Ship Models

Filipe Castro

Introduction

Humans have a fascination with models. Herman Melville perhaps explained it better when he wrote that whales are too big to be understood: either we are far away and can see them but we are blind to the details, or we are close enough to see the details but cannot see the whole.

To deal with the scale problem and acquire a better idea of the world, people have built towers, telescopes, and models.  Ship models have been made in varying scales for votive, aesthetic, political, and research reasons, and they stand as a helpful tool to improve our understanding of ships.

This area is intended as a space to share information on research ship models.  The pages on old or ethnic ship models – such as the Texas A&M collection of Asian Ship Models – will be housed in the “Collections” tab.