topics: |  science | technology | history | technology

Episodes from the history of technological development, mostly focused on
nineteenth century America, illustrate the role of human foibles in
technological advancement and acceptance.

In the extract below, his analysis of the process of bureaucratic inertia
is in itself, worthy of note. - AM

Quotations: Gunfire at Sea, pp. 17-44.

... gun is mounted on an unstable platform, a rolling ship. [Before 1898]
A gun pointer estimated the range of the target, ordinarily in the nineties
about 16oo yards. He then raised the gun barrel ... by turning a small wheel
on the gun mount [to fix it] for range; the gun pointer peered through open
sights, and waited until the roll of the ship brought the sights on the
target. He then pressed the firing button that discharged the gun.  Telescope
sights [even if available] were rarely used - They were lashed securely to
the gun barrel, and, recoiling with the barrel, jammed back against the
unwary pointer's eye.

[Also], there is in every pointer what is called a "firing interval"--
that is, the time lag between his impulse to fire the gun and the translation
of this impulse into the act of pressing the firing button. A pointer,
because of this reaction time, could not wait to fire the gun until the exact
moment when the roll of the ship brought the sights onto the target; he had
to will to fire a little before, while the sights were off the target. The
pointer, on a moving platform, estimating range and firing interval, shooting
while his sight was off the target, became in a sense an individual artist.

    In 1898, many of the uncertainties were removed from the process and the
position of the gun pointer radically altered by the introduction of
continuous-aim firing. The major change was that which enabled the gun
pointer to keep his sight and gun barrel on the target throughout the roll of
the ship. This was accomplished by altering the gear ratio in the elevating
gear to permit a pointer to compensate for the roll of the vessel by rapidly
elevating and depressing the gun. From this change another followed. With the
possibility of maintaining the gun always on the target, the desirability of
improved sights became immediately apparent. The advantages of the telescope
sight as opposed to the open sight were for the first time fully
realized, [and to prevent recoil], the sight was mounted on a sleeve that
permitted the gun barrel to recoil through it without moving the telescope.

    ... this changed naval gunnery from an art to a science.  In 1899 five
ships of the North Atlantic Squadron fired five minutes each at a lightship
hulk at the conventional range of 1600 yards. After twenty-five minutes of
banging away, two hits had been made on the sails of the elderly vessel. Six
years later one naval gunner made fifteen hits in one minute at a target 75
by 25 feet at the same range--1600 yards; half of them hit in a bull's eye 50
inches square.

[But] how was the idea, obviously so simple an idea, of continuous-aim
firing developed, who introduced it into the United States Navy, and what was
its reception?

    The idea was the product of the fertile mind of the English officer
Admiral Sir Percy Scott. He arrived at it in this way while, in 1898, he was
the captain of H.M.S. Scylla. For the previous two or three years he had
given much thought independently and almost alone in the British Navy to
means of improving gunnery. One rough day, when the ship, at target practice,
was pitching and rolling violently, he walked up and down the gun deck
watching his gun crews.  Because of the heavy weather, they were making very
bad scores.  Scott noticed, however, that one pointer was appreciably more
accurate than the rest. He watched this man with care, and saw, after a time,
that he was unconsciously working his elevating gear back and forth in a
partially successful effort to compensate for the roll of the vessel. It
flashed through Scott's mind at that moment that here was the sovereign
remedy for the problem of inaccurate fire. What one man could do partially
and unconsciously perhaps all men could be trained to do consciously and
completely.

[Scott] did three things. First, in all the guns of the Scylla, he
changed the gear ratio in the elevating gear, previously used only to set the
gun in fixed position for range, so that a gunner could easily elevate and
depress the gun to follow a target throughout the roll. Second, he rerigged
his telescopes so that they would not be influenced by the recoil of the
gun. Third, he rigged a small target at the mouth of the gun, which was moved
up and down by a crank to simulate a moving target. By following this target
as it moved and firing at it with a subcaliber rifle rigged in the breech of
the gun, time pointer could practice every day. Thus equipped, the ship
became a training ground for gunners. ... Within a year the Scylla
established records that were remarkable.

[Now Morison moves on to the personality of Scott] he had a certain
mechanical ingenuity; his personal life was shot through with frustration and
bitterness.  There was a divorce and a quarrel with that ambitious officer
Lord Charles Beresford, the sounds of which penetrated to the last outposts
of empire. Finally, he possessed, like Swift, a savage indignation directed
ordinarily at the inelastic intelligence of all constituted authority,
especially the British Admiralty.

