Bradley Fiske started life as a plain black-shoe line officer on commissioning from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1870. The U.S. Navy trailed the leading navies of the world in the transition from sail to steam, from wood to steel, and from smoothbores to rifled naval artillery. The Navy caught up in a hurry, however, commencing in 1880 with the “ABCD” ships (the cruisers Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago, and the dispatch boat Dolphin), followed quickly by battleships and destroyers. Fiske lived through that transformation and was a leader of it.
Young Lieutenant Fiske saw in that transition a need for electricity. At age 28 in 1882, he applied for a six-month leave of absence to study the potential of electricity in warships. There was no postgraduate school for the study of science and technology then, so he asked to go to the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York. Then as now, service reputations were acquired early, and Fiske’s former executive officer, Captain Bowman McCalla, was Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Navigation when the request was received. He recalled Fiske as a free spirit with a flair for creative thinking. The outcome was that Fiske was sent off to study—not for six months, but a whole year.
The Navy never got a greater payback from graduate education than with its investment in Fiske. During that year he published his first technical article, sold his first patent, and was well into his first textbook on the theory and practice of electricity, which was published in 1887 and eventually went through 10 printings over the next 22 years. These were halcyon days when electricity and electrical engineering were so new that opportunities for creativity were wide open. One man working by himself could make a difference.
Between 1878 and 1896, Fiske produced a detaching device for quick release of a ship’s boat, a “pit log” to measure speed through the water electrically, a depth-sounder and forerunner of the modern fathometer, the flashing signal light for intership communication, a more efficient electrical insulator, the stadimeter for measuring short ranges between ships, and numerous other inventions, large and small.
Fiske also designed the electrical drive to rotate warship gun turrets, the electrical gears that move guns in elevation fast enough for continuous-aim fire, the first electrically actuated shell, and the powered ammunition hoist that made big guns practical. Fiske called for a central shipboard gunfire control station aloft that would permit continuous-aim salvo fire. In addition, with his technical skill, he did what gunfire innovator Vice Admiral William S. Sims never could have done: he designed a gunnery range finder and, more important, an electric remote range transmitter to centralize range-finding from high in a ship, all to fulfill his own vision.
In 1912, as a rear admiral at sea, Fiske took his first seaplane ride and became an enthusiast for naval air power. Indeed, he anticipated the torpedo bomber, for he designed and patented an aerial torpedo before aircraft power plants were strong enough to lift his torpedo into the air.
Fiske also was an innovative strategist and tactician. When he was outfitting what is now called the “New Navy,” Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce and his protege, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, were developing at the new Naval War College a maritime philosophy that in an amazingly short time became a mantra of navies and nations, including the U.S. Navy. Fiske was plucked to come to the war college in 1896. His studies there directed his energies in new, nontechnical directions. He became one of the upstart reformers who believed too much power both in constructing and operating the Navy resided in the Secretary of the Navy, and he argued that sea-going naval officers deserved more influence over the bureaus as well as over the conduct of operations at sea.
Fiske’s opening salvo in the battle for reform was his Naval Institute Prize Essay of 1905. It was entitled “American Naval Policy,” but this extraordinary 80-page work covered policy, strategy, operations, and tactics, and made unequivocal his belief that the design and construction of warships was to be guided by the officers who would fight in them and who knew the tactics their ships must use. In this article and appearing for the first time was the equivalent of the now-famous “Lanchester square law of combat” (used to predict the outcome and number of combatants that survive a given battle) a full decade before British engineer F. W. Lanchester himself deduced it.
Fiske was assigned as aide to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels in 1913. Daniels is primarily remembered for drying up the seagoing Navy—removing its spirits. He was forceful and opinionated, and as a journalist by trade quite ignorant of the operating Navy at a time when the war clouds of Europe lay on the horizon. Sims later would play his own vital part in London at the war’s crisis by helping to deal with the first epidemic of German U-Boats in the Atlantic, but at the time Sims said someone else would have to fight for reform “because Bradley Fiske is constitutionally opposed to conflict of any kind.” Sims was right about Fiske’s temperament, but wrong about Fiske’s determination, for Fiske was not above a Machiavellian stroke.
In January 1915, without Daniels’s knowledge, Fiske and a few assistants met literally in the dead of night with Congressman Richmond P. Hobson, the man who as a Navy lieutenant in 1898 had almost succeeded in blocking Santiago Harbor by blowing up the collier Merrimac in its narrow entrance. With the consent of only the Navy’s Admiral George Dewey, from that meeting came the legislation establishing the office of Chief of Naval Operations. Although Daniels was able to constrain the new office’s power in the early days, the creation of the post and its staff by legislation marked a turning point and ensured the growth of the uniformed influence that Luce, Fiske, Sims, David W. Taylor, William F. Fullam, and the other progressives knew to be essential for professional planning.
Bradley Fiske was an officer who served in the Old Navy but he did more than any other single man to equip the New Navy. While leading this new force at sea before World War I, he championed the future of naval aviation, and as a senior officer he fought battles in Washington with skill, acumen, character, and honor.
