The Spanish-American War broke this pattern, making Charlestown once again a repair yard. Besides the new warships the United States was trying out against the Spanish navy, there was also the “mosquito fleet” (old monitors, converted yachts, and other small craft used for coastal defense during the war) to be maintained and repaired. In all some 50 vessels were serviced by 1,200-1,400 workers. To beef up its workforce for war, the yard began hiring more foreign workers, especially from Scandinavian countries with shipbuilding traditions. Charlestown thereafter maintained a workforce averaging over 2,000 during the two decades before World War I—compared to the fewer than 400 workers there through most of the 1890s. The Spanish-American War was pivotal, marking a permanent expansion in the size and diversity of the Charlestown workforce. At war’s end the United States was recognized as a world power with attendant responsibilities. This new status was symbolized by the establishment of a coaling station in the recently acquired Philippines. The capital ship building program continued apace—given renewed vigor by President Theodore Roosevelt, staunch advocate of big ships and a strong navy. The yard continued to be mainly a repair facility with a steadily increasing workload. The new 750-foot Dry Dock 2, authorized three months after the sinking of _Maine_, was built to receive the Navy’s biggest ships. But soon after the massive structure’s 1905 completion, Britain launched H.M.S. _Dreadnought_, ushering in an even larger class of battleship the dock could not accommodate. In this period the yard specialized in the smaller battleships and the newest type of warship: destroyers. These fast, versatile ships had evolved from British “torpedo boat destroyers” built in the 1880s to counter the new torpedo boats. The mobile torpedo, also developed in Britain, was a self-propelled explosive device launched from a warship’s deck, traveling underwater to open the hull of its target. Developments in naval technology from the 1880s to the eve of World War II included nothing quite so dramatic as the epochal shifts from sail to steam and wood to iron, but the period saw advances in strategic weapons such as submarines and aircraft carriers, and major innovations that resulted in ships and shipbuilding essentially like what we see today. In the period before the age of flight, sophisticated warships were highly visible embodiments of the state of a nation’s technology, and the rapidly expanding U.S. fleet was an unmistakable sign of its growing industrial and technological prominence. [Illustration: _Charlestown’s machine shop in 1913. Overhead belts transferred power from a central steam engine to the machines. The potentially hazardous belts were later replaced with electric motors on each machine._] [Illustration: _Lathe operator shapes steam turbine rotor for destroyer tender Whitney in 1923._]