[Next, this idea was transmitted to American officer William S. Sims, who
had little of the mechanical ingenuity of Percy Scott, but the two were drawn
together by [their shared] intolerance for what is called spit and polish and
the same contempt for bureaucratic inertia.

Pioneering passion meets the "Not discovered here" syndrome

[The rest of the chapter discusses at length how Sims' reports on gunnery
were ignored by HQ in Washington - his "reports were simply filed away and
forgotten. Some indeed, it was later discovered to Sims's delight, were
half-eatenaway by cockroaches."  Sims now sends the reports to many of his
colleague officers.  In the second stage, the Bureau of Ordnance raises
objections: "(1) our equipment was in general as good as the British; (2)
since our equipment was as good, the trouble must be with the men, but the
gun pointer and the training of gun pointers were the responsibility of the
officers on the ships; and most significant (3) continuous-aim firing was
impossible. Experiments had revealed that five men at work on the elevating
gear of a six-inch gun could not produce the power necessary to compensate
for a roll of five degrees in ten seconds.  These experiments and
calculations demonstrated beyond peradventure or doubt that Scott's system of
gunfire was not possible."  These experiments it turned out, had been
ingeniously contrived at the Washington Navy Yard--on solid ground. It had,
therefore, been possible to dispense in the Bureau of Ordnance calculation
with Newton's first law of motion, which naturally operated at sea to assist
the gunner in elevating or depressing a gun mounted on a moving ship.

[In the third stage, all rationality was abandoned, and name-calling
ensued] "-the argumentum ad hominem.  Sims, of course, by the high
temperature he was running and by his calculated over-statement, invited
this. He was told in official endorsements on his reports that there were
others quite as sincere and loyal as he and far less difficult; he was
dismissed as a crackbrained egotist; he was called a deliberate falsifier of
evidence."

[In the end, Sims], a lieutenant, took the extraordinary step of writing
the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, to inform him of the
remarkable records of Scott's ships, of the inadequacy of our own gunnery
routines and records, and of the refusal of the Navy Department to
act. Roosevelt, who always liked to respond to such appeals when he
conveniently could, brought Sims back from China late in 1902 and installed
him as Inspector of Target Practice, a post the naval officer held throughout
the remaining six years of the Administration. And when he left, after many
spirited encounters we cannot here investigate, he was universally acclaimed
as "the man who taught us how to shoot."

    Why this deeply rooted, aggressive, persistent hostility from Washington
that was only broken up by the interference of Theodore Roosevelt? Here was a
reform that greatly and demonstrably increased the fighting effectiveness of
a service that maintains itself almost exclusively to fight. Why then this
refusal to accept so carefully documented a case, a case proved incontestably
by records and experience? Why should virtually all the rulers of a society
so resolutely seek to reject a change that so markedly improved its chances
for survival in any contest with competing societies? There are the obvious
reasons that will occur to all of you - the source of the proposed reform was
an obscure, junior officer 8000 miles away; he was, and this is a significant
factor, criticizing gear and machinery designed by the very men in the
bureaus to whom lie was sending his criticisms.  And furthermore, Sims was
seeking to introduce what he claimed were improvements in a field where
improvements appeared unnecessary. Superiority in war, as in other things, is
a relative matter, and the Spanish-American War had been won by the old
system of gunnery. Therefore, it was superior even though of the 9500 shots
fired at various but close ranges, only 121 had found their mark.

blurb (from MIT press website) :

Beginning with a remarkable illustration of resistance to innovation in the
U.S. Navy following an officer's discovery of a more accurate way to fire a
gun at sea, Elting Morison goes on to narrate the strange history of the
new model steamship, the Wapanoag, in the 1860s. He then continues with the
difficulties confronting the introduction of the pasteurization process for
milk; he traces the development of the Bessemer process; and finally, he
considers the computer. While the discussions are liberally sprinkled with
amusing examples and anecdotes, all are related to the more profound and
current problem of how to organize and manage system of ideas, energies,
and machinery so that it will conform to the human dimension.  Winner of
the 1966 McKinsey Award.

Re: the Gunnery innovation below, Note that the key idea of the invention -
to keep the gun continuously tracking the target - is really that of a
lowly gunner (pointer), who is observed by his captain, Scott.  His name is
completely lost in the reporting.