McBride W.M. Technological change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945

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consensus of opinion of ofﬁcers of the Atlantic Fleet was that the armor belt

of battleships of the ﬂeet should not be raised; and that this conclusion was

based upon careful observation during the recent cruise . . . and involved

a distinct and deﬁnite change of view on the part of some ofﬁcers who had

held a very different view before the cruise began.”

Sims received the congressional hearing he wanted, but the resulting

testimony characterized American dreadnoughts as comparable to foreign

designs. Sims’s complaints revealed that the line now played a strong role

in deﬁning the battleship technological paradigm. Sims’s inability to sup-

port his charges against the armor belt, his inaccurate knowledge of foreign

practices, his naivete regarding the density of water, his attempts to talk

about past issues, and his open disdain for Capps and the Board on Con-

struction did not serve his case.

The increasing inﬂuence of the General

Board, the signiﬁcant line ofﬁcer representation on the special battleship

design review board of 1907, the fact that the current president of the Board

on Construction, Rear Admiral Converse, was a line ofﬁcer, and the state-

ment of the ﬂeet commander, all undermined Sims’s claims.

Elting Morison has claimed that Sims and his colleagues “proved their

case, but lost the decision.”

However, they never did prove their case.

They erroneously challenged the expertise of the Bureau of Construction

& Repair on a technical point of debatable importance. When Rear Ad-

miral Capps could place American designs within the mainstream prac-

tices of foreign navies (in a Kuhnian “normal” sense), he demonstrated that

American battleship designs were the product of a conservative, well-

founded appreciation of a complex technical problem.

Some segments of the press sympathetic to Sims continued to charge a

bureau cover-up, and Secretary Metcalf urged Hale to release the reports

of Admiral Evans and Naval Constructor Robinson, compiled during the

cruise of the Great White Fleet, for publication.

When combined with

the Board on Construction’s comments, Metcalf thought that these reports

should ensure that there remains “no doubt whatever in the minds of im-

partial critics that the battleships of the United States Navy are equal, if not

superior, to battleships of foreign navies of corresponding date of design.”

Sims and his colleagues failed to discredit the technical bureaus. For the

navy, the publicity was extensive, but not as damaging as Admiral Dewey

might have feared. Yet Sims was not ﬁnished. He dismissed the senior line

ofﬁcers who endorsed the North Dakota design as ignorant, and appealed

to President Roosevelt to set things right.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

The 1908 Newport Conference

Thwarted in Congress, Sims and his compatriot, Commander L. Albert

Key, turned to President Roosevelt in the hope that, through him, they ﬁ-

nally could break the bureau system and establish a general staff. The fo-

cus of their attack was the design for the new dreadnought North Dakota,

but this time the point man was Albert Key.

Key was due to take command of the new cruiser Salem under con-

struction at the Fore River Shipyard in Massachusetts where North Dakota

was being built. After inspecting North Dakota, Key claimed that she could

not prevail against foreign dreadnought battleships. Key described the in-

stallation of 5-inch armor to protect the secondary battery of anti-torpedo-

boat guns as a waste, since it would not stand up to 12-inch shells from an

enemy dreadnought. Key cynically observed that it would be better to

mount the secondary guns “in the open than behind armor.”

Key also

criticized the location of the number three 12-inch turret between the

boiler and engine rooms. The powder magazine for this turret was, ac-

cording to Key, “completely enveloped, at both ends and sides, by the main

steam pipes.” Only a 12-inch air gap and a cooling water collar—around

the pipes where they penetrated the bulkheads—kept the heat from the

pipes from being conducted to the bulkheads of the magazine.

Ignoring

the recent Senate hearing, Key also complained about the location of

North Dakota’s armor belt.

According to Key, the chief culprits for the North Dakota’s abysmal de-

sign were Washington Capps, the Bureau of Construction & Repair, and

the Board on Construction. Key reported that an “expert designer” had in-

formed him that an increase of 25 feet in the length of North Dakota would

allow turret number three to be shifted aft of the engine room and situated

to ﬁre over number four turret.

