By
that point, Robert Whitehead had made several significant improvements
to his design. In 1875, he replaced his original two-cylinder engine
with a three-cylinder version designed by the British engineering firm
of Peter Brotherhood. The original single screw gave way to
contra-rotating propellers, and Whitehead introduced a steering engine
to amplify the effect of the depth mechanism on the horizontal rudders.
In 1889, Whitehead began to build 18-inch (diameter) torpedoes in
addition to his standard 14-inch model. By the mid-1890s, his torpedoes
could make almost 30 knots for roughly 800 yards. The application of an
invention known as the Obry gyroscope (named after the inventor, Ludwig
Obry) to torpedoes in 1896 supplied a horizontal guidance system and
began their transformation into accurate, high-speed, long-range
weapons. Several years before the outbreak of World War I, torpedoes
could travel at a speed of 45 knots (51 miles per hour) or run 10,000
yards (5.6 miles). To put those numbers in perspective, Glenn Curtiss,
the great American engineer, won the premier airplane racing event of
1909 by flying 47 miles per hour for 12.4 miles—and, of course, he did
not have to contend with water resistance. Over a fifty-year period, the
speed of torpedoes had increased by roughly 800 percent, and their
range by 5,000 percent. They were at the cutting edge of technology.
While
torpedo technology changed, so too did the platforms for launching
them. Indeed, the half-century before World War I may have witnessed
more technological change for navies than any period before or since.
The basic outlines are well known. Through the Napoleonic Wars, naval
vessels were powered by wind, were made of wood, and fired
muzzle-loading smooth-bore cannons maneuvered on carriages. In the
mid-nineteenth century, they began a rapid transformation. Propulsion
changed from sails powered by wind to engines (first reciprocating, then
turbine) powered by fossil fuels (first coal, then oil). Wooden hulls
were clad with iron and then replaced entirely by steel, increasing
their ability to withstand artillery hits. Muzzle-loading smooth-bore
cannons on carriages gave way to rifled breech-loading cannon on
mechanized mounts (first hydraulic, then electric), which could shoot
farther, more accurately, and more quickly. The growing ability of
warships both to endure and to deliver artillery hits involved a
celebrated race between armor and armament. Perhaps less well known, yet
just as important, were changes in communications and targeting
technologies. Navies experimented extensively with telegraph cables and
radio for controlling movement at the strategic, operational, and
tactical levels. The greater range and accuracy of modern guns were of
little use if they could not be aimed and controlled, so navies also
developed better targeting (also known as fire-control) systems, which
were among the world’s first analog computers.
Although
it is natural to think of capital ships exclusively in terms of heavy
armor and big guns, they were the most important type of vessel in
driving torpedo development before World War I. Even all-big-gun capital
ships like the Dreadnought carried torpedoes. Whereas capital
ships had to aim their big guns at individual enemy ships, they aimed
their torpedoes at the entire enemy formation, expecting to sink a
proportion. With such a large and inviting target for torpedoes as
compared to big guns, the effective range of the former could exceed
that of the latter. The race between guns and torpedoes to out-range
each other, so that one fleet could fire at another without being hit in
return, was at least as significant as the better known race between
guns and armor. The prospect that torpedoes might win the race led
tacticians to fear that they would replace guns as the primary armament
of capital ships, and even the battleship aficionado Kaiser Wilhelm II
plotted for a “torpedo battleship.”
In
addition to capital ships, smaller vessels also carried torpedoes.
Torpedo boats, which many navies began to build in the 1870s, were the
first vessels designed to use torpedoes as their primary weapons system.
A short-lived type of vessel known as the torpedo catcher (or the
torpedo gunboat) was developed in the 1880s to defend fleets against
torpedo boats, but it soon became clear that the catchers lacked the
speed to catch their prey. The most durable type of vessel to emerge in
direct response to torpedo development was the torpedo-boat destroyer,
better known as simply the destroyer, which began to appear in the early
1890s. Originally intended to take on the defensive mission of the torpedo-boat catchers, destroyers soon showed offensive
promise as torpedo boats themselves. Indeed, their greater size,
durability, and sea-keeping ability made them better platforms for
launching torpedoes than the torpedo boats had been. When firing
torpedoes, destroyers used above-water, not submerged, tubes.
