Olin Stephens once wanted to be a good painter, and studied under Heliker and Kuniyoshi. But he lacks the conventional "artistic" appearance. With brown suit, bow tie, glasses, a quiet, efficient manner, he might be a foreign service career officer, or a scholar of the medieval history he enjoys reading. Running the world's largest yacht design firm ties him down to his office on lower Madison Ave. most of the time. What leisure he has is spent on his farm in Sheffield, Mass. And he doesn't own a boat.

 

But Stephens regards any view of himself as disinterested in boats as either exaggerated or somewhat out of date. "There was a time, during the war, after it, and through the Korean affair when we did a lot of Navy work. I was busy running the office, keeping men employed, doing stacks of paperwork and I didn't have much time for yacht design. But then all that slacked off, and the America's Cup matches were revived. The commission to design Columbia sparked my interest again. When Mr. Gubelmann asked me if I would design a new Twelve, naturally, I said yes." Stephens is not the man to point out that he is the most logical choice to design a boat for a new America's Cup defense, and that on that assumption he had already been doodling with and pondering the design. Once commissioned, he spent three involved months with "the tank." Stephens was the first yacht designer to tank-test hull models.

He helped Dr. Kenneth Davidson develop the research facilities at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, which are the best in the world, and indeed his identification with the place and the similarity of the names is such that foreign journals occasionally describe his boats as designed by the Stephens Institute. There, six-foot-long models costing $1200 each are put through various tests to determine resistance, lateral force, and leeway angle. The trials are also a test of accuracy; before the 1958 series, the Davidson lab found that dust collecting on models overnight could cause a one percent error in model resistance. For this series David Boyd, the British designer has also used the Hoboken tank, so the advantage has not been all Olin Stephens's.