In all probability, Key’s expert designer

was in the employ of the Fore River Shipbuilding Company, which would

proﬁt handsomely from such a major modiﬁcation to North Dakota.

Key’s letter was referred to the Board on Construction by Acting Secre-

tary of the Navy Truman Newberry on 17 July. Key had also forwarded a

copy of his letter to Sims, who used his position as naval aide to the presi-

dent to send the letter on to Roosevelt. Sims asked Roosevelt for an inter-

nal navy hearing to review Key’s complaints. Sims wanted a conference to

be drawn from ofﬁcers of the line, speciﬁcally, from the General Board and

the Naval War College. After reviewing Key’s charges, the conference

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

could provide the president with their opinion on the “defects of design”

of the new dreadnoughts, whether these defects could be remedied, and a

list of all the “military characteristics” required of battleships to be built in

the future.

Roosevelt agreed to Sims’s request, and a conference was convened at

Newport in the summer of 1908. Unfortunately for Sims, the conference

was not packed with his supporters. After initial discussions, the conference

members agreed that the position of number three turret in North Dakota

was faulty and that the armor protection for the 5-inch guns offered no pro-

tection from large-caliber shells. The location of the armor belt was not

criticized. The faults found in the North Dakota were considered “minor”

and relocation of number three turret was judged too expensive. The orig-

inal location of the turret had been chosen to avoid “excessive girder stress”

in the ship’s hull, a valid and signiﬁcant naval architectural consideration,

but just the type of engineering “detail” that infuriated Sims.

While it was too late to change North Dakota, the two follow-on ships,

Utah and Delaware, had been funded but not started. Sims and Key tried

to use the admitted defects in North Dakota as an excuse to modify Utah

and Delaware into even larger all-big-gun battleships. They advocated re-

placing the ﬁve 12-inch turrets of North Dakota with four 14-inch gun tur-

rets in Utah and Delaware.

The possibility of an even more powerful dreadnought delighted Roo-

sevelt, but the up-gunning of Utah and Delaware would require a quantum

leap in gun technology. The majority of the conference members were not

sure that the new guns could be completed by the time that the ships would

be ready. Sims received assurances from Bethlehem Steel that they could

produce the guns in time, but redesigning the ships to accept the new gun

battery would postpone delivery for ﬁfteen months. Fearing the growing

“dreadnought-gap” with Britain, Roosevelt accepted the existing 12-inch

gun battleships to prevent any delay in the delivery of two more dread-

noughts to the Fleet.

Key, Roosevelt’s naval aide before Sims, complained to Roosevelt about

the “true inwardness of the Newport Conference.” Returning to the issue

of the naval general staff, judged by Sims and Key as the best way to bring

the technical bureaus to heel, Key warned Roosevelt not to accept Acting

Secretary of the Navy Truman Newberry’s proposed Navy Department re-

organization—that would empower the Bureau of Construction & Re-

pair—at face value: “Mr. Newberry, in his attempt at a reorganization of

Technological Change and the United States Navy

the Navy Department, is merely increasing the main evils under which we

now suffer. He is doubling at the expense of sea-going ofﬁcers, the power

and prestige of a shore-staying staff ofﬁcer, whose main purpose is to pre-

serve and increase his own and his corps’ power, prestige and patron-

age.”

100

Interestingly, Key’s attack on Newberry came in the wake of Ad-

miral Dewey’s endorsement of Newberry for advancement to secretary.

101

The Legacy of the 1907–1908 Insurgency

The ﬁrst wartime use of modern battleships conﬁrmed the trend toward

larger guns typiﬁed by Fisher’s Dreadnought and the United States’s Michi-

gan. Pre-dreadnought battleships, such as the ships of the Connecticut class

with their mixed gun batteries, were rendered obsolete by the big-gun

power of the new ships. Almost overnight, the naval battleﬁeld had

expanded from a few thousand yards to almost 7 miles.

