Of necessity, we distill our stories to the simplest facts.

But when we do so we sometimes remove all the things that not only make them worth telling but also obscure the lessons that might be embedded within them.

Consider, for example, Joshua Humphreys (who I’m writing about because he died on January 12, 1838). He was an American ship builder and naval architect who known as the “Father of the American Navy,” because he oversaw the construction of the United States Navy’s first six ships. These included the U.S. Frigate Constitution (aka Old Ironsides), which is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued in 1947 on the 150th anniversary of its launch.

That’s all well and good. But the story gets a bit more interesting once I tell you (accurately) that he developed an innovative, never-before built design for his ships that allowed them to more than hold their own when they fought British ships in the War of 1812.

The story gets even more interesting when you stop to consider what it took to get authorization to build the ships. The simple version of that story is that Congress approved the construction of six ships, which suggests that one day, key members of Congress woke up and said, something like, “you know we really need a Navy. Beside, in a century or so, someone will invent football and the Army will need an opponent for a signature game.”

Actually, there were heated debates about whether the new United States should have a Navy. The rebellious Americans had a small Navy but by 1779 the larger, more powerful British Navy had largely eliminated it as a threat and in 1785, the Continental Congress disbanded what was left of the Navy and sold off its few remaining ships.

The delegates who hammered out the Constitution in 1787 rarely discussed the need for a navy. (The Constitution itself only says that Congress shall have the power to “provide and maintain a Navy.”) In one of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued in support of a Navy, which he and others thought was needed to protect commerce. But others, such as Patrick Henry, argued that a Navy would be an agent of imperial ambitions and warned that it would be too costly to build, operate and maintain even a few warships.

Finally, in 1794, after pirates in North Africa began attacking American ships and sailors Congress, by a narrow margin, authorized construction of six ships. To get the needed votes, President George Washington and Henry Knox, his quite able Secretary of War, agreed to have each ship be built in a different city but all under the supervision of one person who would also design the ships.

This arrangement, to put it mildly, created more than a few logistical challenges. To carry it out (and to build one of the ships in Philadelphia), Knox selected Humphreys, who was a well-known ship builder and designer. Humphreys developed a revolutionary plan called for building “a warship that could carry more armament on one gun deck than any rival ship could carry on two,” according to historian James J. Farley. “Not only would the ship carry more cannons, but they would fire heavier cannonballs.”

This, however, would create a major problem because, as Farley wrote, “these two factors meant that when American frigates fired a broadside (all of the cannons along one side of the ship firing simultaneously) they would fire a throw-weight (the total weight of all the cannon balls fired in a broadside) fifty percent greater than any ship of the same class.” Moreover, “since wooden sailing ships, especially armed warships, are more buoyant in the middle than they are at either end, they tend to ‘hog,’ to develop a deformative curve along the keel that eventually…destroys the ship.” But Humphreys developed an innovative way to prevent hogging and to accommodate all the cannons.

Having come up with an innovative design, Humphreys then had to carry it out. The wood he needed was live oak which grew only in the swamps off the coast, particularly in Georgia, where disease and heat made it impossible to harvest timber in summer months. Moreover, the area lacked the harbor and facilities needed to transport the 1,000 tons of live oak, in the correct lengths, needed for each ship. The ships also needed massive amounts of copper to protect their hulls from barnacles and other marine growth that could slow ship’s speed by half and from boring worms that could quickly turn a wooden ship into a deteriorating sponge. But the young country did not have enough copper to meet the demand. Somehow, with the help of Paul Revere, the nation’s leading coppersmith, enough of the metal was found.

And, having acquired the needed materials, there was the small challenge of assembling the massive ships As Farley explained: “Perhaps the best way to comprehend the magnitude and complexity of the construction of an eighteenth century warship is to visualize it as a giant, three-dimensional, five thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Unlike a modern jigsaw puzzle there is no picture on the cover of the box, no pattern of color or shapes to aid assembly.”

“But wait, there’s more!” as they say on late-night TV ads. The nascent federal bureaucracy did not provide needed funds in a timely fashion, which led Humphreys to write, at one point, “What I expected is now verified the workmen have broke off because they call on you for their pay + [did not receive it]…Either pay them or they will not work.”

Despite all of this, Humphrey and the people overseeing construction in the five other cities, produced the ships, which were an immediate success. However, his glory was short lived because Humphreys was a Federalist who (believed in a strong national government. But in 1801, Thomas Jefferson, a Republican took office (in the country’s first peaceful transfer of power). While Jefferson claimed that “we are all Republicans – we are all Federalists,” other Republicans clamored for the spoils of political power. So in October 1801, Humphreys was summarily dismissed by the new secretary of the Navy.

Humphreys returned to the ordinary world of commercial shipbuilding, and after suffering several personal losses retired to his family’s house in Haverford in about 1813, where he lived until he died in 1838.

His ships, however, formed the core of the Navy during the War of 1812, and won several victories against ships in the British Navy, which at the time was the world’s dominant naval force. And Humphreys work is celebrated to this day. The USS Constitution Museum, for example, has an entire exhibit titled “From Forest to Frigate,” that traces the story of his visionary work.

Reflecting on this, I’m struck not only by the rich story behind the dry fact but also by the lessons and insights it offers about other major challenges, such as what it is going to take to not only develop and deploy an effective vaccine. As one of the men working on the ship project wrote Humphreys, “we are obliged to commit ourselves to our own ingenuity and industry to fix up that vacuum left from want of experience and practice.”

Hopefully, somewhere, there’s a 21st century Joshua Humphrey up for the task and, hopefully, someone in the new Biden Administration will be smart enough to hire him and help him do his job.

Be well, stay safe, “commit yourself to ingenuity and industry,” fight for justice and work for peace.