Fredrik Henrik af Chapman

Fredrik Henrik af Chapman
Chapman painted by Lorens Pasch the Younger in 1778. Chapman is wearing his hooded work jacket with the Order of Vasa on it.
Born	9 September 1721 Gothenburg, Sweden
Died	19 August 1808(1808-08-19) (aged 86) Sweden
Allegiance	Sweden
Service/branch	Swedish Navy
Rank	Vice admiral
Other work	Manager of the shipyard at Karlskrona

Fredrik Henrik af Chapman (9 September 1721 in Gothenburg – 19 August 1808) was a Swedish shipbuilder, scientist and officer in the Swedish navy. He was also manager of the Karlskrona shipyard 1782-1793. Chapman is 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 Swedish king Gustav III.

Chapman was born at Nya Varvet, the royal dockyards in Gothenburg, on 9 September 1721, the son of Thomas Chapman, an English naval officer (born 1679 in Yorkshire) who had moved to Sweden in 1715 and joined the Swedish navy in 1716. His mother was Susanna Colson, the daughter of London shipwright William Colson. He showed a talent for shipbuilding when he made his first body plan based on a drawing of an Ostende privateer given to him by Flemish shipwright. Chapman went to sea in 1736, at the age of fifteen, and spent his late teens working in both private and state shipyards. In 1741, he helped build a Spanish merchant vessel, a project that provided him with enough money to allow him to work as a ship's carpenter in London 1741-44. After his stay in England, he returned to Gothenburg and established a shipyard with a Swedish merchant named Bagge. Together they built a few small vessels and provided maintenance work for the Swedish East India Company.

Though he had received a good basic education in shipbuilding, Chapman recognized that he did not possess the knowledge of higher mathematics that was required to determine draft and stability at the design stage of a vessel. In 1748, he sold his share of the shipyard and moved to Stockholm where he studied for two years under Baron Palmqvist. He went on to study under the English professor of mathematics, Thomas Simpson, who had worked out methods for calculating the volume of irregular surfaces and bodies. After one year of studies in London, he went on to study shipbuilding at the British royal dockyards in Woolwich, Chatham and Deptford.