Rowing boat
It may not look it, but this small craft is a marvel of design. It’s the culmination of centuries of trial and error. It’s existed in this essential form for more than a thousand years.
Look at it. You can see it rides high in the water, which makes the boat a bit ‘tippy’ when empty—tippy and vulnerable to high winds. But it’s not intended to be empty. Laden with a small amount of cargo (or a passenger) the dinghy settles nicely in the water, giving it tremendous stability. The oarlocks are positioned so the rower sits backwards—a much more energy efficient technique than paddling. The rower’s stroke uses all the most powerful muscle groups in the human body, beginning with the legs, continuing with the back and ending with the arms and shoulder. All the energy is utilized to drive the craft forward. The blunt stern may appear to be badly designed, but in fact it allows the boat to rise to a following wave rather than cut into it, so the energy of the wave is added to the energy of the rower. The last major improvement to the rowboat was the invention of the swiveling oarlock in the 1870s.
What we see in this stubby little rowboat is a manifestation of perfection—Aristotelian perfection. The reason the form of this craft has remained basically unchanged for so long is because it’s nearly impossible to improve upon. Its a modest sort of perfection, to be sure, but perfection all the same.
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