KING OF COMPOSITES
On a map, the town of Bristol, Rhode Island, resembles a prehistoric bird claw, the famed Narragansett Bay the waters in which the peninsula dips its talons. Like Rhode Island’s other maritime towns, Bristol is quiet and kempt, and time seems to unfold slowly here, especially when boats tuck themselves in for the winter months. In the years since the Great Recession though, the maritime and boatbuilding industries have suffered a similar quiet disappearance, and in a town that once produced legions of America’s Cup prototypes through most of the 20th century, adaptation has had to come quickly.
Innovation has arrived in the form of composites, a term for the process by which two or more natural or artificial elements (with different physical or chemical properties) are combined to produce a material more reliable than each of the materials on
