John Alden

Who was John Alden?

John Gale Alden was an American naval architect and the founder of Alden Designs.

Alden was born in Troy in 1884, one of eight children, only four of whom survived. He grew up in Rhode Island and first learned about boats when sailing a flat-bottomed rowing boat of his sister's using an umbrella as a sail. He was inspired by the local fisherman and regattas; When his family moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1900 the Grand Banks fishing schooners which were docked there inspired his later designs. A compulsive doodler, as a child he made countless sketches of the boats that were later to make him famous.

When he was 18 years old his father died and he made the decision to train as a naval architect. He took courses at MIT and apprenticed with prominent naval architects Starling Burgess and Bowdoin B. Crowninshield.

In the winter of 1907, he undertook a voyage that would define his distinctive design trademark: The schooner Fame, owned by the eastern Fishing company, had to be returned to Boston when her crew of 23 men had gone down with smallpox and there was no one left to sail her. Alden put together a crew of four inexperienced young men and one old salt to undertake the journey. During the weeks that followed, they experienced appalling winter weather - 60 mile an hour winds, turning the salt spray to ice. The boat, and the crew, were man enough for the job, but for Alden the lessons learned far outweighed the value of the delivery contract: He realized how to design a boat that would be resilient in heavy seas, and what was important when a vessel was short-handed. His subsequent designs are admired not only for their grace and elegance but for their stability and for the fact that they can, generally, be sailed single-handedly if necessary.