J. Richard Steffy took an unusual path to the Nautical Archaeology Program. After receiving an associate’s degree in electrotechnology from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, he joined the family electrical contracting business in the small town of Denver, Pennsylvania. As a hobby, he built meticulous ship models and studied shipbuilding techniques. At age 39, in a rather remarkable expression of intellectual freedom, Mr. Steffy wrote a letter to George Bass and inquired if he might assist the scientific study of ship construction by building a scale model of the seventh-century Yassıada wreck in Turkey.
Having quickly established his credentials in a new field, Mr. Steffy won a grant in 1972 to reconstruct the hull remains of the Kyrenia ship in Cyprus. Steffy’s work on the Kyrenia ship led Bass and Michael Katzev to establish the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA). When INA moved to Texas A&M University in 1976, Steffy and Bass were the first two faculty members. He was awarded the George O. and Sara W. Yamini Professorship in Nautical Archaeology – a tribute to his profound talents despite his never having earned a college degree. In the ensuing years, Steffy continued to demonstrate how much information about ship construction a careful researcher could glean from recovered wooden hull remains, and he shared his myriad gifts for analysis and reconstruction with multiple generations of NAP graduate students.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Steffy earned an international reputation as an authority on ship reconstruction. He and his students examined a wide range of shipwrecks from the oldest known wooden ships of the Bronze Age to the last wooden ships built at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The MacArthur Foundation paid homage to his work by awarding him its immensely prestigious “genius” grant. His book Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks remains a seminal resource for the NAP and researchers worldwide and its glossary figures among the most consulted tools in the field.
To read more about the influential career of Dick Steffy, check out The Man Who Thought Like A Ship, authored by Loren Steffy and published by Texas A&M University Press.