William Sims was a central ﬁgure in the improvement of naval gunnery

that led to the adoption of the all-big-gun battleship in the United States.

In discrediting Mahan, Sims became the foremost spokesman for the “big”

battleship. His importance in the move toward the big battleship should

not be understated, but in looking at the history of naval technology of this

period, one must be aware of Sims’s biographer’s confusion of conservative

engineering practice with reactionary suppression of new technologies.

The Russo-Japanese War, and the construction of dreadnought-style

battleships, provided Sims and his allies with a new springboard for their

efforts to establish line control over all facets of the navy. This included the

technical bureaus with their signiﬁcant power over the profession’s tech-

nological paradigm. Sims truly was out for blood and unconcerned over

the possible damage to the navy, and to naval expansion, from his public

attack upon the Washington naval establishment. Sims did not reckon with

the hostility of the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. In

basing his attack upon the armor belt, Sims demonstrated his ignorance

of contemporary warship design practices, and Chief Constructor Capps

easily discredited him.

In the wake of the amalgamation of 1899 and with the beginning of post-

graduate technical education for ofﬁcers, a cautious cooperation had de-

veloped between the technical bureaus and the old line hierarchy. While

many senior members of the line may have merely “rubber-stamped” the

Reﬁning the Technological Ideal

work of the technical bureaus and the Board on Construction, as claimed

by Sims, the historical record does not justify an evaluation of Sims as the

primary cause for any increase in line control over naval technology. If any-

thing, Sims and his colleagues ignored the new postamalgamation work-

ing relationship between the technical bureaus and the line. As a result,

the “mutiny” of 1908 was an insider-outsider conﬂict in which the Sims fac-

tion was ﬁghting a naval profession that had evolved beyond Sims’s frozen

perceptions of it. Sims was a generation removed from Mahan and a gen-

eration older and out of touch with the younger ofﬁcers in the postamal-

gamation line. These ofﬁcers pursued graduate engineering education be-

cause they accepted, as Sims did not, that every ofﬁcer in the dreadnought

navy had to be a line ofﬁcer and an engineer.

Resentment of the Sims faction lasted for many years. Albert Key, who

left the naval service to sell insurance, reported running into Capps and

Naval Constructor David Taylor, who, as late as 1917, “had not forgotten

the Newport Conference days, [and] gave me the ‘glassy’ eye.”

102

In spite of the “Simsian” uproar, the ofﬁcers of the amalgamated line,

both engineering specialists and seagoing ofﬁcers, were well aware of the

need for cooperation due to the rapid changes in naval technology. The

improving capabilities embodied in the naval technologies of Britain and

Germany in the Atlantic forced the design and construction of increasingly

larger battleships. Large size became an important determinant for the tra-

jectory of the battleship technological paradigm. But above all, it was the

geographic realities of the vast Paciﬁc, and the potential conﬂict with

Japan, that now governed American battleship design.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

Technological Trajectory

Geostrategic Design Criteria, Turboelectric

Propulsion, and Naval-Industrial Relations

he naval profession’s strategic paradigm of guerre d’escadre governed

the battleship technological paradigm and the “normal” reﬁnement

of its technological exemplar—the battleship. However, in the United

States and other leading industrial powers, the new technologies used in

modern dreadnoughts were most often developments of the private sector.

The issue for the American naval profession was how to control the tech-

nological trajectory—the development and incorporation of technolo-

gies—related to the battleship paradigm. This was a difﬁcult undertaking

in an environment of rich capital ship contracts, evolving naval-industrial

relations, and the ever-present pressure of political-industrial alliances. Se-

lection of the proper propulsion machinery for U.S. dreadnought battle-

ships during the Paciﬁc century was representative of the paradigmatic ﬁl-

tering through which new technologies had to pass.

