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Updated: June 15, 2025
Taking the British navy, the leader in this field, the size of battleships was yearly augmented until in 1907 the famous Dreadnought appeared, looked upon at the time as the last word in naval architecture. This great ship was of 17,900 tons displacement and 23,000 horse-power, its armor belt eleven inches thick, its major armament composed of ten twelve-inch guns.
It felt very comfortable to have her there, speed twenty-three knots and four twelve-inch guns. Along in the afternoon two whales spouting water came along and had a look at the fleet. They kept with us for some time but presently got tired. At noon on the 5th, we were in Lat. 46° 17', Long. 35° 03', having sailed 213 miles in the 24 hours.
At ten she weighs nothing; that is to say the R. Force exactly counteracts gravitation. At eleven she begins to rise. At a hundred she would be hurled away from the earth like a shell from a twelve-inch gun, or even faster. Now, watch." He took up the speaking-tube. "Is she all tight everywhere, Andrew?" "Yes, my Lord," came gurgling through the tube.
In addition to all this labour, he perfected a twelve-inch speculum of vast magnifying power before the spring of 1784; and many hours were spent at the turning-bench, as not a night clear enough for observing ever passed without the devising of improvements in the mounting and motion of the various instruments then in use, or the test and trial of newly-constructed "eyepieces," most of which were executed by Herschel's own hands.
Gore here joined in: "It is all very well for you gentlemen to measure General Washington according to your own private twelve-inch carpenter's rule. But what will you say to us New Englanders who never were country gentlemen at all, and never had any liking for Virginia? What did Washington ever do for us? He never even pretended to like us. He never was more than barely civil to us.
He found that the most commonly used section in his specifications, a twelve-inch I-beam, was listed under the English custom as weighing fifty-four pounds per foot, whereas the standardized American section, which possessed the same carrying strength, weighed four pounds less. Here was an advantage of eight per cent. in cost and freight!
On the same morning I have taken them over a man-of-war, on the musketry-range to see a Maxim at practice and down into a twelve-inch casemate when the monster was about to fire.
By the time war broke out five of them had been launched and armed, and the Britain was the newest and most powerful of them. Her displacement was twenty-two thousand tons, and her speed twenty-four knots. She was armoured from end to end with twelve-inch plates against which ordinary projectiles smashed as harmlessly as egg-shells.
The superincumbent weight was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly into the solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow. Before the Spanish caved in, some of their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick!
For the greater distances, the left hand was used in only five cases as against seventy-four cases of the use of the right hand; and further, all these five cases were twelve-inch distances, the left hand being used absolutely not at all in the forty-five cases at longer distances.
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