“We played against Tilden, and sometimes we won!” William Francis would recall about his matches against the future Wimbledon champion.12
By the time they were teenagers, the tennis trophies cluttered the upstairs bedrooms of the Rittenhouse Square mansion. Frustrated, their mother Frances scolded her sons, insisting it was “a little vulgar to display them all.”13 No matter. A good lawn tennis player—someone who played by the rules without losing his cool—was synonymous with being a true gentleman, a perception that must have pleased the Gibbs parents.
The boys also got the chance to travel abroad. When he was twelve, his parents packed little Willy off to Europe with an older cousin. But what stood out in his mind were not the cathedrals and museums, but a library in Switzerland packed full of engineering publications. On a later trip home aboard the White Star Line’s new liner Celtic, then the biggest ship in the world, William Francis and Frederic Gibbs constructed a house out of blocks in their first-class stateroom. The slow but plush British liner was so steady that the block house remained standing for the entire eight-day trip.14 The young Gibbs was fully aware that smaller, more powerful ships than Celtic were making headlines by crossing the Atlantic in less than six days, and that newer European ships had far eclipsed the American Line’s St. Louis in size, speed, and luxury.
Because of his poor health, Gibbs was not sent to one of the Episcopal boarding schools that served the children of the northeastern elite. Instead he was enrolled at the De Lancey School, an easy walk from the family home. De Lancey advertised itself as providing the rigors of a Groton education while allowing the children to live at home.15 And for reclusive Willy, this was a good thing. In addition, it appears that De Lancey was a more intellectual place than its New England counterparts, which had been modeled after the muscular Eton and its playing fields.
Illness continued to dog Gibbs. He did not graduate from De Lancey until he was nearly twenty. In his class of seniors, nearly half went to Harvard, most of the rest to the University of Pennsylvania.16 He applied to Harvard most likely at his father’s insistence; it was, of course, a place better known for cultivating gentlemen than naval architects.
By today’s standards, Gibbs’s college application was abysmally unimpressive. His high school transcript was peppered with C’s and D’s. He flunked Latin, French, and oddly enough, advanced algebra. Nevertheless, a member of the selection committee of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School stamped “Admitted” on his application card, on condition that he get a passing grade in a foreign language after enrollment.17 That the boy came from a very rich family must have been decisive. But the Lawrence Scientific School, later Harvard’s Graduate School of Engineering, might also have known something of his powerful, self-driven interest in engineering and ships.
In September 1906, the twenty-year-old William Francis Gibbs, now a gangly six feet, two inches tall, boarded a train for Boston. His father did not want his son to study engineering, because William Warren Gibbs believed engineers were impractical and inarticulate—qualities that would not recommend a man to the people who mattered. He wanted a different life for his eldest son: an elite university education, a respectable legal profession, and the social status the law would guarantee. In short, the life that entrepreneurial, risk-taking William Warren Gibbs had never had.
Strangely, William Francis’s younger brother, Frederic, did not immediately continue on to college at eighteen. One possibility is that like William Francis, he was a late bloomer as a student. Or maybe their seemingly high-flying parents had their own reasons to conserve cash by the time William Francis left for Cambridge. In the end, Frederic never got a college education.
Gibbs was passionate about ocean liners, but did not seem to possess the technical aptitude, financial savvy, and force of will that was needed to build giant machines for hard-nosed shipping men, visionaries like Samuel Cunard, Albert Ballin, Clement Griscom, and J. P. Morgan.
His parents also must have worried that their reclusive son would have a tough time at Harvard, with its demanding academics and conformist social scene.
Freshman William Francis Gibbs entered Harvard when the famed William James was still chairman of its philosophy department. The great pragmatist crowed about the college, “Our undisciplinables are our proudest product!”18
But one new undergraduate was miserable in Cambridge.
It was the waning tenure of university president Charles Eliot, and Harvard had yet to complete its transition from a finishing school for rich boys from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia into a world-class teaching and research university. Many undergraduates coasted through classes, and spent hours drinking in the private “Gold Coast” dormitories and the elite social clubs lining Mount Auburn Street.
The young Philadelphian with an immensely wealthy father was immediately accepted as a respectable “Gold Coaster.” Gibbs took up residence in Claverly Hall, a Georgian brick pile that boasted wood-paneled walls, a sweeping grand staircase, and a small electric elevator. But unlike most students in Claverly, Gibbs showed no interest in the hijinks and hilarity typical of the turn-of-the-century “Harvard Man.” William Francis continued to spend his free hours much as he had in his family’s Walnut Street mansion. He read technical journals, pored over blueprints of British battleships, and drew. The budding designer approached the plans of these ships with “great deference.” But that could not stop him from carefully rearranging their engine spaces, or adding more watertight bulkheads, imagining what might be done to increase speed or keep a ship afloat if it were struck by enemy shells or torpedoes. “What’s the next step?” he would ask himself as he examined each engineering masterpiece.19
The boy’s growing understanding of design came at a time when naval ideas were in ferment. The rout of Russia’s navy in the Russo-Japanese War, which had occurred just a year before Gibbs left for college, showed what could happen to an outmoded and unprepared fleet. Britain was steaming ahead with new technologies and strategies, but many American naval officers—certainly, some of the naval thinkers in the journals Gibbs was reading—felt the United States was not keeping up. They pointed to the Navy’s failure to implement British naval advances to modernize its own fleet, and the serious lack of coordination between progressive Navy engineers and hidebound line officers. Studying the latest articles and ship blueprints in his dorm room, the intensely patriotic Gibbs began to see a role for himself in rebuilding the American Navy.
To many of his classmates, the preoccupied student from Philadelphia was a strange one. He was painfully shy, and later recalled that some of the loud-mouthed, arrogant scions of privilege “filled him with alarm.”20 Terrified of being bullied, he kept the door to his room locked to protect his blueprints and ship photographs from mockery and practical jokes.21
Photos of Gibbs taken during his time at Harvard show a young man in a long dressing gown with a sash and striped lapels, looking profoundly lonely. In one picture he stands against his dresser, his right arm draped over a pile of books. In another he sits in a chair next to his room’s fireplace, his hands clasped over his lap. Instead of college pennants, the walls are covered with photographs and prints: warships with smoking funnels and fine automobiles. A basket with rolled-up blueprints sits by his desk at the window.22