it for good. But the revolutionary design of Normandie's hull allowed her, with 160,000 horsepower engines, to be almost as fast as Queen Mary, a ship virtually the same size but with 212,000 horsepower engines. Normandie also required much less fuel than Queen Mary. Yourkevitch moved to America on 5 March 1937. He founded a technical bureau in New York called Yourkevitch Ship Designs, Inc. and started negotiating with representatives of the naval and commercial fleets of the US, as well as with private shipping companies. A. N. Vlasov, also a graduate from the Polytechnic Institute and the owner of over forty ocean liners, rendered Yourkevitch financial assistance and addressed their fellows with the following appeal: "We, Russian-Americans, are very proud of the success of our talented compatriot and consider it our sacred duty to support his new enterprise in America… We view the cause of V. I. Yourkevitch as the National Cause of Russia." The first testing of Yourkevitch's models took place in Washington, D.C., in the government testing basin. Their results exceeded those of models designed by competitors. By 1938, 42 ships had been built or reconstructed according to Yourkevitch's designs. From 1939 to 1945, Yourkevitch continued his scientific and educational studies. A number of his articles were dedicated to the problems of upgrading the form of the hull, to the ship's steadiness and speed, and to the ocean liners of the future. He gave lectures on the theory of ship design at the University of Michigan and in the Shipbuilding Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1940, Yourkevitch started working as a technical consultant for the U.S. Maritime Administration and contributed to the design of US warships during World War II. Yourkevitch was in New York City on 9 February 1942 when Normandie, which had been requisitioned by the US Navy and renamed Lafayette, caught fire during conversion works, and subsequently capsized due to taking on too much extinguishing water. He could have saved the ship, based on his intimate knowledge of the liner's ballast systems, but the NYC Fire Department would not call on him. The situation was complicated by the fact that the ship's advanced fire suppression systems had been offline and un-staffed at the time. The United States Navy would later partner with him during what was then the largest and most complicated salvage operation on a passenger liner until the advent