HMS Dreadnought

Gunnery work in the late 1890s and early 1900s, led by Percy Scott in Britain and William Sims in the United States, had pushed expected battle ranges out to an unprecedented 6,000 yards. At that distance the splashes thrown up by numerous small guns obscured those of the heavy ones, so gunners could not tell which weapon had made which splash, and ranging became unreliable. Longer-ranged torpedoes were expected in service soon, discouraging any closing to the ranges where quick-firing secondaries told. Everything pointed the same way: heavy guns of one uniform calibre.

The Italian naval architect Vittorio Cuniberti had written up the all-big-gun ship in 1903 and, when his own navy passed on the idea, argued it in Jane's Fighting Ships. Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher pushed the Board of Admiralty, shortly after becoming First Sea Lord in October 1904, to arm the next battleship with 12-inch guns and give her no less than 21 knots. His Committee on Designs, convened in January 1905 and chaired by Fisher himself, chose turbine propulsion over reciprocating engines on 18 January to save 1,100 long tons of displacement, and added longitudinal bulkheads to shield the magazines from underwater explosions.

The committee had read the Russo-Japanese War closely. Captain William Pakenham's report that 12-inch gunfire showed its hitting power at the Yellow Sea and Tsushima while 10-inch shells "passed unnoticed" argued the calibre; Tōgō's ability to cross the Russian T argued the speed. Parsons had already demonstrated what turbines could do when Turbinia ran at up to 34 knots, unauthorised, through the Diamond Jubilee review at Spithead in 1897, and trials of the destroyers Viper and Cobra followed. Seven iterations of hull form were tested at the Admiralty's tank at Gosport before the design was fixed.

She was built at HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, then reckoned the fastest-building yard in the world, and the sixth Royal Navy ship to carry a name meaning "fear nothing". To meet Fisher's target of a year, material was stockpiled and prefabrication started in May 1905, about 6,000 man weeks of work going in before she was formally laid down on 2 October. No. 5 slip was screened from view. The 1,100 men on her at the start rose to 3,000, working a 69-hour six-day week from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. with compulsory overtime and a thirty-minute lunch. By day 125 the hull was finished.

King Edward VII christened her with Australian sparkling wine on 10 February 1906 — the bottle needed several blows to break on a bow that would become famous — and she was commissioned on 11 December, fifteen months after her keel was laid. She carried ten 45-calibre BL 12-inch Mark X guns in five twin turrets, three on the centreline and two in wings abreast the forward superstructure, for a broadside of eight. Eighteen Babcock & Wilcox boilers fed two paired sets of direct-drive Parsons turbines rated at 23,000 shaft horsepower; on trials off Polperro on 9 October 1906 she made 21.6 knots from 27,018 shp.

Her waterline belt of Krupp cemented armour was 11 inches amidships, her turret faces and conning tower the same, though the top of that belt sat only two feet above the waterline at normal load and submerged at deep load. She was among the first Royal Navy ships fitted to transmit range, order and deflection electrically to the turrets, using Barr and Stroud rangefinders, a Dumaresq mechanical computer and Vickers range clocks in the transmitting stations. A Dreyer Fire Control Table came in the 1912–13 refits. One fault was never cured: her foremast stood behind the forward funnel, leaving the spotting top in the exhaust plume.

She was flagship of the Home Fleet from 1907 to 1911. Captain Reginald Bacon, who had sat on the Committee on Designs, took her to the Mediterranean and across to Trinidad in the winter of 1906–07 and reported that "no member of the Committee on Designs dared to hope that all the innovations introduced would have turned out as successfully as had been the case". In 1910 the hoaxer Horace de Vere Cole talked the Navy into showing a party of "Abyssinian royals" — friends in blackface, among them a young Virginia Woolf — around the ship. Cole chose her because she was the most visible symbol of British naval might.

Neptune replaced her as Home Fleet flagship in March 1911; she was at King George V's Coronation Fleet Review that June, and became flagship of the 4th Battle Squadron in December 1912. War found her in that role in the North Sea, based at Scapa Flow. For a ship designed to fight enemy battleships, her one significant action was an oddity: on 18 March 1915 in the Pentland Firth the German submarine U-29, commanded by Otto Weddigen of U-9 fame, surfaced immediately ahead of her after firing at Neptune, and Dreadnought cut her in two after a short chase, nearly colliding with Temeraire in the process.

She remains the only battleship confirmed to have sunk a submarine. She was refitting at Portsmouth from 18 April to 22 June 1916 and so missed Jutland, the war's one great fleet action. In July she became flagship of the 3rd Battle Squadron at Sheerness, part of a pre-dreadnought force held against German battlecruiser raids on the coast, firing her anti-aircraft guns at German aircraft heading for London. She rejoined the Grand Fleet and the 4th Battle Squadron in March 1918 and paid off at Rosyth on 7 August.

Her design so thoroughly eclipsed what came before that every subsequent battleship in every navy was called a dreadnought and everything older a pre-dreadnought. The speed of her building was itself the argument: Britain meant to show it could open an unassailable lead in a type it had just invented. The effect was the opposite of settling, as fleets everywhere began laying down ships to match her, the Imperial German Navy above all, and the naval race ran on into the First World War.

She was put up for sale on 31 March 1920 and sold on 9 May 1921 to Thos. W. Ward, one of 113 ships the firm bought at a flat rate per ton; assessed at 16,650 tons, she cost the breakers something in the region of £36,000. She arrived at Ward's new premises at Inverkeithing in Fife on 2 January 1923 and was broken up there. Very little of her survives — a gun tampion in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich is among the few pieces.

The name carried on regardless. Britain's first nuclear submarine was named Dreadnought in 1960, and the name goes to the lead boat of the new class of Trident missile submarines. It travelled further than the Navy: the wide, deep-bodied acoustic guitar is called a dreadnought after the ship, and in 2014 palaeontologists named a titanosaur Dreadnoughtus, borrowing both the battleship's bulk and the meaning of her name, "fear nothing".