born Nov. 28, 1810, Dartington, Devon, Eng.
died May 4, 1879, Simonstown, S.Af.
British engineer and naval architect.
He was the brother of James Anthony Froude . In 1837 he became an assistant to I.K. Brunel , for whom he oversaw railway construction. For the British Admiralty he conducted experiments using scale models of ships to determine the physical laws governing full-sized ships, using a testing tank he built at his home. The Froude number, expressed as the ratio of a vessel's velocity to the square root of the product of its waterline length and the acceleration of gravity, is still used by marine architects to predict the behaviour of ships from scale models.