People: Charles Robinson, MBA '47

Photograph by Clyde Mueller

For centuries, the city of Venice has been the proverbial sinking ship. Decay, tidal flooding, and this century's wave damage from speeding motorboats have all taken their toll on the buildings that line the city's fabled canals. With its 5th- and 6th-century architectural heritage in dire straits, it was not in jest that Charles Robinson's Venetian dinner companions asked the 79-year-old engineer if he could help.

"One of my friends asked me if I could design a boat with a reduced wave output," says Robinson, a Santa Fe, N. M., dweller who has owned his own home in Venice for the past 10 years. "Several years before, I had been working on a sailboat that could recover some of the energy of its own wave output and turn that around to make the boat sail faster," says Robinson of a radical design he helped create for an America's Cup contender in the late 1980s. The design did not help his client win the coveted yachting trophy, but when employed on a motorized boat with a wider hull, like the famed Venetian water taxis, the prototype proved remarkably successful.

Dubbed the Mangia Onda — Italian for "wave eater" —- Robinson's boat is designed to suppress wave generation as it plies the canals of Venice. "By recapturing the bow wave you can extract the energy and reduce or eliminate the damage done by the waves," explains Robinson. On July 2, Robinson signed a contract with the Venetian transit system. The Mangia Onda's revolutionary hull design will be employed on 150 of the city's new water taxis or vaporetti — "little steamboats" — with hope of drastically reducing the city's erosion woes.

And where else might this technology be employed? "London has a terrible problem with wave erosion along the Thames," says Robinson, "so their waste transit authority is considering a test of the Mangia Onda, as are Paris and Amsterdam." It's quite possible that within the next decade tourists in Paris will be cruising the Seine in a bateau mouche of Robinson's design.

PETER CALLAHAN