ABSTRACT
On 2 October 1905, Portsmouth Dockyard laid the keel of the first all-big-gun battleship, HMS Dreadnought. She was completed in an astonishingly short time and, on 5 January 1907, sailed on her first, experimental cruise. Her construction marked the beginning of the era named after her, in which the world’s navies, those of Britain and Germany in particular, vied to reequip themselves with capital ships armed with many heavy guns of a single calibre. Dreadnought herself had ten 12-inch guns; she was also the first large warship to be fitted with turbine propulsion, which gave her a speed of 21 knots, three knots faster than most battleships in the British Fleet.1
