|
In French
Blaise Ollivier is without doubt
the most outstanding and certainly the most
innovative of the French engineers and shipbuilders
of the XVIIIth century. Born in 1701, he died at
the age of 46 after serving as engineer-builder and
general director of works in the port of Brest. He
is generally known as the creator of the first
"true" frigate, the Médée, in 1744,
an innovation that was soon to be copied by all
major naval powers. Moreover, as early as the
1720's, Ollivier broke with the more conservative
trends in shipbuilding during the XVIIth century
and opened the way for later developments by the
Bouger, Duhamel du Monceau, Borda and Sané.
The
TRAITE DE CONSTRUCTION was written in about 1736;
the original manuscript of over 1,000 pages is
preserved in the Service Historique de la Marine in
Vincennes and has never been published. Since
Ollivier was much more a builder than a
theoretician, his treatise possesses a high degree
of authenticity which is extremely rare in
XVIIIth-c. maritime works.
A true encyclopedia of shipbuilding, the treatise
offers practical details and information
unavailable in any other XVIIIth-c. printed
publication.
Intended for the historian but
mainly for the model builder, this volume contains
an unparalleled description of how ships were built
in the first half of the XVIIIth century. We have
appended a manuscript describing the construction
of the FLEURON to the treatise because it presents
a very fine set of plates and drawings by Blaise
OLLIVIER. Above all, their value lies in the
illustration by practical example of the sum of the
engineer-builder's knowledge found in his Treatise
on Construction.
|
