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and now The Fleets uh on the sidelines for a few uh weeks or months as they figure out the battery problem that it's
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having so uh so let me ask you a little bit um uh I know that William Francis Gibbs was on the cover of Time Magazine
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when one year in the uh in the 40s uh what brought him to the to the cover of Time Magazine well Gibbs uh by the 1940s
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had founded his own very successful Naval Architecture Firm uh David W Taylor the famous Admiral who become a
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partner his brother was a partner and they ended up becoming the leading uh Navy contractors uh building new Navy
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ships during the 1930s during the buildup to World War II and gibbs's real strength I mean as one of his colleagues
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said he was a great designer but his real strength lay in project management he was very much kind of a Steve Jobs
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figure who came up with the concept of how he wanted a ship to look the specifications it would it was to have
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and then would work very closely with very talented subordinates who were very good technically to come out with the
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finished product he was an utter control freak uh and he also had a very notorious mouth uh he had spoke with
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addiction of a Philadelphia Aristocrat but had the mouth of a sailor and uh he um ended up getting on the cover of Time
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Magazine because his firm was responsible for the production of the famous Liberty ships which were the
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first true mass-produced cargo ships in which America's industrial engine was
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thrown behind the war effort and this is a time when America could produce at one
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time a liberty ship in 3 weeks from stop to finish from start to finish prefab being a lot of stuff off site and then
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building these ships basically faster the Germans could sync them and that's
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what landed him on the cover of Time Magazine he was called a technological revolutionist he brought Henry Ford's
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idea of mass production from Cars to ships interesting and uh and I I seem to remember uh somewhere in your book uh
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that actually he not just a liberty ship but he ended up his firm ended up designing something like 3/4 of all the
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ships that the Americans uh used in the war effort or some large percentage yes his firm Gibson Cox was responsible
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directly or indirectly for 70% of All Ships built during World War II all Navy ships and his firm uh ended up becoming
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one of the leading uh military contractors uh he loved passenger ship design but he saw it didn't really pay
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that much uh so he decided to focus on government contracts he had a relationship with President Roosevelt
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Who Loved ships himself and uh that really grew his business he ended up having employing nearly 2,000 draftsman
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designers engineers in his firm in lower Manhattan by the end of World War II interesting let let's let's uh segue
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just a little bit you mentioned Steve Jobs uh as a a a a modern uh person with some of the same qualities that William
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Francis Gibbs had um tell me a little bit about uh Steve Jobs's personality is
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now uh you know part of the public discourse because of biography recently written uh by Walter Isaacson uh you've
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uh you've uh you've gotten William Francis Gibbs into our imagination What
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kind of person was he and and why do you compare him as a personality to uh to Steve Jobs well in many ways Gibbs was
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an engineer with the soul of an artist and I think Gibbs was someone who had very um little patience for a small talk
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he wanted very when he was talking he wanted you know he was very to the point of what he wanted uh he as a young man
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when he was just starting out uh as a designer he felt he was too nice and too Meek and he felt that his Pro his his
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ideas were getting bowled over so in his early 30s he sort of had this transformation where he said you know
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what if I want to get something done if I want to aim for an ambitious goal being disagreeable or even being nasty
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is a way of getting to a to a greater goal he would later tell his um his uh staff when they finished design the SS
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United States I apologize for how I behaved but this is like trying to build a pyramid here interes and uh and Gibbs
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was the sort of guy that would sneak up on his designers when they were working soundlessly it kind of creeped them out
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a little bit but he was everywhere he kept um he would he kept um tabs on everything everyone was doing
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sort of a control uh a control personality but but he knew exactly what he wanted at the end exactly he was a he
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was a very uh controlling personality uh he once he also had a great sense of humor uh love giving speeches and you
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know Steve Jobs is a similar way very charismatic Persuader uh for impossible ideas and uh Gibbs once said uh if I
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didn't have a sense of humor working with ship Builders I'd be dead a long
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would have been dead a long time ago and he says everyone thinks such a mean fellow cuz I like ships More Than People
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interesting which is I think it was a dig it himself but also revealing that he um was devoted to Creation did he did
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he have the same problems with his family life as as job seems to have had with his he had a very distant
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relationship with his children uh he and his wife uh ended up leading uh relatively separate lives uh by their
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You by when they were in older um Vera was the daughter of Paul Kath the famous New York attorney who founded Kat Swain
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and Moore and she was very um devoted to her husband and his creation but uh Gibbs on one hand I
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think relied on her but then he once said in a New Yorker interview my life is my wife is a beautiful intelligent
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wonderful woman she goes her way and I go mine perhaps that's why we get along
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so well so it was kind of a telling thing I think he was he wanted to create his own world and gibs and Cox's firm
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was um a very closely guarded um basically under the mil the context of military secrecy um you there were all
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mazes of barriers um to get in and get out uh he once told a security guard um please check the identification of
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everyone who comes in here and the next day uh William Fran gibes walks in the door and this this is a story from one
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Naval architect told me um and the security guard sees the um Gibbs in and waves them through and Gibbs says you're
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fired you should have asked me for ID yeah so I think like jobs and Gibbs they want to create their own sort of little
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creative worlds and I guess I guess in the high-tech sense uh Trade Secrets and all that stuff creates the need for that
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kind of uh careful scrutiny and security and in and gives his world it was the government contracts and the secrets of
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Naval design and and then his own personality that did it oh they all meshed very well I mean the uh the naval
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vessels he were designing were top secret right and there were a lot of other Naval firms that wanted to get a
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look at what he was doing uh there was one exception though he asked a a bishop to come in and take a look at what he
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was doing a bishop and the bishop said are you sure you want me to uh come into this model shop and see this see all the
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stuff you're doing you know how clergy talk and Gibb said that's okay I'm not
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worried about you I'm not only convinced in your character but the abysmal ignorance of the you're about to
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see well um uh Steve I uh I remember when I first moved to Philadelphia going down to the docks uh here in
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Philadelphia and seeing this great huge hulking vessel uh parked uh on the Delaware River uh and wondering what on
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Earth could that be uh and it said SS United States on the side and having read your book uh a whole area of not
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just Philadelphia history but also uh the history of American Business and uh this incredibly important uh ship
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building industry that the United States was so strong in over the years uh really came to life so uh so thank you
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for bringing that all to us thank you [Music]