Perhaps
surprisingly, submarines played little role in driving torpedo
development before World War I. France led the way on submarines,
introducing the first recognizably modern version in the early 1890s. It
was followed by the United States and Great Britain around 1900.
(Despite its later association with submarine warfare, Germany actually
lagged in submarine development and likely had to rely on pirated French
designs.) Prewar submarines had limited utility as torpedo platforms.
They were not true submarines but submersibles, spending most of their
time on the surface of the water and submerging only to attack a target.
Most submarines lacked sufficient surface speed to accompany battle
fleets (i.e., they were not fleet-keeping submarines), which moved above
20 knots by 1914, and instead were confined to coastal patrol. They
expected to fire their torpedoes at point-blank range of hundreds rather
than thousands of yards. Thus it was surface vessels, especially
capital ships, and not submarines that drove the development of faster,
more accurate, and longer-range torpedoes.
Like
many other armaments, torpedoes were built and sold in a global
marketplace, featuring (like so many of today’s markets) multinational
corporations and transnational flows of capital, ideas, and technology.
There were four international producers, who were distinct from those
who built for just one country. The first, and most important, was the
Whitehead factory in Fiume, which signed its first contract (with
Austria-Hungary) in 1868 and its first international contract (with
Britain) in 1871. It eventually sold torpedoes to twenty-three countries
before World War I. The second was the Berliner Maschinenbau
Aktiengesellschaft (BMAG). It was sometimes referred to as the
Schwartzkopff Company after its founder, who most likely stole plans
from Whitehead in 1873 and began producing a near-duplicate of his
torpedo shortly thereafter. BMAG sold to Japan, China, Spain, Sweden,
and Germany—until the mid-1880s, when the German Navy ceased to buy from
BMAG and instead built all its torpedoes in state-owned factories. The
third international producer was the Whitehead factory in Weymouth,
England, which was originally established in 1890 to build solely for
the British Navy but eventually sold on the open market. Finally,
France’s Schneider Company (better known for its guns) began to sell
torpedoes internationally, but very little about its torpedo business is
known.
The international arms market had several distinctive
characteristics. First, a number of armaments firms (like Whitehead)
were multinational, with branches in more than one country. Some firms
were subsidiaries of larger foreign conglomerates. In 1906, for
instance, the great British armaments firms of Vickers and
Armstrong-Whitworth purchased the Whitehead Company, including both its
Fiume and Weymouth branches. Second, the line between public and
private, and thus between state and nonstate actors, was blurry.
Governments often operated quasi-private armaments factories to preserve
security or stimulate competition, while private firms often received
substantial investments from governments, making them quasi-public.
Third, the armaments business usually required large upfront capital
investments, and thus the number of producers within a given country was
limited. Sometimes a single firm had a monopoly on a particular product
(as with Krupp in German naval gun production), or a small number of
firms had an oligopoly (as with Germaniawerft and Schichau in German
torpedo-boat production). Finally, given the specialized nature of the
goods being produced and the occasional ban on exporting, there was
often just one consumer—the government—creating a so-called monopsony.
Under
these conditions, producers faced several challenges. Not only did
entering the armaments business require large capital investments, but
so too did the constant plant upkeep to remain in the business. Demand
was unreliable without a diversified consumer base. If a monopsonist
government decided to stop purchasing, for whatever reason, demand
collapsed. Government demand itself depended on unstable factors, like
financial wherewithal and favorable tactical, strategic, and diplomatic
circumstances. Monopsony empowered the consumer to set prices and
specifications while depriving producers of leverage to protest.
Producers often responded to their vulnerability by combining into rings
or cartels.
Monopsonies notwithstanding, consumers faced
difficulties as well. If the producers did not find many consumers,
neither did the consumers find many producers. To stimulate
competition—and thus, in theory, to obtain better products at lower
prices—consumers had three basic options. One was to entice more private
firms into the business. This task was not easy, despite the
potentially lucrative rewards: for the reasons explained above, any
intelligent firm would think twice about entering the armaments
business. Overcoming firms’ reservations usually required both a cash
subsidy (whether in the form of direct injections or payment of
artificially high prices) to help firms acquire the necessary start-up
capital, and the promise of contracts to assure firms that they would
receive returns on their investments. If governments were unable or
unwilling to make large financial outlays or to promise orders to
private firms, they could adopt the second option for stimulating
competition, which was to establish a government factory. The globe was
dotted with such plants: the US Navy’s torpedo factory in Newport, Rhode
Island; the Royal Navy’s torpedo factory in Greenock; the Japanese
arsenal in Kure; the French gun plant at Ruelle; the Russian iron works
at Putilov; and the Austrian shipyard at Pola. Of course, these plants
also required large financial outlays.
