Warrior to Dreadnought: Warship Development, 1860-1905 [Paperback]

This book is not for the faint of heart. It is very detailed and technical. However, it is not prohibitive in its presentation, and anyone interested the capital ship design and development will already have the vocabulary under his belt to tackle this book. Yet, what this book offers is much more than a simple chronology of ship development. It provides telling insights into all the research and politics which went into making these 45 years, perhaps the most fecund in ship development, ever--the ships themselves were only the final products of a convoluted design process carried out in the face of both the comfort of unchallenged-empire, and the uncertainty as to the future of naval warfare. With this book (and ideally a copy of the now out-of-print but excellent Steam Steel and Shellfire) you'll be set to intelligently explore this very exciting period in warship design.

Amateur naval enthusiasts, with little or no background in naval engineering, tend to accumulate isolated bits of knowledge about warship design from Jane's, Brassey's, Conway's and random photographs and diagrams in sundry sources. Warrior to Dreadnought provides a wealth of basic information regarding the evolution of armored ships, in a single large-format volume. The information is largely technical, in keeping with the author's professional standing. Yet, it is presented in an accessible fashion. If you have read terms like "metacentric height" and "righting lever" -- or perhaps dropped them in conversation with a fellow hobbyist -- but don't really know what they mean, this book is your salvation.

The author sketches some of the key (and largely unknown) personalities who shaped the Royal Navy during the last half of the 19th century, though without rendering them in full detail. This is in keeping with the book's technical focus, but may leave some readers unsatisfied.

The book includes at least one photograph of each major warship discussed in the text, but seldom more than one. Additional views of some of the vessels would have been helpful. Despite its technical focus, the book includes only a few ship plans.

These criticisms aside, this book fulfills a specific -- and, for some of us, critical -- need for basic information concerning warship design, during the period when the modern capital ship evolved.

This book is the second of a series of five written by D. K. Brown covering the design of ship for the Royal Navy from 1800 to the late 1980s. Brown retired from the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors as Deputy Chief Naval Architect in 1988 and is hugely qualified as well as deeply interested in history. I have read the last four of the volumes and recommend them all, but I think this one is really special. My view is that the period covered actually is one in which the rate of technology change in marine architecture and engineering was extremely high, arguably more rapid than it is today. A warship of 1960 might have had some value in 2005 but a warship of 1860 had NO value in 1905. The author is able to take us into the past to understand why technical decisions in various directions were taken and what our modern understanding of their implications were. Yet he is fully cognizant of the state of knowledge of the time that led to those decisions. One of the best features of this volume, also found in the others, are technical appendices that provide introductions to some fundemental concepts of naval architecture such as ship stability, rolling, strength of ships,and so on. The technical level is below that to be found in introductory texts in naval architecture but with enough quantitative material to allow clear knowledge of the issues involved.
Yet Brown is quite cognizant of the fact the ships are tools for war and must be fit for that purpose and the effect of the technical characteristics on fitness for that purpose is a theme repeatedly sounded in the couse of this and the other texts. The book is quite well illustrated with many contemporary photos and drawings as well as simple charts and graphs to cover various technical points. It might be nice to have had the old plans reproduced in larger scale but one can only put so much in a book of a certain price and size.
One last good thing (and I have no bad things) to say about this work is that Brown is very aware that naval ship design is a human activity carried out by real people just like himself and he does not fail to delve into the personalities and politics of naval ship design of the period, drawing conclusions as he sees appropriate.