submarines. In spring 1904 he was still lecturing the Reichstag about his contempt for submarine warfare but that July, reacting to Britain’s program, he announced the building of a submarine. The German navy’s first Unterseeboot—the U-1— was completed in 1906 at Krupp’s plant in Kiel.
The torpedoes which armed all submarines were named after the crampfish or electric ray and pioneered by British engineer Robert Whitehead. While working in Austria for a company supplying the Austro-Hungarian navy, he developed in strict secrecy an “automobile device” driven by compressed air which could travel at eight knots and carry dynamite. Soon after he perfected a depth-keeping mechanism. The Royal Navy invited him home to demonstrate the new weapon and in 1870 concluded that “any maritime nation failing to provide itself with submarine locomotive torpedoes would be neglecting a great source of power both for offence and defence” and paid fifteen thousand pounds for the right to manufacture his torpedoes. Other nations quickly followed suit.
The first torpedoes were designed to be fired from surface vessels and had spectacular success in the Russo-Japanese War. Admiral Fisher predicted the weapon “would play a most important part in future wars” since ships as currently constructed were powerless against them and “the constant dread of sudden destruction” would demoralize seamen. By 1904 the British Holland submarines had a one in two chance of hitting a destroyer from a range of three hundred to four hundred feet with their improved torpedoes.
Perhaps the area where Britain’s commercial as distinct from naval maritime supremacy was at the greatest risk as the delegates to the London Maritime Conference assembled was the transatlantic passenger trade—just as now for airlines one of the most profitable sources of revenue.
American Moses Rogers pioneered steam propulsion across the Atlantic when in 1819 he captained the paddle steamer Savannah to Liverpool, although the vessel used steam for only eighty-five hours of the twenty-seven-day voyage and sailed for the rest of the time. The first ship to steam continuously across the Atlantic was the British Sirius in 1838. She was fitted with the recently invented marine surface condensers which prevented her boilers from becoming clogged with salt.
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1787, Samuel Cunard was already a successful businessman when in 1838 the British government invited tenders to carry transatlantic mail by steamer. He hurried to London where he won a contract to carry the mail to and from America twice a month for a fee of fifty-five thousand pounds. In July 1840 the first of Cunard’s fleet, the paddle steamer Britannia , made her maiden voyage from Liverpool, reaching Boston in fourteen days.
Charles Dickens never forgot his voyage to America on the Britannia in 1842. He derided his cabin as “an utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box.” The only thing conceivably smaller for sleeping in would be “a coffin” and the flat quilt that covered him was “like a surgical plaster [bandage].” Furthermore, there was as much chance of accommodating his wife’s luggage as of persuading a giraffe “into a flower pot.” Bad weather forced him to spend a great deal of time in the cabin and he felt seasick. “Read in bed (but to this hour I don’t know what) . . . ; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold brandy and water with unspeakable disgust and ate hard biscuits perseveringly,” he wrote. “Not ill, but going to be.”
British and American lines dominated the transatlantic route, using more and more sophisticated ships, until in 1889 the kaiser, impressed by a new British White Star Line vessel he saw at a British naval review, decided “we must have some of these.” By 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the huge 14,350-ton Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was the fastest liner on
The torpedoes which armed all submarines were named after the crampfish or electric ray and pioneered by British engineer Robert Whitehead. While working in Austria for a company supplying the Austro-Hungarian navy, he developed in strict secrecy an “automobile device” driven by compressed air which could travel at eight knots and carry dynamite. Soon after he perfected a depth-keeping mechanism. The Royal Navy invited him home to demonstrate the new weapon and in 1870 concluded that “any maritime nation failing to provide itself with submarine locomotive torpedoes would be neglecting a great source of power both for offence and defence” and paid fifteen thousand pounds for the right to manufacture his torpedoes. Other nations quickly followed suit.
The first torpedoes were designed to be fired from surface vessels and had spectacular success in the Russo-Japanese War. Admiral Fisher predicted the weapon “would play a most important part in future wars” since ships as currently constructed were powerless against them and “the constant dread of sudden destruction” would demoralize seamen. By 1904 the British Holland submarines had a one in two chance of hitting a destroyer from a range of three hundred to four hundred feet with their improved torpedoes.
Perhaps the area where Britain’s commercial as distinct from naval maritime supremacy was at the greatest risk as the delegates to the London Maritime Conference assembled was the transatlantic passenger trade—just as now for airlines one of the most profitable sources of revenue.
American Moses Rogers pioneered steam propulsion across the Atlantic when in 1819 he captained the paddle steamer Savannah to Liverpool, although the vessel used steam for only eighty-five hours of the twenty-seven-day voyage and sailed for the rest of the time. The first ship to steam continuously across the Atlantic was the British Sirius in 1838. She was fitted with the recently invented marine surface condensers which prevented her boilers from becoming clogged with salt.
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1787, Samuel Cunard was already a successful businessman when in 1838 the British government invited tenders to carry transatlantic mail by steamer. He hurried to London where he won a contract to carry the mail to and from America twice a month for a fee of fifty-five thousand pounds. In July 1840 the first of Cunard’s fleet, the paddle steamer Britannia , made her maiden voyage from Liverpool, reaching Boston in fourteen days.
Charles Dickens never forgot his voyage to America on the Britannia in 1842. He derided his cabin as “an utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box.” The only thing conceivably smaller for sleeping in would be “a coffin” and the flat quilt that covered him was “like a surgical plaster [bandage].” Furthermore, there was as much chance of accommodating his wife’s luggage as of persuading a giraffe “into a flower pot.” Bad weather forced him to spend a great deal of time in the cabin and he felt seasick. “Read in bed (but to this hour I don’t know what) . . . ; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold brandy and water with unspeakable disgust and ate hard biscuits perseveringly,” he wrote. “Not ill, but going to be.”
British and American lines dominated the transatlantic route, using more and more sophisticated ships, until in 1889 the kaiser, impressed by a new British White Star Line vessel he saw at a British naval review, decided “we must have some of these.” By 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the huge 14,350-ton Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was the fastest liner on
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