Interviewer: Tyler Priest

Affiliation: University of Houston

George Lagers was born in Maastricht, Germany, in the middle of the Second World War. Lagers eventually became interested in naval architecture, and in 1968 earned his degree from Delft University. Lagers’ first job was at a shipyard near Rotterdam, one engaged in offshore work (including fabricating jack-up rigs). After nine years, Lagers left the yard in 1977 after having analyzed primarily dynamic positioning systems. Then at the Ocean Minerals Company, Lagers worked on dynamic positioning issues in 1978 for a seafloor manganese nodule mining concern. In 1992, Lagers formed his own one-man consulting company. In the late 1990s, Lagers gained fame in the historical community when he co-published Fifty Years Offshore with Hans Veldman.