Vladimir Yourkevitch

Vladimir Yourkevitch attended Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute from 1903 to 1907, where he was a pupil of naval engineer Alexei Krylov.

He experienced hardships living in a foreign country, including the inability of working at his profession, instead finding employment as a stevedore.

He attempted to convince British shipbuilders to use the hull design he had developed in Russia for the project of RMS Queen Mary, claiming it would be equivalent to a power boost of 1/6, but his idea was rejected.

He was employed by the shipbuilding company Penhoët, which soon afterward was commissioned to design and construct a massive new transatlantic liner called the SS Normandie.

With France initially unaffected by the Great Depression, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique ("CGT" or "The French Line") started the construction of what would become the Normandie in 1931, and she was launched in 1932.

But as the Depression reduced demand for transatlantic travel, CGT slowed her fitting-out, and she did not enter service for two and a half years.

A number of his articles were dedicated to the problems of upgrading the form of the hull, to the ship's steadiness and speed, and to the ocean liners of the future.

In 1940, Yourkevitch started working as a technical consultant for the U.S. Maritime Administration and contributed to the design of US warships during World War II.

Yourkevitch was in New York City on 9 February 1942 when Normandie, which had been requisitioned by the US Navy and renamed Lafayette, caught fire during conversion works, and subsequently capsized due to taking on too much extinguishing water.

The United States Navy would later partner with him during what was then the largest and most complicated salvage operation on a passenger liner until the advent of the Costa Concordia incident of 2013.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and others in the War Department felt the same way, but further inspections of her innovative hull nevertheless uncovered damages and other issues in the ship and made her, according to experts, beyond economical repair.

In the post-war years of 1954–1957, Yourkevitch worked on a project of a giant ship that would carry six thousand passengers from New York to Le Havre within three days for 50 dollars.

To a significant degree, the realisation was hampered by the financial difficulties of the customer, and also by the shipping and airline companies that were afraid of losing passengers and profits.