Original subtitles

On the morning of February 10th, 1906,

King Edward IIIth smashed a bottle of

wine against the hull of the largest

warship anyone had ever seen at

Portsmouth dockyard. 527 ft of steel

slid into the water and within months,

every battleship in every navy on the

planet was obsolete. That was October of

1905 when the Keel was laid. By the time

this ship was finished, the entire

balance of global naval power had

shifted. The ship was called [music]

Dreadnaugh. And this is how it changed

everything. To understand why Dreadnaugh

mattered, you need to understand the

problem [music] it was built to solve.

And that problem starts with a question

that sounds almost too simple. How do

you hit a target that's 5 mi away,

moving at 18 knots while you're also

[music] moving at 18 knots on open ocean

with waves throwing your deck up and

down? At the turn of the 20th century,

the answer was basically that you

couldn't, not reliably. Every major navy

in the world was building what we

[music] now call pre- dreadnaugh

battleships. These were big armored

warships with a mix of different sized

guns. A typical pre- dreadnaugh [music]

carried four large guns, usually 12-in

caliber, mounted in two turrets. Then it

carried a bunch of [music] medium guns,

maybe 6 in or 9 in, mounted along the

sides. Then even smaller guns for close

defense. The idea was simple. The big

guns would fire [music] at long range.

The medium guns would fire as the enemy

got closer. The small guns [music] would

deal with torpedo boats. On paper, it

made sense. In practice, it was a

disaster waiting to happen. The

fundamental problem was [music] fire

control. When you fired all these

different caliber guns at the same time,

their shells hit the water at different

distances. A 12-in shell throws up a

massive [music] column of spray when it

misses. A 6-in shell throws up a much

smaller splash. From the spotting

position high up on the mast, you're

squinting through a telescope trying to

figure out which splash belongs to which

gun so you can adjust your aim. When big

splashes and small splashes are landing

everywhere at once, it becomes nearly

impossible to tell [music] them apart.

You're basically guessing, and in a

naval battle, guessing gets your crew

killed. There was another problem, too.

Each caliber of [music] gun had

different ballistic properties. The

12-in shell flew on a different arc than

the 6-in shell. They had different

muzzle velocities, different rates of

fire, different trajectories in

crosswinds. Coordinating all of that in

real time with smoke drifting [music]

across the water and the ship rolling

under your feet was a mathematical

nightmare. The fire control officers

were [music] doing calculus in their

heads while shells were exploding around

them. And the multiple calibers made the

math essentially unsolvable at anything

beyond close range. And close range

[music] was exactly what admirals were

starting to realize they could no longer

count on. Then came the battle that

proved the theory right in the worst way

possible. On May 27th, 1905, the

Japanese Imperial Navy met the Russian

Baltic [music] Fleet in the Tsushima

Strait between Korea and Japan. The

Russians had sailed 18,000 mi from the

Baltic Sea around Africa and across the

Indian Ocean to get there. Their ships

were fouled with barnacles. Their crews

were exhausted, [music] and their fleet

was a mix of old and new warships

sailing at the speed of the slowest

vessel. The Japanese under Admiral

Heihachiro Togo had faster ships, better

trained gunners, and a critical

advantage. They opened fire at ranges

beyond 7,000 yd. At that distance, the

Russian secondary guns were useless.

Completely useless. Only the biggest

guns had the range to fight [music]

back, and the Russians didn't have

enough of them. In under 45 minutes,

Togo's fleet had the Russian formation

in chaos. Japanese gunners were landing

hits at distances that most navies

considered impossible, ranges beyond

12,000 [music] yd where only the

heaviest guns could reach. By the end of

the 2-day battle, the Japanese had sunk

or captured virtually the entire Russian

fleet. 21 ships sunk, seven captured,

over 4,000 Russian sailors killed. The

Japanese lost three torpedo boats. Naval

attaches from Britain, the United

States, Germany, France, and half a

dozen other countries [music] had

observers at the battle or debriefed

Japanese officers immediately afterward.

