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

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The most strident criticism of the turboelectric drive appeared in Sci-

entiﬁc American. Editorials by J. Bernard Walker carried titles such as “A

Grave Defect in Our Battlecruiser Designs,” and the letters to the editor

provided a forum for the expression of “disinterested” engineering opinion

on the electric drive. Walker even enlisted the president of the Naval War

College, Rear Admiral William S. Sims, to ﬁght the electric drive in his ca-

pacity as an ex ofﬁcio member of the General Board.

The 10 February

1917 edition of Scientiﬁc American contained a letter from Charles Curtis

condemning the turboelectric drive while praising the patriotic efforts of

private shipyards to prevent the navy from making a grave technical error.

Curtis called for the creation of an impartial engineering board to judge

the situation. Rear Admiral Grifﬁn rejected a review of the electric drive

proposed by members of the civilian Naval Consulting Board since the

evaluators would have been Benjamin Lamme of Westinghouse and

William Le Roy Emmet, both of whose opinions were hardly impartial.

The mechanical interests attempted to involve both the House and Sen-

ate Naval Affairs Committees in the electric drive dispute. The House

Committee stood clear of the controversy, as “it was an entirely technical

subject with which the bureau experts of the Navy Department had ex-

clusively to do.” Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, chairman of the Senate

Naval Affairs Committee, on the other hand, was somewhat receptive to

the complaints against the electric drive while navalists, such as Senator

Lodge, wanted to provide the navy a forum for its defense. As a result, J.

Bernard Walker and Rear Admirals Taylor and Grifﬁn were called to tes-

tify before the Senate Committee during a special Saturday session in Feb-

ruary 1917.

The hearing focused on the placement of some of the battlecruiser boil-

ers above the main armored deck. The testimony revealed that this was not

due to a lack of volume within the armored citadel caused by the electric

drive, per se, but by the number of boilers required for the high speed re-

quirements of the battlecruiser, the number of boilers being the same

whether the ship was driven electrically or mechanically. The navy design

bureaus had decided to separate the boilers vertically to protect one-half

from the effects of torpedoes exploding against the hull.

As the Senate

hearing progressed, both admirals challenged Walker to name any civilian

engineer who had publicly gone on record against electric propulsion yet

had no ﬁnancial interest in the situation. When Walker was unable to

respond, the Senate Committee came to the same conclusion as the

Technological Change and the United States Navy

104

House—that there was insufﬁcient reason to challenge the technical ex-

pertise of the bureaus.

After successfully defending the navy’s selection of its capital ship

propulsion technology before Congress, Rear Admiral Grifﬁn took the un-

precedented step of presenting the Navy Department’s case to the public

in the pages of Scientiﬁc American. Quoting from previous correspondence

with Senator Tillman and Congressman Padgett, the chairman of the

House Naval Affairs Committee, Grifﬁn recounted Schuyler Wheeler’s

earlier visit to Secretary of the Navy Daniels in which Wheeler’s limited

large-scale electrical experience was revealed, painting him, in Grifﬁn’s

opinion, as little more than a shill for the shipyard interests.

The attempt of Walker, Wheeler, and Curtis to enlist congressional aid

was the high point of their ﬁght. Public statements in favor of the electric

drive by such notable electrical experts as Nikola Tesla and Frank Sprague

did much to sway public opinion in favor of the navy.

Even shipping in-

dustry publications such as Marine Engineering and Shipping Illustrated

pointed out the ﬁnancial motivation behind the opposition to the electric

drive. The latter, who held “no brief for the electric drive,” attributed the

“incompetent criticism” to the shipyards’ loss of business as patent li-

censees of Curtis and Parsons turbines. When the electric drive moved

from an experimental collier built in a government yard to battleships built

under contract by private ﬁrms, “the shoe began to pinch.”

Much like Emmet some four years before, Charles Curtis claimed that

his motive was disinterested: “my efforts to set the Navy Department right

in this important engineering matter are not due to any royalty or com-

mercial considerations.” But Curtis was ignoring the fact that he retained

the royalty rights to the GE-Curtis turbine for all nonelectrical uses. Curtis

disingenuously stated that he believed that any future navy geared-turbine

installations would exclusively feature Parsons turbines.

Parsons or not,

the selection of geared turbines for any of the superdreadnoughts of the

1916 Program would have prevented a turboelectric monopoly and an

eclipse of the International Curtis Marine Turbine Company within the

lucrative American capital ship market.

