Atlantic Warfare Today : 419 



1900 and found a place not only on liners and cargo vessels but in 

 the fighting ships as well. 



Scores of other inventions and discoveries came into the warships, 

 some after delay and some by devious routes: Edison's incandescent 

 light; Bell's telephone; Maxwell's and Hertz's radio waves (1885) 

 which Marconi utilized for local signals (1895) and made into trans- 

 atlantic wireless (1901); hydraulic and then electric elevators; ma- 

 chinery for moving and handling heavy weights. The list in full 

 would be almost endless for nearly every development that is impor- 

 tant in civilian life is either directly useful in naval structures or has 

 some naval counterpart. Even the child's spinning top made a con- 

 tribution to naval development: it suggested to Ludwig Obry the 

 gyroscope (1896) and the gyroscope was used first to control the di- 

 rection of torpedoes; later it was used to stabilize ships in rough 

 waters; in the Sperry gyro-compass and "metal mike" or automatic 

 steerer for ships and planes and in many other ways. 



While it was true that such new devices were absorbed at a tardy 

 and uneven pace it was also true that the unevenness sometimes in- 

 cluded a big jump. The British took such a jump in 1906 when they 

 floated upon the Atlantic the latest product of their shipyards, 

 H.M.S. Dreadnaught. She was not only new — she was a surprise 

 package. She was the largest (18,000 tons), fastest (twenty-one knots), 

 most heavily armed (ten twelve-inch rifles) battleship afloat. Of 

 course her importance was measured neither by speed nor size nor 

 firepower but by the fact that the three qualities supported each 

 other. The size would have made her an easy target without the 

 speed; the heavy armament would have burdened a smaller vessel 

 and been wasted in a slower one. Taken together the three superla- 

 tives reinforced each other. No other navy had afloat or building a 

 vessel like her or anything else to rival her power. She gave her 

 name to a new class of vessels — the Dreadnaughts — the all-big-gun 

 ships. 



This move brought forth a number of different responses, some of 

 them characteristic. The immediate response was that many nations 

 began building ships more or less along the Dreadnaught pattern. 

 In addition to stepping up her big ship program, Germany began 

 looking for alternative sources of strength. This led her to an even 

 more intense program of army training and to the expenditure of 

 special efforts on submarines and submarine warfare. 



In the United States there could be no immediate response in terms 

 of a building program, for this was peacetime and Congress kept all 



