The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 297

understood fully what was at stake. The whole question was supposed

to be secret, and was in fact secret from all but a small number of in­

siders. But the men who had to decide were not themselves techni­

cally well informed and relied on what others told them. Under such

circumstances Pollen’s status as a civilian, tainted with greed,^57 put his

salesmanship at a hopeless disadvantage against the advocacy of “ser­

vice experts” for their own, technically inferior, invention. As an

angry admiral wrote in 1912:

By placing Mr Pollen in the position of a favoured inventor we

have put him in possession of the most complicated items of our

Fire Control system and we are being constantly pressed by Mr

Pollen to pay him large sums of money to keep that information

for our exclusive use. Each time we pay him thus (monopoly

rights) he gains more confidential information..... it is a chain

around our necks being forged more and more relentlessly.^58

The decision to settle for an inferior system of fire control was par­
ticularly ill advised inasmuch as the Royal Navy seemed committed to
bombardment at extreme range. The so-called battle cruisers (under
construction 1905–10) had guns of the very largest size and could move
at the highest speeds, but lacked more than rudimentary armor.^59 They
could hope to confront enemy battleships with-impunity only by using
their speed to hover just out of reach, while pounding their opponent
to pieces by outranging his fire. Fisher conceived these super ships as
constituting a second revolution in ship design, comparable to the
famous Dreadnought revolution with which he had inaugurated his
regime at the Admiralty. But without fire control machinery capable
of exploiting the superior range of their heavy guns, such vessels were
death traps, or close to it.
Oddly, no one seemed to care, not even Admiral Fisher, whose ini­

57. After deciding against Pollen’s fire control devices in 1912 the company he had
    founded was stricken from the list of contractors with whom the Admiralty was au­
    thorized to do business. Like Armstrong in 1863, Pollen then proceeded to try to sell
    his product to other navies, and did so to the Russians. As his son points out, however,
    he patriotically did not offer his know-how to the Germans. On the other hand, negoti­
    ations with the United States Navy, and with Brazil, Chile, Austria, and Italy must have
    made the principles of Pollen’s fire control devices readily accessible to German naval
    experts, if they had been interested. Pollen, The Great Gunnery Scandal, pp. 96, 108,


58. Pollen’s company was in dire financial straits once Admiralty advances were turned
    off—a history that illustrates the perils of armaments business for a small company
    attempting to enter it.


59. Ibid., p. 116.


60. Parkes, British Battleships, p. 486.