Michel Selig II

The class (the word is applied to Sixes) prospered. 1000 boats
were built before WWII. It became an Olympic class and it was
"the" development class. New ideas were first tried out on
Sixes.
An anomaly of the Rule is that the boats are twice as long as
their numbers. A Six is about 12 m. long.
This goes back to a humourous story at the London conference
that created the Rule in 1907. In fact the conference was fixed.
The northern countries and the U.K. had already decided the
form of the equation.
The monolingual French representative, Louis Dyèvre, wasn't in
on the "fix".
He huffed and puffed in French at the blackboard advocating a
variant of the American Universal Rule which has a parameter
in the denominator.