Captain William Packenham of the Royal

Navy was aboard a Japanese warship

[music] during the engagement, and his

reports back to the Admiral Ty were

devastating. The 12-in guns had done

essentially all the damage. The

secondary batteries had barely

contributed. At the ranges where the

battle was actually fought, the 6-in and

8-in guns might as well not have been

there. The lesson was brutal [music] and

clear. Long range gunnery decided

battles. And if longrange gunnery was

the future, then you needed as many big

[music] guns as possible firing the same

caliber shell so your spotters could

actually tell where the shots were

landing. The age of the mixed battery

battleship was over. Most admirals just

didn't know it yet. One man did, and he

had been thinking about it for years

before Tsushima even happened. Admiral

Sir John Abbathnaugh Fischer became

first sea lord of the Royal Navy in

October of 1904. Everyone [music] called

him Jackie. He was short, stocky, blunt,

and so full of restless energy that he

was known [music] to dance at formal

dinners. He had spent decades rising

through the ranks, and the entire time

he had been quietly forming opinions

about what was wrong with [music] the

Royal Navy, and he had a lot of

opinions. Fischer looked at the British

fleet, the largest navy in the world,

and saw a collection of expensive

antiques. Slow ships carrying the wrong

[music] guns designed for a style of

naval warfare that Tsushima was about to

prove dead. He also understood something

that most of his colleagues [music]

refused to accept. It didn't matter how

many battleships Britain had if a

foreign power built a better one.

Numbers only counted if the ships behind

those numbers could actually fight.

Fischer wasn't working from scratch

though. An Italian naval engineer named

Vtorio Kuniberti had published an

article in Jane's Fighting Ships in 1903

describing his vision of the ideal

battleship. Kunibbert's concept was

radical. Instead of carrying [music] a

mix of large and medium guns, his ship

would carry nothing but big guns, all of

them the same caliber. The article had

caught Fischer's eye immediately because

it [music] confirmed what Fischer was

already thinking. Before he even took

the first Seaord job officially, Fischer

had been working on sketches with

William Guard, the chief constructor at

Portsouth Dockyard, and Alexander

[music] Gracie, the managing director of

the Fairfield Shipbuilding Company. By

the time Fischer walked [music] into the

Admiral T in October 1904, he already

had a rough design in his pocket. In

December 1904, he convinced the first

lord of the Admiral T appointee [music]

on designs, a group of senior naval

officers and engineers who would take

Fischer's concept [music] and turn it

into a real blueprint. The committee

worked through seven different [music]

design iterations, arguing over turret

placement, armor thickness, propulsion

systems, and a dozen [music] other

details that would determine whether

this ship could actually work. What they

came [music] up with was something the

world had never seen before. 10 12in

mark, 10 guns, five twin turrets, three

along the [music] center line, one on

each wing. That meant eight guns could

fire in a broadside. more than double

what any existing battleship could

manage. Each of those guns could throw

an 850lb

armor-piercing shell more [music] than

14 mi. And because every gun fired the

same caliber shell, the fire control

problem was solved. One caliber, one

splash pattern, and your spotters

[music] could finally tell where the

shots were landing and adjust

accordingly. The armor was equally

considered. Dreadnaugh carried a main

belt of hardened steel up to 11 in thick

along her [music] waterline, tapering to

4 in at the bow and stern, where a hit

was less likely to be fatal. The turrets

were protected by up to 12 in of [music]

armor. The conning tower, where the

captain and senior officers would stand

during battle, had 11in walls. Beneath

the waterline, [music] internal

bulkheads of 8-in steel were designed to

contain flooding if a torpedo struck

home. She was 82 ft wide at the beam,

which gave her the internal volume to

[music] carry all that armor without

sacrificing stability. But the guns and

the armor were only part of the

revolution. Fischer understood that

firepower without speed was just a

floating target. Pre- dreadnaugh

battleships ran on triple expansion

reciprocating steam engines. These were

massive, noisy machines with pistons

[music] hammering up and down, and they

vibrated badly enough to shake

instruments off their mounts. They could

push a battleship to about 18 knots on a

good day, and they broke down [music]

constantly. Fischer wanted something

better, and the answer had already

announced itself in the most dramatic

[music] fashion imaginable. 8 years

before Dreadnaugh's keel was laid on

June 26th, 1897,

the Royal Navy assembled 165 warships at

Spithead for Queen Victoria's Diamond

Jubilee Naval Review. It was the largest

fleet review in British history. The

ship stretched for miles. Foreign

dignitaries, members of Parliament, and

the Prince of Wales himself watched from

reviewing vessels. The entire point was

to show the world the overwhelming power

of the British Empire. Then a small

white boat nobody had invited showed up

and ruined [music] the whole

performance. Her name was Turbinia. She

was 103 ft long, [music] 9 ft wide, drew

just 3 ft of water, and she was powered

by a new kind of engine that her

inventor Charles Parsons had been

developing since 1884.

