Search results
2 Steam and the management of naval architecture During your tenure of office the Royal Navy has been converted from a sailing to a screw navy, and the efficient vessels of every class which now constitute the screw navy, bear testimony to the skill and intelligence which have been successfully bestowed on this most important subject. W.G. Romaine, Secretary to the Admiralty, congratulates Baldwin Walker on his tenure as Surveyor of the Navy.1 The Royal Dockyard of Portsmouth is well worthy of a visit. To me it was an object of peculiar interest. I had only
The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. This book provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It brings to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy. The book demonstrates the ways in which naval architects shaped naval thinking about ship design and influenced how ships were employed in active service. The 1830 Whig government's Board of Admiralty abolished the Tory-controlled Navy Board and appointed Symonds to oversee many of its duties and made the self-fashioning of the enlightened 'sailor-designer' identity a priority. The book focuses on the implications of steam for the management of naval architecture. The shaping of the Warrior and the introduction of iron into the British warship took place against the backdrop of projecting naval power and actors building credibility for new materiel. HMS Captain fully represented Cowper Coles's ideas of what a turret ship should be, and her launch the culmination of over ten years' effort, to secure what he considered an ideal trial for demonstrating his design ideas. The Royal Sovereign was one of the Royal Navy's first warships built under the 1889 Naval Defence Act, which provided £21.5 million for ten battleships, thirty-eight cruisers and other smaller vessels. The Navy is one of the most historically significant, and yet singularly neglected, institutions in the history of technology and war.
. Shipwrights and naval officers were the groups most immediately connected to the problems of naval architecture, but the connection between ship design and British naval strength was such that the topic excited interest from across the political, naval, engineering, scientific and press communities. Levels of knowledge differed widely, together with the types of knowledge that communities privileged, i.e. that derived from experience, experiment or mathematical analysis. The questions they sought to answer, however, were much the same: what types of ships ought to be built
, technology, and experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore, MD, 2000), 7–12. 272 Shaping the Royal Navy institutional authority of their makers.4 It has brought to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy; and rather than taking them for granted, it has examined their authority to act by resurrecting controversies and has recovered the politics of ship design. Through this contextual approach it has shed new light on the history of naval architecture. It has followed naval architects through the
interest the nation takes in its results . . . John Scott Russell sees the controversial HMS Captain as a costly experiment in naval architecture.1 On 27 March 1869, HMS Captain was launched from John Laird’s Birkenhead dockyard. The 320-foot iron screw turret ship left the slipway in a launching ceremony eagerly watched by Hugh Childers, the Liberal Party’s First Lord of the Admiralty, and the ship’s designer, Captain Cowper Coles.2 The Captain fully represented Coles’s ideas of what a turret ship should be, and her launch the culmination of over ten years’ effort
Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood’s flagship at Trafalgar, launched in 1786. The name also figured in the history of nineteenthcentury naval architecture, being used for a Symondite design of 1844 that the Admiralty later cancelled and an uncompleted three-decker that became the site of Cowper Coles’s first turret experiments. An article in The Times provided the weights, dimensions and number of guns of all these ships, and concluded that a ‘complete collection of models of the vessels named above would form an admirable object lesson in the progress of naval architecture
various that he will find it difficult to believe that any fixed principles of naval architecture exist, or ever did exist. The engineering press brings attention to the uncertainty in naval architecture regarding the form of iron ships.2 On 19 December 1860, the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company launched Britain’s first ironclad warship (Figure 3.1). The press coverage conveyed a deep sense of uncertainty. An article in the London-based Temple Bar hoped that the familiar material aesthetic of naval power would remain ‘whatever may be discoveries of scientific
the period. This debate formed around two questions: ‘What skills was a ship designer required to have?’ ‘How should the merits of a ship’s design be judged?’ Responses to these questions highlight the role of professional rivalry, political manoeuvring, social tension and epistemic controversy in early nineteenthcentury debates about authority and naval architecture. The Vernon was a fourth-rate warship, meaning that she carried between fifty and sixty guns. She was launched from Woolwich on May Day 1832 in a ceremony that saw Lady Graham name the ship after
problem of the highest order, with which few men could deal, but fortunately the scientific was by far the strongest side of the committee, which comprised the name of Sir William Thomson, Dr. Woolley, Professor Rankine, and Mr. Froude. Engineering emphasises the scientific nature of the design problems facing the Royal Navy.2 On 12 July 1871 the latest addition to the Royal Navy was launched at Portsmouth. The usual launch ceremony drew the local population to cast their eyes over a most unusual specimen of naval architecture. The popular press understood HMS
established in Egypt for them to inhabit. The Carians and Ionians as well as mercenary groups from many other countries are attested throughout the 26th Dynasty and formed an essential element of the growing Saite military power. Changes to the navy and modifications in naval architecture helped Egypt secure control of its sea coast and achieve an effective Mediterranean naval presence. egypt of the saite pharaohs On the international front, for the first time in centuries Egypt was able to occupy territory in Syria–Palestine. For a brief period, Egypt was once