280 Chapter Eightment. Sometimes more specific requirements were set forth, e.g.,
with respect to all-round fire from turrets when they were first
introduced.^32
What distinguished the situation that developed after 1884 was not
so much any absolute novelty as the range, breadth, and constantly
expanding ramifications of the new naval version of command tech
nology.^33 Indeed, for thirty years, 1884–1914, it grew like a cancer
within the tissues of the world’s market economy which earlier had
seemed immortal as well as invincible.
Even a hasty review of the major landmarks of naval technological
change between 1884 and 1914 will demonstrate the enlarged scope
command technology attained in these years. After quick-firing
guns—which rapidly escalated in size with only a modest diminution
in rate of fire^34 —came the escalation of ships’ speed. The initial de
parture lay in the development of a new “tube boiler” design,
pioneered by a boat builder named Alfred Yarrow. He won an Admi
ralty contract to build a new type of vessel first called “torpedo boat
destroyers” but soon known simply as destroyers. Their task was to
intercept torpedo boats before they could get dangerously close to
capital ships. This required destroyers to be faster than their prey and
also seaworthy. It was a tall order, yet the first destroyer, launched in
1893, attained a speed of over 26 knots—some two to three knots
faster than contemporary torpedo boats. Four years afterwards, when
Yarrow’s boilers were hitched up to steam turbines (patented by
Charles Parsons in 1884), the result was a ship capable of over 36
knots—more than twice the speed warships of a decade earlier had
been able to attain.^35
In 1898 and again in 1905 actual sea battles in distant waters gave
naval designers a better idea of what their new warships could achieve
in combat. The Spanish-American War of 1898 showed the penalty of
lagging behind technically, for obsolete Spanish vessels were no match
for the newer American ships. Yet United States naval bombardments
- Cf. Stanley Sandler, The Emergence of the Modern Capital Ship (Newark, N.J.,
1979), pp. 306–13. - Hugh Lyon, “The Relations between the Admiralty and Private Industry in the
Development of Warships” in Ranft, Technical Change and British Naval Policy, pp.
37–64, offers a useful conspectus. - Very elaborate and powerful machinery for pointing and loading the big guns had
also to be developed—and constantly improved. By 1914, enormous revolving turrets
descended deep into the bowels of the ship. Inside each turret loading machinery
moved with the guns so as always to be able to serve them, no matter what their azimuth
and elevation. - Oscar Parkes, British Battleships: “Warrior” to Vanguard ” rev. ed., (London,
1970), p. 377; Clowes, The Royal Navy, 7:39, 54.