With Admiral Land’s approval and perhaps a nudge from President Roosevelt, Gibbs set his staff to work on the Mahan-class destroyers. Like the Grace Line’s Santa class, his engineers specified double-reduction gears—the first time such equipment was to be used in an American naval vessel. Gibbs also called for four boilers capable of funneling 650-degree steam at 700 pounds per square inch into three turbines. That would generate 49,000 horsepower, enough to give the 341-foot vessels a cruising speed of 36 knots.24
Bowen pored over the Mahan-class plans and concluded that “this machinery was the most rugged and reliable of any main drive installation ever installed in all respects.” More good news followed in May 1935, when Vice Admiral Harold Bowen replaced Admiral Robinson as chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Engineering and engineer in chief. Around the same time, Gibbs & Cox moved into an expanded suite of offices at 21 West Street, a nondescript skyscraper in lower Manhattan that faced the Hudson River.
When the first Mahan-class destroyer began sea trials, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William D. Leahy found himself bombarded with crew complaints about the cramped engine compartments of the new, smaller turbines. An exasperated Leahy called the Navy chief constructor into his office and asked him what was going on with these new ships.
“Admiral,” Bowen replied, “I’m not going to build an obsolete navy.”25
Meanwhile, William Francis traveled between New York and the various shipyards, making sure that the destroyers were built to his precise specifications. As a new method of quality control, Gibbs & Cox built a model shop, where workers built large models according to the blueprints churned out by the design department. “No piece of equipment or member of the hull was installed until the drawings were approved by the appropriate Bureau of the Navy Department,” Bowen noted after making the rounds at Gibbs & Cox. “It was much easier for the pipe shop to lay out its piping from the model than to construct it by laying templates in the actual vessel.”26
For Gibbs, the model shop became the Holy of Holies at 21 West Street, guarded by a maze of security doors and locks. One of the rare non-Navy visitors, a bishop, wondered whether he would be let in. “You know how bishops talk,” he said to the naval architect. Gibbs, a practicing Episcopalian, smiled and replied, “I have great confidence in your character, but even more in your abysmal ignorance in the things you will see.”27 He was proud of the veil he wrapped around the “radical technical developments” that were “without precedent” in naval history. “The people did not know what was going on,” he bragged years later, “and it’s doubtful if the layman now realizes what we finally came up with. Government leaders had no desire to tell them, and that was right in line with my expectations…. What a fortunate thing!”28
The destroyers exceeded everyone’s expectations. After Mahan’s trials, United Dry Docks chairman of the board James H. Davidson wrote Gibbs an assessment of the vessel’s performance: “Congratulations on your designing… I never before witnessed so smooth a performance as she gave us. Estimated HP 44,000, with five burners not in use and two nozzles cut out. I feel she will approach 40 knots if crowded.”29
Following the successful completion of the Mahan class, the Navy made good on its word and offered Gibbs & Cox additional destroyer work, this time from the Bath Iron Works in Maine and Federal Shipyards in New Jersey. The next group of destroyers, the Somers and Benham classes, began entering service in 1937. This time Gibbs & Cox’s engineers upped the steam temperature to 850 degrees and pressure to 600 pounds per square inch for both classes of vessels.
Still under attack from the conservatives in the Navy Department, Bowen decided to take on the skeptics on the Board of Inspection. Instructing the new commanding officer of the Somers before its first runs, he told him to “do everything he could think to bust up the machinery of his ship.”
The commander tried, and afterward reported that it couldn’t be done. As far as design went, the ships were “unbustable.”30
Gibbs had pushed naval design where it had never gone before. By the late 1930s American naval vessels had surpassed the British in steaming radius, operating efficiency, speed, and fuel economy. No longer would U.S. ships have to rely on the old British Parsons engines. The new destroyers, Bowen wrote, finally gave America technological independence.31
For Gibbs & Cox, the success of the destroyers was important in two ways. First, in designing for the fastest ships in the Navy, the firm turned away from designs for individualized commercial construction and toward designs for multiple, mass-produced vessels. The move would pay unexpected private-sector benefits, spurring new design and construction techniques that increased the efficiency of commercial shipbuilding.
Second, the Navy contract put the firm of Gibbs & Cox on solid footing. Memories of the lean Depression years began to fade. William Francis found that he did not get along with his yacht-designing partner Daniel Cox, and so he bought out Cox’s stake in the company. As president of a firm whose ranks would swell to 1,200 employees by the 1940s, Gibbs was established fully on his own.32
Gibbs savored the absolute control he now had. When Stalin’s Soviet Union—finally recognized by the United States in 1933—sent a private business agent to court Gibbs’ firm, the naval architect was willing to hear him out. Told that Moscow sought plans for a moderate-sized, combination battleship-destroyer, Gibbs presented the agent with plans for a colossus of a ship able to carry sixty planes on its flight deck. In the words of a journalist, the battleship “would dominate any naval engagement as easily as a shark dominates a school of mackerel.”33 The Soviets declined. “Gibbs is a very peculiar man, you see,” the somewhat bewildered agent said. “I mean, he is like an artist. He likes his work.”34
Gibbs & Cox also developed a reputation for being demanding but fair employers. The Gibbs brothers’ Philadelphia childhood may have been rigidly defined by religion, education, and family background, but in an age when Jews and other minorities were excluded from all too many white-shoe firms, William Francis hired “anyone who qualified, regardless of race or national origin.”35
As Gibbs & Cox began to grow and prosper, the firm was aware of the threat of war. In fact, as Gibbs saw it, “world conflict was inevitable.” He knew that when it came, “an enormous expansion of shipbuilding, both naval and merchant, would be required.”36
The prospect of war brought one of Gibbs’s professional qualities front and center: his obsession with secrecy and security. From his own excursions to check out competitors’ ships, he knew how much could be learned from even a short but expert inspection. Opening his firm’s own work to other eyes was a mistake he would not allow Gibbs & Cox to make. Even the innocent public was not to know specifics. “It’s doubtful if the layman now realizes what we finally came up with,” he recalled years later. “Government leaders had no desire to tell them, and that was right in line with my expectations.”37