Lacking congressional and public support, the mechanical lobby called

an end to the electric drive ﬁght. In the spring, contracts were signed for

the ﬁrst four battlecruisers of the 1916 Program. Fore River Shipbuilding

contracted with General Electric, and Newport News with Westinghouse,

for turboelectric drives at an average price of $2.8 million per ship.

Technological Trajectory

105

comparative study conducted by the Bureau of Steam Engineering re-

vealed that at power levels below 29 percent of full power, that is, at cruis-

ing speeds, the turboelectric drive was approximately 20 percent more ef-

ﬁcient than direct-drive Parsons or Curtis turbines and at least 6 percent to

8 percent more efﬁcient than a mechanical reduction gear driven by a Cur-

tis turbine.

The vigorous campaign by the opponents of the turboelectric drive was

typical of the political maneuvering involving any large government con-

tract. The 1980s struggle between Northrop (F-20) and General Dynamics

(F-16) over air force day-ﬁghter contracts is a more recent example. The

importance of the electric drive was its contribution to a paradigm for sub-

sequent naval-industrial relations that made strategic compatibility a pre-

requisite for consideration, let alone adoption, of any technology offered

by the private sector.

Technology Selection and National

Strategic Philosophies

The U.S. Navy was not alone in imposing a strategic litmus test on its

warship propulsion technology. Despite its worldwide responsibilities, the

strategic focus of the British navy in the years before 1914 was the North Sea

and conﬂict with the German navy. The high speed provided by direct-

drive turbines in its dreadnought battleships was deemed essential for suc-

cessful sorties against the Germans. This does not mean that the British

were not interested in improving the fuel efﬁciency of turbine propulsion,

but operations in the North Sea made fuel economy less important a de-

sign criterion than for the Americans.

The Germans had the same strategic focus as the British, but without a

global empire to patrol could design ships primarily for North Sea opera-

tions. Admiral von Tirpitz had speciﬁed that German capital ships must be

resistant to battle damage, and German naval architects were successful,

surprising the British with the German ships’ ability to withstand punish-

ment at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. British naval constructors attributed

the German ships’ strength to the local focus of German naval strategy.

They referred to German dreadnoughts as “coastal ironclads,” and there is

a kernel of truth to this pejorative evaluation. Like the British, the Germans

Technological Change and the United States Navy

106

required high battle speed, which could be provided by direct-drive tur-

bines. Their capital ship designs were not driven by strategic requirements

for steaming range as were the British, and to a much greater extent, the

Americans. The wartime reorientation of German naval construction to

the building of submarines resulted in a delay in the installation of the Föt-

tinger transformer in a German capital ship. Three of the seven German

battlecruisers authorized during the war, those of the Ersatz Yorck class of

the 1916–17 Program, were to be equipped with Föttinger’s transformer, but

the ships were never completed.

The Japanese navy expressed an interest in turboelectric propulsion af-

ter the war. In 1920 the newspaper Tokyo Nichi-Nichi reported that the Im-

perial Japanese Navy was appropriating several million yen to study the

electric drive.

The following year, the Japanese navy ordered and took

delivery of the auxiliary oiler Kamoi, equipped with a GE turboelectric

drive, from the New York Shipbuilding Company.

Although the Japanese had embarked upon indigenous capital ship con-

struction with the superdreadnoughts Fuso and Yamashiro in the 1911 and

1913 Programs, they had a strong tradition of purchasing their naval tech-

nology abroad. This allowed the Japanese the ﬂexibility to consider the

technological selections of other countries. The fact that the technology

being examined in 1920 was American rather than British reﬂected the

change in post–World War I power relationships in the Paciﬁc. Any Japa-

nese desire to pursue turboelectric propulsion for their navy was cut short

by the Five-Power Treaty ratiﬁed in 1922 with its ten-year construction halt

on new capital ships.

Both the German and Italian navies, encouraged by the American naval

experience with turboelectric propulsion, seriously considered the electric

drive during the 1930s. A turboelectric drive was originally selected for the

Bismarck-class battleships, but Siemens-Schuckert Werke would not ac-

cept the contract because of a fear that it could not meet certain technical

requirements. Its withdrawal led to the reversion to a reduction-gear sys-

tem, patterned after those installed in the Scharnhorst-class battlecruisers,

favored by the conservative faction of naval constructors for its ease of re-

pair.

The Italians also considered the turboelectric drive in the capital

ship design studies performed in 1932 and 1933, but rejected it in favor of a

more efﬁcient reduction-gear system for the large 35,000-ton “treaty” bat-

tleships of the Vittorio Veneto class ordered in 1935.