Instead of pistons hammering up and

down, Parson's steam turbine used

high-pressure steam to spin a rotor at

enormous speed. The design was smoother,

lighter, far more efficient, and capable

of producing power that reciprocating

engines simply couldn't match at the

same weight. Getting there had not been

easy, though. Parson's early tests with

a single propeller were [music]

disappointing because the propeller

cavitated at high speed, essentially

spinning so fast that it created air

bubbles in the water and lost its grip.

Parson solved this by building [music]

what is believed to be the world's first

cavitation tunnel, studying the problem

directly and then splitting the power

across three separate turbine stages,

driving three shafts, each with three

propellers, nine propellers total. The

redesigned Turbinia hit 34 a 12 knots in

trials at a time when the Navy's fastest

destroyers struggled to reach [music]

27. At Spithead, Turbinia tore through

the assembled fleet at full speed. The

Navy sent its fastest patrol boats to

catch her. They never got close. The

London papers reported that the

spectacle was astonishing. [music] The

newspapers went wild. The Admiral T was

embarrassed, then intrigued, then

convinced. Within 2 years, the Navy had

ordered its first turbine-powered

[music]

warships. Fischer remembered that day at

Spithead when the Committee on Designs

debated what should power the new

battleship. Fischer pushed hard for

Parson's turbines. The committee agreed.

Dreadnaugh would carry two sets of

Parson's steam turbines [music] driving

four propeller shafts fed by 18 Babcock

and Wilcox's [music] water tube boilers

generating 23,000 shaft horsepower. Her

top speed would be 21 knots, at least

three knots faster than any battleship

afloat. Three knots [music] might not

sound like much, but in naval tactics,

it was everything. Three extra knots

[music] meant you could choose when and

where to fight. You could cross the

enemy's bow and rake them with broadside

fire while they could only [music]

respond with their forward turrets. You

could run if you needed to. You could

chase if you wanted to. Speed wasn't

just a convenience, it was a weapon. The

engineering ambition was staggering, but

Fischer added a demand on top of it that

most people thought was impossible. He

wanted the ship built fast, unbelievably

fast. The traditional construction

timeline for a battleship of this era

was around 3 years or roughly 31 months

at minimum. Fischer told his builders

[music] he wanted Dreadnaugh done in 12

months. The political logic was simple.

Fischer knew that [music] other

countries, especially Germany, Japan,

and the United States, were working on

their own all big gun designs. Whoever

launched first would force every other

navy to start from scratch. [music] If

Britain could build this ship faster

than anyone else could react, the Royal

Navy would own the future of naval

warfare for [music] years before anyone

caught up. What followed at Portsmouth

dockyard was one of the most impressive

feats of industrial coordination of the

entire Eduwardian era. Fiser had

components prefabricated before the keel

was even laid. Armor plates were being

rolled at steel works in Sheffield.

[music] Gun mountings were being

machined at the Elswick works on the

Tine. Boiler drums, turbine castings,

structural steel frames, all of it was

being manufactured at factories across

Britain. While the dockyard was still

preparing the slipway, some accounts

suggest that Fischer redirected gun

mountings originally intended for other

warships under construction, the Lord

Nelson class to make sure Dreadnaugh's

armament arrived on time. The moment the

keel went down on October 2nd, 1905,

everything converged. Workers ran in

shifts around the clock. Riveters

hammered steel plates into the growing

hull by gaslight after dark. The

dockyard never stopped.

100 days later, the hull was complete.

On February 10th, 1906, King Edward

IIIth came to Portsmouth for the launch.

Enormous crowds lined the waterfront.

The king christened the ship, the

restraining blocks were knocked away,

and 18,000 tons of steel slid into the

harbor. By September, her first captain,

Regginald Bacon, [music] was running

machinery trials, engine tests, steering

evaluations, and armament drills. On

December 2nd, 1906, [music] Dreadnaugh

completed her acceptance trials and was

commissioned into the Royal Navy at full

compliment. 14 months keel to

commission. No warship of that size had

ever been [music] built that fast, and

the record was never matched. Fischer

had wanted a year and a day. He [music]

got 14 months, close enough to make his

point, and the point landed hard. The

moment Dreadnaugh was commissioned,

[music] every navy in the world was

faced with an ugly truth. Their entire

existing battleship fleet was now

[music] second rate. Britain had just

made its own fleet obsolete, too, which

was the part Fischer's critics screamed

about loudest. The Royal Navy [music]

had dozens of pre- dreadnaugh

battleships. All of them were now

outclassed by a single ship.

