“Fire control” was a new thing in 1905. No navy, save the British, had considered it to any appreciable degree. The _King Edwards_ had taught that control of two calibres from one position was a practical impossibility. Mixed calibres were damned accordingly, and there was no outlet but the _Dreadnought_. But for Cuniberti she might, and possibly would, have remained a theoretical desirability for several more years. The measure of his genius may be the demonstration that such an ideal ship could be built. It is to be argued that he did nothing more than put into practicable shape what already existed as a hypothesis. Even so, however, to him belongs the honour of indicating that the step from theory to practice was possible; and on that account alone he deserves to go down to posterity as the actual creator of Dreadnoughts. In the other three ships of the 1905–06 programme, however, a high speed was accepted as the governing factor. The ships as built were designated “armoured cruisers,” and in so far as the Japanese were known to be building armoured cruisers carrying battleship guns, that designation was legitimate. For that matter, there also existed a paper by Professor Hovgaard, of the Massachusetts School of Naval Architecture, in which it was tentatively laid down that the ideal armoured cruiser of the future would be a battleship in armament and armour, increased in size, to obtain greater speed. The three companion ships to the _Dreadnought_--the _Invincible_, _Inflexible_, and _Indomitable_--adhered no more closely to the Hovgaard ideal than to the Cuniberti one. In principle they varied from the _Dreadnought_ design only in that they sacrificed a certain amount of armour in order to obtain a greater speed. By the adoption of the échelon system, the same broadside-fire was secured for them (on paper, at any rate) as for the _Dreadnought_, though with a turret less. In practice it has been found that there are very few positions in which they can bring more than six big guns to bear, but this must be considered as an error of construction rather than of principle. They have turned out to be wonderful steamers, but considerably inferior sea-boats to the _Dreadnought_, and in the British Navy are generally likely in the future to become regarded as obsolete long before the former. For all that, they probably approximate more nearly to the warship of the future than the _Dreadnought_. Admiral Bacon, in his views as to the warship of the future, generally inclined to the idea of very large and very swift ships, relying on armament, speed, and super-scientific internal sub-division rather than on armour protection. These ships would act more or less independently, each, as it were, representing a divided squadron group of to-day.