History of Maintenance Management

Hull Inspections – Condition-Based Maintenance

By the 1906 revision of the Regulations, there were many more technical changes to manage. Most ships now had iron or steel hulls, which changed the mechanism of how a hull would fail. Galvanic corrosion and methods to prevent it were well understood. The chapter covering “Preservation, Repairs, and Docking” required zincs, the sacrificial anodes to be placed near the screws to prevent galvanic corrosion.

1861 Queen’s Regulations

In 1861, Royal Navy regulations updated the Captain’s responsibilities. Centralized management control of the technical system continued to grow. Regulations now prevented Captains from modifying the ship. Many new standard report forms were required to be routed to superior offices in the bureaucracy.

Many rules from the 1717 and 1731 regulations were kept, for example: managing ship surveys, tracking repair costs, written communications with the dockyard about defects and their status, and periodic caulking. 

The Royal Navy built its first steam-powered ship, the HMS Comet, in 1822. The first generation of steamships normally had both sails and a steam engine. A ship with both sails and a boiler had a long range and was mobile in close quarters. A boiler reduced the tactical importance of wind direction, and allowed maneuvering in disadvantageous winds or when becalmed. Over the next 40 years, the Royal Navy converted many sailing ships to steam by retrofitting boilers. 

The capability came at a cost. A worldwide coal distribution system was required. The ship had to contain a stack, machinery, the boiler itself, and tons of coal. The added weight changed how the ship moved and reduced space for supplies, weapons, and ammunition. Refueling, called coaling, changed operational patterns.

Between 1670 and 1700, the Royal Navy installed lead sheets over the hulls of some ships to help preserve them and reduce repairs. (See Failure Modes of Lead Hull Sheathing Explored by the Royal Navy.) Galvanic corrosion attacked the iron bolts holding the hull and rudder together, so the program had to be canceled.  

The British reverted to their previous practice of installing thin wood sheathing on top of the main hull. The wood sheathing was sacrificial and had to be replaced every few years. When the sheathing was stripped for replacement, inspection and repair of the main hull was accomplished. 

Accelerated life tests are used to help predict the rate of failure of components. Capacitors are frequent victims of accelerated life testing, and have a distant relationship with one of the earliest documented accelerated life tests: the unit of capacitance, the farad, is named for Sir Michael Faraday. 

Michael Faraday remains one of the most important scientists of all time. He made foundational discoveries in electricity, magnetism, and electrochemistry. Today, Faraday is less well known for documenting the Royal Navy’s results of accelerated life tests on dry rot of wood.

Failure of Ship Hulls Due to Rot

British oak forests provided the wood to build the fleets that fought the Seven Years’ War, American Revolutionary War, French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. New trees had to mature for 80-120 years for shipbuilding. By the early 1800s, three-quarters of British oak forests had been harvested to fight a half century of naval wars. Additionally, a scourge of dry rot reduced the service life of Britain’s main battle ships from the historical 25 years to less than 7 years. Britain had a severe national security problem – the Timber Crisis.

R. James Abernathy was a writer who specialized in flour and grain mills in the late 1800s. In 1880, he authored Practical Hints on Mill Building. Early in this 350-page technical manual, he wrote that millwright skill was declining. He thought the reason was that the millwrights were assembling mills from pre-fabricated components, instead of having to manufacture parts by hand. The manual was published in the United States and England, and remained an authority for several decades. It remains a reference for assessing mills for their historic value, such as applications for national historic registers.

In the 19th century, factories and mills were major concentrations of capital. Manufacturing completed for investment money, and business cases could be as closely examined as any other risky investment. In 1884, Edwin Matheson wrote about how maintenance affected accounting and business prospects in The Depreciation of Factories and their Valuation. Matheson’s book became the basis of modern views of depreciation.

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Ships Don’t Last Like They Used To

Robert G. Albion was a notable historian of maritime affairs. He taught at Princeton and Harvard, and was one of the US Navy’s chief historians during World War II. In one of his books, Albion examined how timber management in Britain affected naval shipbuilding and maintenance policies.

