Who Should Get Credit for the Keel that Revolutionized Sailing?
The Australia II wing keel case asks how credit should be assigned when a successful engineering achievement involves several people with different kinds of responsibility. Australia II won the America’s Cup in 1983 with a revolutionary wing keel that helped end the New York Yacht Club’s 132-year winning streak. Officially, Australian designer Ben Lexcen received credit for the design, and his name appeared as the inventor in the patent application. However, later accounts indicate that Dutch engineers Peter van Oossanen and Joop Slooff played the decisive role in developing the keel and winglets. The main question of this case is whether credit should go to the person who had official design responsibility, the people who actually developed the technical innovation, or both in different ways. This case highlights the difference between role credit and causal credit: someone may deserve credit for accepting responsibility for a design, while others deserve credit for actually creating the innovation.