Speed, displacement and fire-power crept up as technology was further refined, all framed by politics and funding along with a variety of engineering and infrastructure constraints. That concept continued to evolve around these broadly established engineering themes. By the 1890s, battleship design had emerged from a long experimental period characterised by fast technical change, and was producing ships of about 12-15,000 tons with reciprocating engines, capable of 15-17 knots and typically with four heavy guns, backed by lighter weapons. To explore how all that worked, we first need to look at the way battleships were evolving up to that time.
He wanted to be seen as innovative and influential but Dreadnought was more an evolutionary extension of existing trend, including the nature of her armament, and behind the scenes he did not get his way with the actual revolution he wanted – which was to scrap battleship construction in favour of large and fast armoured cruisers.
The point arguably had a good deal to do with his ego. Dreadnought had many innovations and advantages, but she was not quite the total conceptual revolution that Fisher liked to make out. One point that has emerged from this process is that we have to draw distinction between the popular view of Dreadnought as a pivot, and her place in terms of broader historical social, political and engineering trends. Ongoing and constructive discussion is, of course, the essence of how historical understanding emerges. The subsequent main interpretation, proposed in the 1960s by US academic Arthur Marder, has also been debated. Indeed, the way these events are understood has gone through repeated re-interpretation since 1929, when Bacon published his biography of Fisher. The forces driving Dreadnought‘s origin were as much political and economic as technical, and because the final outcome was a result of the mix between all these factors – into which Fisher’s persona stirred colour and controversy – the issue has been open to historical discussion since, largely in terms of how all these issues inter-played. There was only one small problem: it wasn’t strictly true. Gard, built in just a year and a day, making every earlier battleship instantly obsolete. According to Fisher, the Dreadnought was a revolutionary step he conceived with input from the Constructor at Portsmouth dockyard, H. The ship was popularly portrayed at the time as a wonder-vessel, brain-child of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher – along with its cruiser equivalent, the battlecruiser. Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher (1841-1920).
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