Old as the Ark (almost)

Spar guru Eric Hall reflects on the first appearance of modern exotics in the America’s Cup

In 1970, before most of today’s America’s Cup players were born, carbon yacht applications were unheard of. That year I was part of a small group of people who changed the game, introducing advanced composite materials to the America’s Cup.

Rewind to 1968: in a moment of uncanny similarity to a scene from The Graduate, one of the most popular movies of the time, 5.5 sailor Gordon Lindemann approached me at a cocktail party and said, ‘Eric, as a young engineer, just remember one word: boron.’

I was already deeply involved with boron fibre-epoxy composites as a member of the Grumman’s F-14 design team (the F-14 would fly for the first time in December 1969). My job at Grumman was to take the stress guys’ laminate for the boron-epoxy horizontal stabiliser skins and design it into the surrounding titanium structure.

Boron fibres are made by vacuum-depositing boron onto tungsten filaments at elevated temperatures and even by today’s standards it is a super material: strong and stiff in both tension and compression...

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Bowman George Twist and mast man Jon Andron setting Intrepid’s boron -carbon spinnaker pole.