The third option for
stimulating competition was perhaps the one most fraught with potential
pitfalls: to allow private firms to sell internationally. By doing so,
governments effectively gave up their monopsony. The market was flooded
not only with additional consumers but also with additional producers
because the armaments firms now had to compete with producers in other
countries for international customers. Governments could then reap the
benefits of international competition in their own countries. Even in
the absence of any imperative to stimulate competition, governments
might allow firms to sell abroad in order to keep the firms in business
at lower cost to themselves. In effect, allowing companies to court
foreign buyers stabilized demand, meaning that their home governments
did not have to inflate demand artificially through subsidies or
unnecessary orders.
Despite
such advantages, a significant drawback of this approach is easy to
see: allowing armaments firms to sell abroad eroded secrecy. It was
possible to minimize that risk by erecting various safeguards—for
instance, by physically quarantining especially sensitive parts from the
production of less sensitive ones, or by providing for damages if
secrecy was breached— but it could not be eliminated. Thus, as we shall
see in the following chapters, the global arms market offered benefits,
but with costs.
Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex
Beginning
with the introduction of the gyroscope in the mid-1890s, the growing
accuracy, speed, and range of torpedoes posed grave challenges to
conventional naval tactics. Traditional naval tactics called for capital
ships sailing in close order and following visual signals from their
leader to defeat their counterparts with heavy guns fired at point-blank
range. Ships proceeding in close order and engaging at short ranges
were extremely vulnerable, however, to torpedo fire. To deal with the
torpedo threat, navies experimented with new formations, such as moving
ships further apart in the line of battle or even breaking the line of
battle into independent divisions, but the new formations created
serious command-and-control problems. Navies also experimented with
longer battle ranges to stay out of torpedo range, but the greater
distances made it more difficult to achieve accurate gunfire. To cope
with this challenge, navies sought to improve both their guns and their
gunnery fire control. The result was a race for range between guns and
torpedoes that raised the possibility that the entire system of tactics
built around capital ships armed primarily with big guns would give way
to one built around smaller vessels primarily armed with torpedoes.
The
implications of torpedo development were equally profound at the
strategic level. Traditional naval strategy, as elaborated in previous
centuries by the Royal Navy, called for close blockade of enemies’
coasts to stifle their trade combined with decisive battle to destroy
their fleets and achieve full command of the sea. Torpedoes threatened
both aspects of this system. Expensive capital ships were so vulnerable
to torpedo attack by cheaper vessels in battle that fleet actions could
seem too risky. Ships engaged in close blockade were overly vulnerable
to torpedo attack by surface torpedo vessels under cover of darkness or
by submarines at any time. One option was to move the blockade farther
from the enemy’s coast, but distant blockade (sometimes called loose
blockade) was more difficult to enforce and was considered questionable
under international law. By threatening to deprive navies of battle and
blockade, torpedo development forced nations to look for fundamentally
new ways of defining and applying naval power.
Thus,
torpedoes played an important role in the intense naval competition
preceding World War I. Navies everywhere poured enormous resources into
increasing and conserving their relative power. In a classic example of a
challenge-and-response dynamic, no sooner did one navy get a piece of
technology than another navy invented a new piece of technology that
rendered the former technology obsolete—and with it the massive
peacetime investment needed to produce the technology on an adequate
scale.
The depreciation of peacetime investment was particularly
problematic for navies. Until recently, naval warfare was far more
technologically sophisticated than land warfare and required
correspondingly greater peacetime investment. “You can go round the
corner and get more guns, more rifles, more horses, more men who can
ride and shoot,” as Admiral Sir John Fisher once said, “but you can’t go
round the corner and get more Destroyers and more Cruizers [sic] and
more Battleships.” Lord Kitchener, Britain’s War Secretary for the first
two years of World War I, confirmed Fisher’s claim: Equipping the
British army, he claimed, “was not much more difficult than buying a
straw hat at Harrods.” With so many resources sunk into naval power,
representing such a high opportunity cost, the stakes were higher in the
event of failure.