Strategically, Fischer had reset the

scoreboard to zero. But Fischer

understood something his critics didn't.

The scoreboard was going to be reset

anyway. [music]

If Britain didn't build the first

dreadnaugh, someone else would. And

British dockyards were the fastest and

most efficient in the world. In a

building [music] race, Britain would

always be ahead. Fischer wasn't throwing

away a lead. He was choosing the race.

Germany was the country Fischer was most

worried [music] about and with good

reason. Since 1897, Admiral Alfred von

Turpitz had been building the German

Imperial Navy under the direct

encouragement of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The

Kaiser believed that a strong navy was

essential to making Germany [music] into

a true world power and he admired the

British fleet so much that he saw it as

the model to surpass. Between 1898

[music]

and 1912, five German naval laws were

passed, each one authorizing more

warships. The first law called [music]

for seven new battleships. The second

doubled the fleet to 38 ships. When news

of Dreadnaugh reached Berlin, Turpitz

realized immediately that his entire

building program [music] needed to be

redesigned from the ground up. Every

ship Germany had built or was building

was now a pre- dreadnaugh and

pre-dreadnots were yesterday's weapons.

Germany launched its first dreadnaugh

[music] class battleship SMS Nassau in

1907.

Japan launched a semi- [music]

dreadnaugh called Satsuma in November of

1906. The United States laid down the

USS Michigan [music] in 1906 and

launched it in 1908.

Italy, Russia, France, and

AustriaHungary [music] scrambled to

follow. The arms race fisher had

triggered consumed national budgets

[music] across Europe. In Britain,

public opinion swung behind a massive

building campaign. The press, naval

pressure groups, and popular authors all

demanded more battleships. A slogan

emerged that captured the national mood

perfectly. We want eight and we won't

wait. that referred to the eight

dreadnots the public demanded the

government fund in a single year.

Members of parliament debated it in the

House of Commons. [music] Newspapers ran

editorial after editorial. The public

treated dreadnaugh counts the way a

later generation would treat nuclear

warhead counts as the scoreboard that

determined whether your country was safe

or in danger. In Germany, Turpitz pushed

through a fourth naval law in 1908,

increasing the building rate to four

capital ships per year. He calculated

that if [music] the program held,

Germany would have 21 dreadnots by 1914.

Turpitz told the Kaiser the bill looked,

[music] in his words, as small and

harmless as possible. It was neither.

Britain responded by accelerating its

own program. The Admiral T's shipyards

were building dreadnots faster than

anyone else on Earth, and they kept that

pace for years. By August of 1914, when

the Great War began, Britain had 45

Dreadnaugh battleships and battle

[music] cruisers in service or under

construction. Germany had 26. Fischer

had been right. [music] In a building

race, Britain's industrial capacity was

simply too large for Germany to

overcome. The gap never closed. But here

is the part of the Dreadnaugh story that

nobody expected. The ship that changed

everything barely fought. Dreadnaugh

served as the flagship of the home fleet

and later the fourth battle squadron.

She spent most of her career on patrol,

on exercises, and in port. By 1916, she

was already 10 years old, and the Navy

had built so many newer dreadnots with

bigger guns and heavier armor that the

original had been pushed down the

roster. When the Battle of Jutland

happened on May 31st, 1916, the largest

naval engagement of the entire war with

over 250 warships clashing in the North

Sea, Dreadnaugh wasn't there. She'd been

reassigned to the third battle squadron

in the Tempame's Eststerie to guard

against a possible German [music]

invasion that never came. The ship that

had been designed to dominate fleet

battles never participated in one. She

did get one moment of [music] combat

though, and it was nothing anyone had

predicted. On March 18th, 1915, a German

submarine designated U29 was operating

in the waters near the Ornne Islands,

hunting for British warships near the

Grand Fleet base at Scappa Flow. U29 was

commanded by Otto Wedigan, one of the

most celebrated submarine captains in

the German Navy. The previous September,

Wedigan had commanded Unin and [music]

sunk three British armored cruisers, the

Ibukia, the Hogue, and the Cressy in

just [music] over 90 minutes, killing

more than 1,400 sailors. It was one of

the deadliest submarine attacks in

history, and it had made Wedigan a

national hero in Germany. Now commanding

U29, Wedigan spotted a squadron of the

Grand Fleet [music] on exercise in the

Pentland FTH. He fired a torpedo at the

battleship Neptune. He missed. In the

process of firing, U29 accidentally

broke the surface, exposing her hull for

just a moment. That moment was enough.