Technological Trajectory

107

The Strategic Imperative

The selection in 1905 of the marine steam turbine to power HMS Dread-

nought engendered an immediate interest in this form of propulsion

among the other naval powers. The turbine was popular with naval ofﬁcers

since it was quieter and more tidy than reciprocating steam propulsion and

it allowed a reduction in the volume of a warship devoted to an opaque ma-

chinery system seen as less worthy than guns and armor. The industrial, or-

ganizational, strategic, and tactical advantages of the turbine were enu-

merated by the Admiralty Committee on Designs in 1905 and applicable

to the United States and Britain:

While recognising that the steam turbine system of propulsion has at present

some disadvantages, yet, owing to the great savings in weight and reduction in

number of working parts, smooth working, capability of being started on short

notice, saving in coal consumption and in engine-room complement, and to

the increased protection which it is possible to obtain by the introduction of this

system, the Committee have decided to recommend that it be adopted in this

design [HMS Dreadnought].

The “disadvantage” of the steam turbine system, the lack of efﬁciency that

resulted from the direct-coupling of the turbine to the propeller, had little,

if any, impact given the British strategic focus on the German navy and the

North Sea—a strategic policy that required the higher speed, larger guns,

and improved armor protection the turbine could provide.

The inherent deﬁciencies in a directly coupled turbine system were re-

alized from the beginning. In 1904, a German naval architect expressed a

desire that “all the ships of the enemies of Germany would have tur-

bines.”

Yet within three years, the German director of naval construction

had announced that all future warships of the Imperial Navy would be pow-

ered by turbines.

The United States, Japan, and France all jumped on

the turbine bandwagon. However, the poor economy of the turbine caused

the U.S. Navy to reconsider its selection of the turbine in 1909–10. The en-

gineering and entrepreneurial efforts of William Emmet induced the navy

to accept turboelectric technology because it enhanced the strategic con-

sonance of U.S. battleships.

All the naval powers agreed with Jackie Fisher’s precept that ship design

should be dictated by strategy. The use of direct-drive turbines by marine

Technological Change and the United States Navy

108

engineers in Germany and Britain does not mean that they were not in-

terested in improving the efﬁciency of turbine propulsion, as the efforts of

Parsons and Föttinger demonstrate. Yet given their strategic focus, neither

had as pressing a requirement for improving the efﬁciency of direct-drive

turbine propulsion as did the United States.

Like so many modern military technologies, the supremacy of the tur-

boelectric drive was short. Both General Electric and Westinghouse

pursued reduction gear technology, and the navy installed it on smaller

warships such as destroyers. Reduction gears became more efﬁcient, even-

tually transmitting 2 percent to 3 percent more power than the electric

drive. By 1931, machining and metallurgical technologies could produce

compact lightweight reduction gears with which the electric drive could

no longer compete. The ﬁrst electrically propelled battleship, USS New

Mexico (ex-California), had her electric motors replaced with a General

Electric mechanical reduction gear in 1931.

When U.S. battleship construction recommenced as a part of the in-

dustrial recovery program of the New Deal, American capital ship design

philosophy continued to favor large guns and the maximum armor possi-

ble. The Paciﬁc strategy still required long-range steaming, but faster Japan-

ese capital ships meant that high speed was now a requirement as well.

The Bureau of Engineering prepared ﬁfteen propulsion system proposals,

ten of which featured mechanical reduction gears, while the remainder

were turboelectric drives. The electric drive was discarded since it required

at least 10 percent more weight and volume than reduction gear systems of

equal power and efﬁciency.

The battleship displacement limit mandated

by the London Naval Treaty of 1930, and the subsequent Anglo-French-

U.S. accords of January 1937 and March 1938, made volume and weight ex-

tremely critical design factors. As a result, U.S. battleships could ill afford

the larger, heavier turboelectric drive, and it fell victim to treaty limitations

and to the new emphasis on speed within the U.S. Navy’s Paciﬁc-oriented

strategy.

The turboelectric drive reﬂected the strength of the technological tra-

jectory associated with the battleship technological paradigm to affect the

industrial sector of U.S. society. Industrialists who were successful in es-

tablishing naval markets for their products had to be consonant with the

overarching battleship paradigm. Competition among different battleship

technologies was fairly traditional and the use of political inﬂuence, com-

plaints about the bidding process, or method of evaluation was typical.

Technological Trajectory

109

Successful naval-industrial relations could only be forged by companies of-

fering technological reﬁnements—not challenges—to the battleship.

