HMS Dreadnought makes every battleship obsolete

On February 10, 1906, the Royal Navy launched HMS Dreadnought at Portsmouth, christened by King Edward VII before a crowd reported in the tens of thousands. The ship was less an improvement than a redefinition of what a battleship was.

At a time when capital ships typically carried a handful of large guns amid an array of smaller weapons, Dreadnought mounted a uniform main battery of ten 12-inch guns. New steam turbines drove her to 21 knots, several knots faster than rivals running on traditional piston engines.

The leap was so great that her name became a category: every ship of her kind was now a “dreadnought,” and everything before was a “pre-dreadnought.”

The design rendered the world’s existing battle fleets obsolete overnight and triggered a naval arms race, as Britain, Germany and others rushed to build their own. Few single vessels have so abruptly reset the standard for an entire field of military engineering.