1. Introduction
Sinking due to insufficient buoyancy and capsizing because of
insufficient stability are two of the major threats to ship survivability
at sea. The safety from sinking and capsizing is thus an
important part of the safety of navigation with the entailed safety
of life and protection of the environment in waterborne transportation.
The two aspects had an extremely different development
through history. As we will see, this is substantially due to
the different perception of the immediacy of danger and to the
very different entailment of physical and mathematical aspects in
the two aspects. An important change in the perception was given
by the change in propulsion, in particular the passage from sail
ships to mechanical propulsion.
This paper does not deal in detail with the history of the theory
of ship stability (King, 1998) nor with the developments of
dynamic stability, which are contained in the companion paper by
Neves (2015). The main focus is in the origins and developments of
rules and regulations for ship stability, i.e. on the applications to
ship safety from capsizing. The paper aims, indeed, to trace the
timeline leading to the formulation and development of intact
stability criteria as we know today and beyond. The adopted
nomenclature for historical periods does not conform to the
standard use. It has been adapted by the author (Francescutto,
1993, 2004, 2007; Francescutto and Papanikolaou, 2011) to the
slow development of ship stability as a science.
Apart a single mention, the paper does not deal with the history
and developments of intact stability for Navies. This subject
was extensively treated in Reed (2009), while a review of more
recent developments is given in Bačkalov et al. (