The officer on watch aboard Dreadnaugh

spotted the periscope and the brief

flash of the submarine's hull.

Dreadnaugh increased speed to 17 1/2

knots and turned toward the submarine.

One round was fired at the periscope. At

12:35 in the afternoon, Dreadnaugh's

20,000 ton hull struck U29 at full speed

and cut the submarine in half. The bow

section of U29 was forced above the

surface by the impact. [clears throat]

Observers on Dreadnaugh's deck saw the

number 29 painted on the hull before

[music] it sank. Oil, clothing, and

debris floated to the surface briefly,

then disappeared. Wedigan and his entire

crew were killed. There were no

survivors. It remains the only confirmed

instance of a battleship deliberately

ramming and sinking a submarine. And

that single [music] act of violence in

the Pentland FTH was the only enemy

vessel Dreadnaugh ever destroyed in her

entire 14-year career. The most

revolutionary warship of the modern age

spent the war doing patrols and guarding

esties. While the ships she had inspired

fought the battles she had been built

for. In February of 1919,

Dreadnaugh was decommissioned. On May

[music] 9th, 1921, she was sold for

scrap. The ship that had reset the

global balance of naval power that had

triggered the most expensive arms race

before the Cold War that had carried the

name meaning fear nothing from bow to

stern was broken [music] apart and

melted down. But what she left behind is

what actually matters. Dreadnaugh didn't

just change the design of battleships.

She changed the concept [music] of what

a warship was supposed to be. Before

her, naval architects designed for the

battle they expected. After her, they

designed for the battle they couldn't

[music] afford to lose. The all big gun

philosophy, the steam turbine

propulsion, the centralized fire

control, these became the baseline

[music] for every capital ship built for

the next 40 years. Her name became the

word for a new class of warship. Any

battleship built after 1906 [music]

with uniform heavy caliber armament and

turbine propulsion was called a

dreadnaugh. Everything that came before

was a pre- dreadnaugh. One ship created

the dividing line between the old navy

and the new one. And the speed of her

construction proved something just as

important. Fischer had shown that

industrial capacity was itself a weapon.

The ability to build ships faster than

your opponent could respond to them was

a strategic advantage.

>> [music]

>> as real as any gun or armor plate. That

lesson shaped military [music]

procurement thinking for the rest of the

20th century. There's an argument, and

it's a fair one, that Dreadnaugh helped

cause the war she was built to deter the

arms race. She triggered poisoned

relationships between [music] Britain

and Germany at a time when diplomacy

might have kept the peace. Every new

dreadnaugh launched by one [music] side

provoked two from the other, and the

cycle fed on itself until the only

question left was [music] when, not

whether, the guns would finally speak.

Fischer himself never [music] saw it

that way. He believed that overwhelming

naval strength was the only guarantee of

peace, and if peace failed, the only

guarantee [music] of victory. History

can judge whether he was right. What is

beyond argument is what his ship

accomplished as a piece of engineering.

In 14 months, a team of designers,

engineers, steel workers, and dockyard

laborers built a machine that weighed

18,000 tons, stretched longer than

[music] a football field and a half,

carried 10 guns that could throw an 850

lb shell more than 14 mi, and could

outrun every battleship on the ocean

while [music] doing it. They did this

with hand tools, steam powered cranes,

and riveting hammers. No computers, no

welding, no modern project management

software, just a clear design, a

relentless schedule, and a man at the

top who refused to [music] accept that

it couldn't be done. Dreadnaugh was laid

to rest in a scrapyard [music] in 1921.

But the standard she set for firepower,

for speed, for the sheer ambition of

what a single nation could build when it

committed fully to an idea, that

standard outlived her by generations.

Every aircraft carrier, every nuclear

submarine, every guided missile

destroyer that patrols the oceans today

carries a piece of what Fiser and his

engineers figured out in that drafting

room at Portsmouth [music] over a

century ago. The name Dreadnaugh meant

fear nothing. The ship earned it. If you

learned something new from this video,

hit that subscribe button [music] and

leave a comment telling us which

engineering detail surprised you the

most.

>> [music]

>> We have more stories like this coming

and you won't want to miss