At the 1950 annual meeting of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers a paper entitled "The Backing Power of Geared Turbine Driven Vessels" was presented by E. F. Hewins, H. J. Chase and A. L. Ruiz, based on the full·scale backing tests of the S.S. ESSO SUEZ. This paper received wide attention from ship operators and designers evidencing the interest in the problems of stopping and maneuvering of ships where backing power was a main factor. The conclusions derived by the authors indicated the desirability of extending their work to cover other types of ships, prime movers, and power transmissions, and the development of a method of calculation therefor.
With the modern trend towards increasing speeds, the installed ahead power of new ships has increased steadily. These vessels will necessarily operate in restricted waters, where maneuvering is most important, at a fraction of ahead rated power much smaller than that of their predecessors. Because of these facts, some members of the marine industry believed that arbitrary selection of backing power expressed as a percentage of the ahead power, such as the well known "80 per cent torque at 50 pet cent revolutions per minute" for steam turbines, needed further analysis with respect to the power plant and propeller influence on the stopping of ships, and that means to establish and evaluate backing power requirements on a rational basis were highly desirable.