The U.S. Navy began commerce protection operations in the Paciﬁc

Ocean soon after the War of 1812. The East India Squadron was established

formally in 1842 after years of operations in the region. The navy’s early, in-

efﬁcient steam warships were ill-suited for these distant operations and this

constituted the primary technological tension in nineteenth-century steam

propulsion for the U.S. Navy.

The extent of the Paciﬁc necessitated territorial acquisitions for coaling

stations or compromises in warship design.

The ill-fated USS Maine,

chapter 4

commissioned in 1895 as a “second-class battleship,” was originally de-

signed to carry sails, in addition to steam engines, to extend her cruising

radius.

The acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 and the emergence of

Japan as a rival Paciﬁc naval power underscored the geopolitical factors

governing the design of U.S. naval propulsion technology.

Without a worldwide coaling network like Britain possessed, the United

States required warships (as it would later require strategic bombers) capa-

ble of long-range operations. Captain C. W. Dyson, of the Bureau of Steam

Engineering, described the unique situation facing the U.S. Navy:

The former [European] nations were providing for operations in conﬁned wa-

ters such as the North Sea and the Mediterranean, where they were never far

from their bases. . . . Under the conditions foreseen high speed was more desir-

able than cruising radius, and the latter was sacriﬁced.

Turning now to the conditions which confront us, we see . . . the entire line

from Seattle to Panama to the southward, and from Seattle to Honolulu, thence

to Guam and on to the Philippines and still further to Samoa, requiring our at-

tention. The areas to be covered are great and the distances to bases and from

base to base in some cases are magniﬁcent. Fuel economy is of the highest

value, even predominates over speed, as the refueling problem becomes a seri-

ous one and the greater our bunker capacities and the fuel economy of our

machinery, by so much is the seriousness of the problem reduced.

By 1909, American battleships were being designed with a steaming radius

of 10,000 nautical miles, almost double that of the longest-ranged battle-

ship, USS Oregon, which had fought at Santiago de Cuba in 1898. This in-

creased steaming radius came only at the price of larger coal bunkers in

bigger, more expensive ships.

The ﬁrst twenty-four U.S. battleships, commissioned between 1895 and

1908, were powered by large, relatively economical, reciprocating steam

engines. The development of the compact marine steam turbine, and its

introduction in HMS Dreadnought in 1905, greatly reduced the internal

hull volume required for propulsion machinery.

However, due to its di-

rect connection to the propeller, the marine turbine brought a decrease

in propulsion efﬁciency and steaming radius.

Although the U.S. Navy

could not afford any decrease in propulsion economy, the turbine was at-

tractive because its compact size offered potential improvements in the

Technological Change and the United States Navy

ﬁghting efﬁciency of a battleship, for example, the installation of an im-

proved armor design precluded by the size of traditional reciprocating

steam engines.

The ideal solution was to equip battleships with turbines, along with a

speed reduction device that would allow the propeller to operate at a

slower, more efﬁcient speed. Designed by the General Electric Company

(GE) and using an electric motor to power the propeller, the turboelectric

drive was one of several systems developed to correct the reverse salient cre-

ated by the introduction of the marine steam turbine.

The other systems

were a mechanical reduction gear, developed in the United States and

Britain, and a “hydraulic transformer,” a type of ﬂuid gear box, developed

in Germany. Each was adopted by one of the major naval powers accord-

ing to their strategic requirements.

One of the reciprocating steam engines destined for the battleship Wisconsin, 1898.

The height of these engines required large engine rooms which adversely affected the

ship’s armor design, center of gravity, and stability after damage. (Courtesy of the

San Francisco Maritime Museum. Naval Historical Center, NH 75106)

Image not available.

Developing American Naval Technology

The accretion of increasingly complex artifacts by modern steel navies

cried out for a prescribed method for technology development. Yet in

the United States, as in Britain, the navy left this task to private industry.

The substantial budget of the Royal Navy ensured the steady growth of the

British naval-industrial complex in the last decades of the nineteenth cen-

tury while the ﬂuctuating level of American naval appropriations during

the Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley administrations made U.S. naval-

industrial relations a “hot and cold” affair.

