March 19, 1947
William Starling Burgess, whose transportation legacy spans multiple means of mobility, died at his home in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was 68.
Burgess was born in Boston on Christmas Day in 1878. His father, Edward Burgess, was a renowned yacht designer. Early on in life, William Starling Burgess demonstrated a high level of proficiency in both mechanics and mathematics. He attended Milton Academy, a Boston-area boarding school. During his time at that educational institution, Burgess began to develop an interest in aviation. He also designed his first sailboat, which was named Sally II.
After graduating from Milton Academy in 1897, Burgess began his studies at Harvard University. He took time off from those educational pursuits to serve in the U.S. Navy during the Spanish-American War. By special vote of the Harvard faculty, though, Burgess received credit for the courses he missed during his military tour of duty.
Burgess left Harvard without completing his degree and, following in his father’s footsteps, opened his own yacht design office in Boston. He eventually partnered with Alpheus Appleton Packard to launch Burgess & Packard, Naval Architects and Engineers. That same year, Burgess designed an innovative sailing scow (at type of flat-bottomed inland waterway vessel) named Outlook. A key feature of this scow was that a steel truss along the deck midline made this vessel low and light by the standards of that era and therefore able to travel at a faster-than-average speed. In 1905, Burgess established a yacht yard in Marblehead, Massachusetts, to both design and built vessels.
One of Burgess’s best-known creations is the schooner-rigged sailboat Pilot, which he built in 1924 for the Boston Pilots’ Association. This vessel, which remained in operation until 1976, holds the record as the longest-serving pilot boat in American history. Another similarly enduring contribution that Burgess made to watercraft was his introduction of the Atlantic design in 1928. This design was for keelboats – mid-sized sailing yachts – and these vessels have been widely used over the decades for both races and recreation. Several of the Atlantic-design keelboats remain in use today.
In addition, Burgess designed following vessels that were each successful J-class yacht defenders of the America’s Cup in the years identified parenthetically: Enterprise (1930); Rainbow (1934); and Ranger (1937). Starting in 1935, he served as a consulting naval architect for Alcoa Corporation (a portmanteau of Aluminum Company of America) at its office at the Maine-based shipyard Bath Iron Works. Burgess’s efforts in this capacity included focusing on corrosion-resistant alloys for ships. His maritime contributions ultimately extended to the military sphere; during World War II, he worked as a civilian engineer for the anti-submarine development detachment of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet.
Throughout the years, Burgess also took time to nurture his enthusiasm for airborne transportation. He joined forces with airplane designer Augustus Moore Herring in 1909 to establish the Herring-Burgess Company. This enterprise built a biplane named the Flying Fish. This aircraft’s April 1910 flight over Plum Island in Massachusetts was only the second fully powered and controlled flight in all of New England. The following year, Burgess built several planes that were licensed by the Wright Brothers.
After Herring stepped away from their partnership in 1910, Burgess established Burgess Company and Curtis, Inc., with Greely S. Curtis and Frank H. Russell. This enterprise, which had the distinction of being the first licensed aircraft manufacturer in the United States and was renamed Burgess Company in 1914, sold hydroplanes to both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army. In 1915, Burgess was awarded the Robert J. Collier Trophy of the Aero Club of America for his aviation accomplishments. During World War I, Burgess reenlisted in the Navy. His service this time around entailed designing planes for the Navy.
Yet another one of Burgess’s transportation-oriented endeavors was collaborating with noted architect and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller to design the futuristic Dymaxion car in the 1930s. “Dymaxion” is a portmanteau of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension,” and this streamlined aluminum automobile was shaped like a giant tadpole and came equipped with a periscope and just three wheels. While the Dymaxion ended up being a dud and anything but marketable at the time, Burgess and Fuller did manage to construct a total of three experimental prototypes of that first-of-a-kind vehicle.
In the time since his death, Burgess has continued to be honored in several ways for his contributions to means of travel. In 2013, for example, he was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
For more information on William Starling Burgess, please check out https://nshof.org/inductees/burgess-w-starling/ and https://www.massairspace.org/virtualexhibit/vex2/index.htm
Information on his papers is available at https://research.mysticseaport.org/coll/coll193/
Transportation History 
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