Naval ofﬁcers were co-optive, less receptive, or downright hostile toward

technologies that threatened to overthrow the technological paradigm and

thereby threatened the profession’s overarching battleship strategy.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

110

Anomalous Technologies of

the Great War

Airplanes, Submarines, and the

Professional Status Quo

nlike the turboelectric drive, advances in airplanes and submarines

during the World War presented patchy, potential anomalies that

threatened the battleship technological paradigm. The navy’s exploration

of these technologies was in a Kuhnian “normal” sense. However, the

anomalous nature of these technologies was enhanced by their use in an

innovative wartime environment. As a result, submariners and aviators be-

came more clearly delineated as new technologically deﬁned thought col-

lectives (deﬁned by Ludwig Fleck as a community “mutually exchanging

ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction”) within the naval profes-

sion.

The dramatic sinking of three British cruisers by a single submarine

at the outset of the war garnered respect for the submarine. The airplane,

on the other hand, was still unreﬁned when the war ended, but many pre-

sumed it had the potential for future development and the ability to replace

the battleship in fulﬁlling the guerre d’escadre strategy.

To ﬂourish after the armistice, aviators and submariners had to develop

a strategic thought style (Fleck’s “stock of knowledge and level of culture”)

which avoided roles as counterweapons to the battleship.

Most aviation

and submarine ofﬁcers had been raised in and belonged to, the overarch-

ing, “conventional” battleship thought collective. They had little or no

chapter 5

problem supporting a strategic continuum in which aircraft and sub-

marines played subordinate strategic and tactical roles to the battleship.

Senior ofﬁcers considered the battleship an evolving technology, able to

weather any challenge from the air or the depths. They accepted aircraft

and submarines, but saw their missions as limited to those that contributed

to the continued supremacy of the battleship. Submariners, who in reality

operated surface ships that occasionally submerged, were more conserva-

tive in estimating their anomalous nature. Naval aviators, ﬂying alone or in

small crews, were more independent, operating outside the factory-like at-

mosphere of the battleship with its thousand-man crew. As a result, avia-

tion attracted individualists, some of whom were not at all shy in deﬁning

a broad, aggressive threat to the supremacy of the battleship-based techno-

logical paradigm. This laid the groundwork for the presumptive anomaly

based in naval aviation that would mature by the late 1930s.

Besides the creation of new aviation and submarine specialists, wartime

conﬂict over the future of American battleship design divided the line.

Many ofﬁcers favored emulating Great Britain in the construction of

battlecruisers, ships that sacriﬁced heavy armor for high speed. Battle-

cruisers—like Wampanoag in 1869—were the perfect ships for guerre de

course. However, battlecruisers went against the traditional American

technological paradigm, which favored long-range capital ships carrying

the maximum armor and largest guns possible. The battlecruiser question

was complicated further by Japanese construction of four, powerful, 30-

knot battlecruisers of the Amagi class (1918–19 budget). These ships were

said to carry large guns that could outrange and demolish U.S. battleships.

In the end, the status quo prevailed because of the more complete post-

war knowledge of the dramatic failure of three British battlecruisers at Jut-

land in 1916 as well as the capital ship ceiling imposed by the Five-Power

Treaty.

Between 1914 and 1920 the naval ofﬁcer corps divided into communities

deﬁned by the technologies they operated, a division, with its attendant

rivalries, that continues to the present. These emerging factions—the avia-

tors, the submariners, and the internally conﬂicted battleship sailors—illus-

trate the social process that governed the introduction of new technologies

into the navy. The same process, complicated by stronger naval-industrial-

congressional liaisons, governs technology selection and inﬂuences strate-

gic options today.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

112

The Battleship-Battlecruiser Controversy

The initial threat to the American battleship design philosophy of

slower, longer-ranged “Paciﬁc” ships with maximum armor and powerful

guns came from Jackie Fisher’s “battlecruiser,” which followed hard on the

heels of HMS Dreadnought. The three battlecruisers of the Invincible class,

authorized as part of the British 1905 Program, carried 12-inch guns like

Dreadnought, but were lightly armored to carry the propulsion systems

needed to attain 25 knots.

The battlecruiser’s primary defense was its

speed; or as Fisher was fond of saying, “Speed is Armor.”

As Jon Sumida has shown, the battlecruiser was an interim ship created

on the way to Fisher’s ideal fast armored ship to maintain British sea

Submarine S-22, seen in 1929, was typical of inter-war submarines built to support

the battle line. Ironically, larger “ﬂeet” submarines developed during the late 1930s

spent little time supporting the ﬂeet during World War II. Instead, they waged an

effective campaign of guerre de course against the Japanese. (Courtesy of RADM

Ridley McLean, 1935. Naval Historical Center, NH 46339)

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