The Old, the New, and Skinning Cats
Musings from the Battleship
I grew up with the expression “there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” and early on in my study of the history of technology, I kept returning to that as it became clearer to me that the reality of different ways of accomplishing the same or similar purpose is more important to grasp than “improvement” or “better” ways of doing things. My advisor wouldn’t let me use the expression in my dissertation, fearing that gatekeepers might interpret it as callous disregard for cruelty to animals. (He was thinking correctly; the whole point of a dissertation is to get it past the gatekeepers, so don’t put anything in there that might possibly impede that if you can avoid it.)
This weekend, as part of an overdue return to the world and some semblance of normal life after the enforced hermitage of the ‘rona, we went downtown for sushi and then visited the Battleship North Carolina for the first time in a few years. One of our hometown’s major attractions, BB-55, or “the Showboat,” as she was known in her day, sits in the mud on the east side of the Cape Fear River, as she has since five years before I was born (I’m almost 55). She was the first modern battleship commissioned by the U.S. after the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. Built from 1937 to 1940, she was formally taken into the Navy in April 1941—good timing, as just eight months later, seven of her older counterparts were put out of action at Pearl Harbor by Japanese bombs and torpedoes.
“The battleship,” as she’s simply known around here, is an interesting mix of what strikes me as antique and modern. In that sense, she represents our own technological world, as we rely on both the old and the new every day. The ship herself looks, for the most part, modern. She’s huge, at 729 feet overall length. Her all-steel hull and superstructure are a towering meld of curves and angles whose complexity is visually amplified by her starkly-contrasting dark-and-light gray camouflage paint. Her three main turrets of three 16” guns each are imposing to say the least, if you’re a human. (Sixteen inches means the diameter of the bore; it means she threw a shell as big around as a tree, and she could put that shell accurately on a target twenty miles away.)
On second glance, though, you start to see the antique. She has a big radar dish up top—a huge advantage over her adversary—but it looks nothing like the modern radar domes on ships, which also bristle with antennae and other sensing equipment entirely lacking on the battleship. The big giveaway, though, is the Vought Kingfisher float plane
on her stern; it visually screams Second World War, with its huge Plexiglas canopy, radial engine, and two-blade propeller. This was before helicopters, which is what any large modern ship uses for reconnaissance. That plane is as clear a reminder of her time as a 1940 automobile parked out front would be.
Having toured the ship several times over the past 25 years, my main interest now is in the details, especially the materials used and equipment carried that we would never find on a more modern vessel. This ship is from a pre-plastic world. I took close-ups of beautiful solid brass faucets, solid black steel fans to move the hot air around, deep-honey-brown hardwood galley tables, braided-cover wiring that would terrify the new owners of a house built in 1940 (as mine was, actually), but which served this almost incomprehensively complex weapon perfectly well. Miles of it connect breakers to switches and pumps to valves. Every system was redundant, built and wired to allow the men left alive to work and fight the ship even if main systems, and their operators, were destroyed. Any visitor paying attention is already impressed by the complexity and sophistication—and especially the automation—built into the ship’s systems even before getting down into the depths of the lower decks where the main attraction—to me anyway, awaits: the main fire-control room.
This is where the ship’s main fire-control computers are (yes, computers). And I don’t mean fire-control as in putting out a fire; I mean fire-control as in controlling the big guns, which was the whole purpose of this massive ship. These aren’t just fascinating because they’re novel to a modern visitor, or because they are so capable and complicated. They’re fascinating because they show us that something we take for granted as something that belongs to our world, and not this one—the computer—is in fact older than that. Just as we’d find on a modern warship, those operating the weapons systems weren’t using their eyes and ears or internalized sense of momentum or trajectory or anything. They were deep in a big windowless artificially-lit room full of big black metal pedestals with precision-graduated dials and knobs, where a group of sailors worked quickly but carefully to operate these machines that would do all the math and physics needed to put a shell on a target no one could see. If that target were moving, they had to compute not where it was, but where it would be when the shell got there. And they could, and they did, without a single silicon chip. Human brains, precision instruments, vacuum tubes. This was state-of-the-art, top-secret technology. I mused to my wife that what anybody off the street could now casually wander past, back then they would have shot you before they let you near it.
And yet, at the same time, the battleship herself was already obsolescent. All battleships were. It’s telling that, as a capital ship, she was set up with quarters for an Admiral and office space for his staff; but an Admiral was rarely aboard, and the radar gang berthed in there. The Admirals were on the aircraft carriers, because those were the most important and decisive weapons in the fleet. BB-55 literally bristles with anti-aircraft guns. Aircraft sank both of the Japanese super-battleships. They sank the German super-battleship Tirpitz. North Carolina served as a bombardment platform in every island campaign in the Pacific, but as soon as the war ended, she was mothballed. Jet aircraft were in combat. Missiles had landed on London. Japan had experienced nuclear war.
Were battleships worth their enormous cost and manpower demands in this war? Would those resources have been better-utilized in more aircraft carriers—and, at the other end of the spectrum, on the construction of more small, fast escort vessels to protect the vital merchant shipping being slaughtered by submarines? These are academic questions, because the people making the decisions believed in battleships. Their ideas and, just as importantly, their sentiments had been shaped by the naval culture of the big-gun battleship. It’s far harder to defend the statement that battleships were still being built because they were the best use of limited resources, given the reality of war at sea in the 1940s, than that battleships were still being built because the naval establishment wanted them to be.
Technology is shaped by culture and vice versa. We appraise technology through the filters of culture. If we want to understand it, we have to develop the ability to take those filters off, as best we can, for a little while. You don’t need transistors to construct a sophisticated electrical communication system. You don’t need silicon chips to make a computer. We tend to assume you do, while they assumed that only male humans could (or should) work the computers on a warship, and that sailors with dark skin were only fit for doing the dishes. We do not assume either (most of us, anyway—I hope).
NB: It’s technically not correct to call BB-55 “USS North Carolina,” as she is no longer in commission in the USN. In fact, there is a USS North Carolina—she is a Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine (SSN—777), launched in 2008.
If you’d like to see the photos I took on the battleship, here’s the link:
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/Y-9hgo5pTYCUiN_GUNHt4w.PayqW1-1euf93IXHx7vKci
Great books that heavily influenced these musings:
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2008)
Eric Schatzberg, Wings of Wood, Wings of Metal: Culture and Technical Choice in American Airplane Materials, 1914-1945 (Princeton University Press, 1998)