Fredrik Henrik af Chapman
Swedish admiral and shipbuilder (1721-1808)
Vice-Admiral Fredrik Henrik af Chapman (9 September 1721 – 19 August 1808) was a Swedish Navy officer, shipwright and scientist. Serving as the manager of the Karlskrona shipyard from 1782 to 1793, Chapman has been credited as the first person to apply scientific methods to shipbuilding and is considered to be the first naval architect.
Chapman was the author of Architectura Navalis Mercatoria (1768) and several other shipbuilding-related works. His Tractat om Skepps-Byggeriet ("Treatise on Shipbuilding") published in 1775 is a pioneering work in modern naval architecture. He was the first shipbuilder in Northern Europe to introduce prefabrication in shipyards and managed to produce several series of ships in record time. He was ennobled as "af Chapman" in 1772, after the successful coup of Gustav III of Sweden.
Early life
Fredrik Henrik Chapman was born at Nya Varvet, the royal dockyards in Gothenburg, on 9 September 1721. He was the son of Thomas Chapman, a Yorkshireman born in 1679 who moved to Sweden in 1715 and joined the Swedish Navy in 1716. His mother was Susanna Colson, the daughter of the London shipwright William Colson. Chapman showed a talent for shipbuilding when he made his first body plan based on a drawing of an Ostend privateer given to him by a Flemish shipwright.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fredrik Henrik af Chapman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.