In like manner the very backward and antiquated Imperial docks [the old tinker's shops, as Tirpitz called them] were rebuilt and developed into model modern plants and the arrangements for the workers were developed so as to further the welfare of the latter along the most approved lines. Only those who, like myself, have followed and seen with their own eyes from the very beginning the origin and development of all these factors necessary to the building up--nay, the creation anew--of the fleet can form anything like a proper idea of the enormous achievement of Admiral von Tirpitz and his entire corps of assistants. The office of the Imperial Naval Department was also a new creation; the old "Oberkommando" was eliminated when it was divided into the two main branches of Admiralty Staff and Imperial Naval Department. Both of these (as in the army) were directly under the supreme war commander in chief--this meant that there was no longer any official between the Emperor and his navy. COMING OF THE DREADNAUGHT When Admiral Fisher evolved an entirely new type of ship for England in the shape of the "dreadnaught"--thereby surprising the world as if he had launched a sudden assault upon it--and thought that he had thus given England, once for all, an unapproachable naval superiority which the rest of the powers could never meet, there was naturally great excitement in all naval circles. The idea, to be sure, did not originate with Fisher, but came--in the form of an appeal to shipbuilders of the whole world--from the famous Italian engineer Cuniberti, who had made public a sketch in Fred Jane's _Illustrated Naval Atlas_. At the first conference regarding the introduction of the "dreadnaught" type of big fighting ship by England I at once agreed with Admiral von Tirpitz that it had robbed all pre-dreadnaughts of their value and consigned them to the scrap heap, especially the German ships, which it had been necessary to keep considerably smaller, on account of the measurements of our old locks, than the ships of other navies, particularly the English.