Guns were perfected, it is true, and the old muzzle-loading smooth-bores of Civil War and earlier times were succeeded by breech-loading rifles. These new guns, too, became more and more powerful and more and more accurate. Still, however, the accuracy of gunfire was not greatly improved, although it improved slowly.
The newer ships gradually eliminated sails and came to depend exclusively on their engines, just as passenger ships did during this same period, and the engines increased in power and reliability until, in the early ’nineties, many of the world’s cruisers were capable of a speed of more than twenty knots an hour.
Turrets had become revolving armoured turntables carrying one or two guns, and these had been placed on an equally heavily armoured “barbette” or circular steel base through which shells and ammunition were hoisted into the turret. Side armour grew heavier and heavier, and a “protective deck,” somewhat above the water line, was built in. This deck was of comparatively thin steel armour, and as it approached the side of the ship it was bent down so that it was attached to the sides at or below the water line, thus placing over the all-important boilers, engine rooms, and magazines the protection that they needed from the enemy’s shells. During this period, guns were such that an enemy’s projectile would probably strike the side of the ship, and this deck, therefore, did not have to be designed to prevent the entrance of shells striking it except at a small angle. Consequently, the light armour used was sufficient. Later, at the Battle of Jutland (in 1916) and elsewhere, these decks were easily penetrated by shells fired at such a distance that they fell at a very steep angle.
A SCOUT CRUISER
This ship is one of the Omaha class, built after the World War for the U. S. Navy.
Shortly before the Spanish-American War, a new type of warship began to appear, and it created much interest because of its supposed ability to annihilate other types of ships. This new type was the torpedo boat. It was small and was very fast, for that day, being capable of twenty-one or twenty-two knots and sometimes a little more. It was a fragile affair, but it carried the newly perfected Whitehead torpedo. “Torpedoes” had been used during the Civil War, but in reality they were nothing but mines, set off by a trigger or by contact, and capable of use only when they could be set in the path of a ship, or by being fastened at the end of a long pole could be thrust against a ship, below the water line, by another craft. Some success attended their use during the Civil War, but they were not numerous or widely successful.
The Whitehead torpedo, however, was a new development. It consisted of three parts: first, the “war head,” or foremost section, filled with high explosive which was set off when its sharp nose came in contact with a solid object; second, a round steel compressed-air tank, which took up the midship section; and third, the section to which were attached propellers, vertical and horizontal rudders, and in which there was a powerful engine operated by the compressed air of the midship section. This torpedo could be plunged into the water from a “torpedo tube” and its engine would propel it for four or five hundred yards, while it was kept in a direct line and at an even depth beneath the surface by its automatic rudders.
A torpedo boat, then, small, fast, and capable of making a comparatively high speed, did seem to be a dangerous warship. But during the Spanish-American War two Spanish torpedo boats, the Furor and the Pluton, were smothered by the fire of the American ships—notably the Vixen, which was only a converted yacht—at the Battle of Santiago, and later another type of ship called the “torpedo-boat destroyer” was designed. This new type completely eliminated the torpedo boat.
The heavier warships had grown into weird collections of turrets. Turrets carried 12-inch guns, and 8-inch guns, and 6-inch guns, and all of these were sometimes placed on a single ship. Turrets were forward and aft and on both sides, sometimes as many as eight of them. But the 12-inch guns outranged the 8-inch guns, and the 8-inch guns outranged the 6-inch guns, and so the British, seeing the fallacy of these numerous guns of various sizes, decided to build a ship armed only with the heaviest type of naval guns in use and with small guns to withstand torpedo attacks. Thus the Dreadnaught came to be designed. She was the first “all-big-gun” ship, and immediately she changed the design of all line-of-battle ships, or, as they had come to be called by this time, battleships. Incidentally, so great was the effect that the Dreadnaught had, that all the great battleships to-day are called “dreadnaughts,” or, now that they have increased so much in size, “super-dreadnaughts.”