In the late 1700s, the British Empire was more dependent on the navy for power projection, home defense, and security of maritime trade. In the age of sail, the average ship life was between 10 and 20 years. In the 17th century, British naval ships lasted 25-30 years. Albion found their average service life to be only 13 years in 1771. By 1792, service life fell to 12 years. In the Napoleonic period, the lifespan fell to only 8 years.  

“The ‘life’ or duration of a ship was reckoned from the date of her launching to the time when her condition necessitated repairs as costly as the construction of a new ship.” The British determined service life by a basic level of repair analysis.

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“His Majesty Will Have A Fleet Upon The Durability Of Which There May Be Some Dependence.”

Balancing Fleet Size with Workforce Size

In 1763, the Seven Years’ War ended and the Royal Navy demobilized. The Earl of Sandwich left the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty for the second time. At the end of the war, Britain had 149 ships of the line. Scrapping, retirement, and storage reduced the fleet size and  maintenance requirements. The navy was trying to manage a shrinking fleet with a shrinking budget. 

In 1763, the Admiralty requested a report of the total value of all ships and their stores, and an analysis of the “annual cost of replacing them in cycles between twelve and sixteen years,” according to historian N. A. M. Rodger. The Admiralty also asked for an estimate for annual repair and maintenance at task work rates if they expanded the number of shipwrights to 3000. (Shipwrights were the carpenters in dockyards who built and repaired ships.)

By 1765, only 47 of the 140 ships were in good condition. The Navy Board made a plan to increase the number of ships in good condition to from 47 to 63, but the plan required three years and an extra £2,000,000. Once restored to good condition, the plan assumed that the existing shipwright workforce could maintain a fleet of 90 ships. This approach would only work if the shipwrights were allowed to maximize overtime all summer, for every summer to come…the workforce and labor budget were at maximum capacity. To actually maintain 140 ships in good condition, the shipwright workforce would have to be expanded from 3,150 to 4,200. The government did not want to expand its civilian industrial labor base at a time when it expected a peace dividend.

By 1792, six Royal Navy dockyards employed about 1500 workers each. The dockyards had a wider variety of technical specialties than was found in any other manufacturing enterprise. The dockyards “were some of the largest manufactories in Europe and dwarfed almost all private industries.” (Morriss) The dockyards built new ships, but maintaining ships was just as important. The Royal Navy’s dockyards constituted one of the largest industrial maintenance organizations in the world…and their only peer organizations in terms of the scale of maintenance management were the dockyards of other superpower navies.

A Bureaucratic Basis for Maintenance Management 

In 1653, “An Act for Constituting Commissioners for Ordering And Managing the Affairs of the Admiralty And Navy” established the responsibilities of the Admiralty and Commissioners of the Navy. The Commissioners were to make policy for building, fitting out, “repairing and preserving,” and “sale and disposal of old and unserviceable ships and vessels.” Another duty was to conduct a survey (i.e. an inventory) of the nation’s ships and naval stores, an element carried over from Monson’s Tracts in 1624.

William Sutherland was a ship’s master carpenter in the late 1600s. Returning to shore, he became a foreman in the Portsmouth dockyard, then was promoted to be a senior manager at the Deptford yard. Sutherland wrote two books about naval architecture and ship construction. His 1717 book Britain’s Glory: or Ship-Building Unvail’d documented lifecycle maintenance in the Royal Navy.

John Fincham was master shipwright at Chatham and Portsmouth, and the superintendent of the school of naval architecture. He wrote several books about shipbuilding and construction of masts. In 1851, he wrote a history of naval architecture. His history recorded some design changes that the Royal Navy made in the 1700s to improve the reliability of its ships. These changes were important and permanent enough for Fincharm to discuss them 100 years later.

Samuel Pepys is famous for keeping a diary from 1660 to 1669. He recorded details of everyday life in London during the Restoration period, including firsthand accounts of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Pepys spent most of his career managing the Royal Navy’s logistics and shipbuilding programs during the second, third, and fourth Dutch wars. From 1673 to 1679, he was the Secretary for the Admiralty. He fought bureaucratic waste and endemic bribery while building the so-called “Thirty New Ships” of 1677. After infighting between political factions, Pepys resigned in 1679 to face trial for corruption himself.

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