While progressive ofﬁcers

within the navy clamored for modern battleships, the oppression of naval

engineers by the seagoing ofﬁcers of the line had precluded the establish-

ment of any signiﬁcant naval technical research facility (except for naval

ordnance). The Experimental Model Basin, established at the Washing-

ton Navy Yard in 1899, limited its work to hydrodynamics. The Bureau of

Steam Engineering’s Experimental Station at Annapolis did not develop

new technologies; it merely evaluated items offered for sale by the private

sector.

By default, new technologies, for the most part, originated from pri-

vate-sector inventors and entrepreneurs, or later, as products of the indus-

trial research revolution.

Some naval ofﬁcers realized the need for an institutional structure to ad-

dress the navy’s technological needs. In 1902, the navy’s engineer-in-chief,

George Melville, called for a research establishment modeled upon the

German naval facilities at the Charlottenberg and Dresden Technical Col-

leges.

Melville’s research institution was precluded by the line’s desire to

break, rather than to enhance, the power of the technical bureaus typiﬁed

by the push to create a naval general staff. Bradley Fiske, an inventor as

well as a line ofﬁcer, proposed a department of invention for the navy in

1907 and lobbied Thomas Edison for his services in 1911.

During his testimony on American battleship design before the Senate

Naval Affairs Committee in 1908, Fiske described the navy’s difﬁculties in

developing new technologies, attributing the problem to the failure of “of-

ﬁcers in high position to realize the duality of the naval profession; to re-

alize that a navy consists of both personnel and material; the two of equal

importance, and each useless without the other.” Almost a decade after the

amalgamation of the engineering corps into the line in 1899, senior ofﬁ-

cers, according to Fiske, still failed to “correlate the military and the engi-

neering arts” and neither engineering specialists nor line ofﬁcers possessed

Technological Change and the United States Navy

the perception to see the “relations that ought to exist between the two

arts.”

Fiske presented the emerging private-sector industrial research

facilities as the solution:

The remedy is easy to ﬁnd, because it has been found already by the large in-

dustrial concerns. These are themselves large organizations; and competition

between them is so keen that a concern which falls behind the times goes into

the hands of a receiver very soon. Fortunately for our Navy foreign navies have

been as lax as we and will continue to be so until one navy wakes up. Then they

will all have to bestir themselves or get into a condition so obviously inferior that

ﬁghting would be a useless sacriﬁce of life and limb.

Ironically, Fiske’s plea for research according to the industrial model would

be forestalled by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels’s 1915 call for a de-

partment of invention, which resulted in the ineffective and peripheral

Naval Consulting Board.

As a result, the early-twentieth-century navy

continued to rely upon the private sector for new technologies.

The Marine Steam Turbine and Warship Propulsion

In Britain in 1894, Charles Parsons formed the Marine Steam Turbine

Company, Ltd., and attempted to interest the Royal Navy in his reaction

turbine for propelling warships. Parsons ﬁnally succeeded in bringing his

invention to the attention of the Admiralty three years later when his

Turbinia steamed at 31 knots down the battle line at Queen Victoria’s Dia-

mond Jubilee Naval Review.

Although initially condemned in most quarters as unsuitable for naval

use due to its high rotative speed and experimental nature, Parsons’s tur-

bine offered the potential to increase warship speed.

A faster battleship

possessed obvious strategic and tactical advantages. If the turbine could be

installed in destroyers, the navy would also have a means to increase the

defensive zone around its capital ships concerning the high-speed torpedo

boat. Unlike Isherwood’s Wampanoag, Parsons’s innovative technology

could protect the naval status quo, based upon the supremacy of the battle-

ship, from the challenge of the torpedo.

In 1901, the Admiralty agreed to install Parsons turbines in two torpedo-

boat destroyers, Cobra and Viper. Although lost at sea before operating ex-

Technological Trajectory