Industrialization exacerbated this dynamic,
and torpedoes epitomized the process. Although a steamship is the more
familiar symbol of industrialization at sea, a torpedo is at least as
good a symbol: like steamships, torpedoes were metal and ran on engines,
but torpedoes could be produced in much larger numbers because they
were relatively small and inexpensive compared to ships. Even as the
miniaturization of torpedoes enabled them to be produced in bulk,
however, it posed serious design and production challenges. Consider
these figures: in an 1882 contract for Whitehead torpedoes, the Austrian
Navy required that the margin of error on an overall length of 4.415
meters not exceed 5 millimeters (0.005 meters), and that the margin of
error on an overall diameter of 35.6 centimeters (0.356 meters) not
exceed 2 micrometers (0.0002 meters). On that order, precision meant
margins of error within four decimal places and 0.001–0.0006 percent of
overall sizes.
Miniaturization on that scale was not easy, and it was
all the more difficult in view of the number of parts that had to be
crammed into a torpedo. Consider some additional figures: whereas the
standard small arm used by the US Army before World War I (the 1903
Springfield rifle) contained ninety parts, the standard torpedo used by
the US Navy at roughly the same time contained about 500 parts—in the
guidance systems alone.
Given
the many small, precisely machined, and tightly fitted pieces of metal
that composed torpedoes, sending a prototype into production without
putting it through a rigorous research and development (R&D) process
could easily create manufacturing, quality control, assembly, and
operational nightmares. The small size and relatively cheap per-unit
cost of torpedoes did not spare them from the need for an expensive
R&D process. In fact, miniaturization and large-scale production
made it all the more necessary.
In these respects, torpedoes
likely represented a cluster of devices sometimes called control
technologies, and they have attracted relatively little interest from
scholars. Although historians of that problematic
late-nineteenth-century phenomenon known as the Second Industrial
Revolution have moved well beyond the classic focus on railroads,
electricity, and chemistry, naval historians still tend to study big
things, often created by big corporations: armor, guns, and propulsion.
If taken too far, this focus crowds out equally important narratives
about smaller technologies, built by smaller businesses, that made the
big stuff smart—control technologies in communications, data collection,
and information processing, which together formed the nervous system
for the heavy exoskeleton of the industrial beast. In navies, control
technologies included targeting and guidance systems (both of which
relied on cutting-edge gyrostabilization) and radio, which had different
manufacturing requirements and were built by different types of firms
compared to armor, guns, and propulsion. Perhaps most important, these
control technologies, like torpedoes, required miniaturization on a
scale that many other industrial technologies did not. Although the
exact mixture of engineering challenges posed by torpedoes was unique,
more generally those challenges typified an important class of
industrial technology that has been under-studied by historians.
Solving
the challenges presented by industrial technology like torpedoes
required a distinctive type of innovation, in which numerous activities
occurred together rather than discretely or sequentially. Take basic
science and applied science. Although the basic scientific principles at
work behind industrial technology may not have been qualitatively more
difficult than those behind preindustrial technology, they grew in
quantity as the technology grew in sophistication. For instance, the
science behind air flow in torpedo propulsion, which rested on the ideal
gas law, was in some sense very simple, but applying it depended in
part on the metal used for pipes and valves, which had their own
chemical science of metallurgy. Discovering a particular scientific
principle was easier than combining it with other relevant principles
and applying the result in order to create effective technology. Given
the difficulty of the latter, basic science sometimes lagged behind
applied science (or science sometimes lagged behind technology),
reversing an idealized path of scientific-technological progress. To
return to the propulsion example, even if the ideal gas law and
metallurgical chemistry were not perfectly understood, it could still be
possible to build a propulsion system that worked well enough (bearing
in mind that the phrase well enough itself constituted a dependent
variable), and perhaps later to deduce the underlying science from the
technology. Thus, it was possible to have technology-led science as well
as science-led technology.
