Episode Details

Dreadnought means fear nothing, and following the name through the Royal Navy traces 500 years of naval technology. The first was a 40-gun ship of 1553; a 41-gun successor launched in 1573 fought the Spanish Armada in 1588 and at Cadiz in 1596, and was rebuilt in 1592 and 1614. Oak was so scarce that ships were stripped to the keel and rebuilt around their sound timbers, so sailors could fight aboard the same hull for decades. A 52-gun Dreadnought fought at the Four Days Battle in 1666 and the brutal melee at Solebay in 1672, and 60-gun versions followed in 1691, 1723, and 1742.

The 98-gun second-rate Dreadnought of 1801 fought at Trafalgar in 1805 and became a hospital ship in 1827, as did a later Dreadnought, the former Caledonia, in 1856. In 1906 HMS Dreadnought made every battleship afloat obsolete: steam turbines gave her a sustained 21 knots, and ten 12-inch guns of one caliber let spotters read a single salvo's splashes and correct their aim. Every later battleship was a dreadnought and everything before it a pre-dreadnought, triggering the arms race that preceded World War I, yet she was sold for breaking up in 1921. In the atomic age the name went to Britain's first nuclear submarine, and fearing nothing came to mean staying unseen.

• During the 1782 siege of Gibraltar, a Dreadnought gunboat carried 21 men from the Brilliant and a single 18-pounder.
• A small Dreadnought gunboat captured the schooners Polly and Cyrus in North American waters in 1813.
• Before 1906, mixed batteries threw so many splashes that spotters could not tell which came from the main guns.
• Submarine S101 Dreadnought served from 1960 until it was decommissioned in 1980.
• Britain's new ballistic missile submarines carry the Dreadnought class name to sustain continuous at-sea deterrence.