Similarly, invention, development,
and production could occur at the same time, conducted by the same
people in the same spaces. Contemporary actors struggled to define these
activities, the boundaries of which could have legal and financial
implications. Did invention consist of coming up with a good idea, or
did it consist of embodying that idea in a workable design? Did
development end when a torpedo entered production, or did it continue
when the design was tweaked during the torpedo’s acceptance tests? Or
was tweaking the design invention rather than development? Attempting to
distinguish these activities from each other risks not only
over-simplifying a complex historical reality but also obscuring the
self-interest behind certain distinctions. When innovators seeking
patents came up with a good idea but lacked the resources to turn it
into a working prototype, it was in their interest to define their
contribution as invention and to define others’ contributions as “mere”
development. When innovators seeking monetary compensation turned a good
idea into a working prototype, it was in their interest to define
invention in terms of labor and risk rather than in terms of coming up
with a good idea. These issues may reasonably be characterized as being
among the ontological and epistemological implications of
industrialization.
As if
these supply-side problems were not formidable enough, the demand side
presented its own challenges. (Of course, those on the demand side—
navies—were also on the supply side, engaged in invention, development,
and production themselves.) Although many of those demanding torpedoes
understood that the weapon had the potential to revolutionize tactics
and strategy, determining exactly how that potential would translate
into reality was extremely difficult. Even the best guesses had to
contend against institutional factionalization in both the American and
British navies, and agreements about the desired performance
characteristics of torpedoes were temporary. Thus, the specifications
that producers had to meet were not only strict but changing. Volatility
characterized both the consumption and production environment.
In
their ideal world, navies had unlimited resources and could invest
heavily in all aspects of innovation to mitigate this volatility. In the
real world, navies’ resources were limited, and they had to make
choices, all of which came with trade-offs. For instance, slowing
production in favor of continued R&D risked having too few weapons
in service when a crisis hit, while short-changing R&D in favor of
production practically guaranteed more hiccups during the production
process and problems with the weapons once they entered service. In the
key sector of naval-industrial R&D infrastructure, Britain was far
stronger than the United States, despite the traditional depiction of a
declining Britain and a rising United States during this period. As a
result, Britain was better able to perfect existing technology and test
new technology thoroughly, while the United States had to take
technological gambles. Precisely this pattern occurred with torpedo
technology.
The effort to create an R&D infrastructure
capable of developing successful torpedoes profoundly changed the
relationship between state and society in the United States and Britain.
The historian William McNeill associated this change with the emergence
of command technology: technology commanded by the public sector from
the private sector that was so sophisticated and expensive that neither
possessed the resources to develop it alone. As a result, they had to
collaborate, meaning that, while such technology was commanded in the
sense that government fiat replaced the market, it was not commanded
insofar as governments required the cooperation of the private sector.
Indeed, far from the smooth hierarchy perhaps implied by the metaphor of
command, this cooperation could be extremely messy, for reasons alluded
to above: both parties had leverage, and it was impossible to
distinguish neatly among the various activities (science, invention,
development, and production) involved in their collaboration.
McNeill’s
thesis had three major implications. First, command technology put a
premium on the development of a kind of technology—which I will call
servant technology—that could generate information needed to improve
command technology. Second, the information generated by servant
technology was itself a commodity because it had the power to affect
market relationships by offering insight into the value of command
technology. This commodified information was a distinctive kind of
property. Third, the collaboration between the public and private
sectors required to develop command technology raised fundamental and
complex questions about the nature of property in relation to invention.
When more than one party helped to invent a piece of technology, how
could ownership of the intellectual property rights be established?
Answering
this question generated serious friction between the public and private
sectors. Conventional contract language, patent procedures, cost
accounting methods, and pricing assumptions provided little guidance,
because they were based not on the new collaborative procurement
paradigm but on an older one, in which the public sector bought finished
goods from the private sector as ordinary commercial products. In a
series of legal battles over which side owned the intellectual property
rights to technology that both had helped to invent, the governments
won. To do so, they exploited two aggressive new legal strategies:
applying eminent domain to intellectual property; and using
anti-espionage legislation to control exports, that is, to regulate
private commercial and proprietary rights—notwithstanding the fact that
the legislation had been written for very different purposes. In every
case, contractors protested that cutting them off from the global market
would damage their property rights, but governments insisted that
permitting private actors to share technological information freely
would aid the governments’ enemies. Courts tended to lose sight of
private property rights when national security seemed to be at stake.
(Credit: Dja65 via Shutterstock/Salon)
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