Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher, First Sea Lord of the Board of Admiralty, is credited as the father of Dreadnought.

Shortly after he assumed office in 1904, he ordered design studies for a battleship armed solely with 12 in (305 mm) guns and a speed of 21 knots (39 km/h; 24 mph).

She was also the first capital ship to be powered by steam turbines, making her the fastest battleship in the world at the time of her completion.

Gunnery developments in the late 1890s and the early 1900s, led in the United Kingdom by Percy Scott and in the United States by William Sims, were already pushing expected battle ranges out to an unprecedented 6,000 yd (5,500 m), a distance great enough to force gunners to wait for the shells to arrive before applying corrections for the next salvo.

Another problem was that longer-range torpedoes were expected soon to be in service and these would discourage ships from closing to ranges where the smaller guns' faster rate of fire would become preeminent.

Keeping the range open generally negated the threat from torpedoes and further reinforced the need for heavy guns of a uniform calibre.

When the Italian Navy did not pursue his ideas, Cuniberti wrote an article in Jane's Fighting Ships advocating his concept.

He proposed an "ideal" future British battleship of 17,000 long tons (17,000 t), with a main battery of a dozen 12-inch guns in eight turrets, 12 inches of belt armour, and a speed of 24 knots (44 km/h; 28 mph).

After he was appointed First Sea Lord on 20 October 1904, he pushed through the Board of Admiralty a decision to arm the next battleship with 12 inch guns and that it would have a speed no less than 21 knots.

[13] The committee decided on the layout of the main armament, rejecting any superfiring arrangements because of concerns about the effects of muzzle blast on the open sighting hoods on the turret roof below, and chose turbine propulsion over reciprocating engines to save 1,100 long tons (1,100 t) in total displacement on 18 January 1905.

This was deemed necessary after the Russian battleship Tsesarevich was thought to have survived a Japanese torpedo hit during the Russo–Japanese War by virtue of her heavy internal bulkhead.

It was decided due to the experimental nature of the design to delay placing orders for any other ships until Dreadnought and her trials had been completed.

This was very unpopular with the officers, not least because they were now berthed near the noisy auxiliary machinery while the turbines made the rear of the ship much quieter than they had been in earlier steamships.

[18] Vickers, Sons & Maxim was the prime contractor for the ship's machinery, but as they had no large turbine experience, they sourced them from Parsons.

[22] She had two paired sets of direct-drive turbines, each of which drove two 8-foot-10-inch (2.7 m) diameter, three-bladed propellers using[23] steam provided by 18 Babcock & Wilcox boilers that had a working pressure of 250 psi (1,724 kPa; 18 kgf/cm2).

They fired 850 lb (390 kg) projectiles at a muzzle velocity of 2,725 ft/s (831 m/s), giving a maximum range of 16,450 yd (15,040 m) with armour-piercing (AP) 2 crh shells.

[20] Dreadnought was one of the first vessels of the Royal Navy to be fitted with instruments for electrically transmitting range, order and deflection information to the turrets.

The control positions for the main armament were located in the spotting top at the head of the foremast and on a platform on the roof of the signal tower.

[29] Firing trials against Hero in 1907 revealed this system's vulnerability to gunfire, as its spotting top was hit twice and a large splinter severed the voice pipe and all wiring running along the mast.

The rangefinder in the foretop was given a gyro-stabilized Argo mount and 'A' and 'Y' turrets were upgraded to serve as secondary control positions for any portion or all of the main armament.

[30] Fire-control technology advanced quickly during the years immediately preceding the First World War, and the most important development was the director firing system.

An 8 in (203 mm) bulkhead was angled obliquely inwards from the end of the main belt to the side of 'X' barbette to fully enclose the armoured citadel at middle deck level.

[37] To meet Fisher's goal of building the ship in a single year, material was stockpiled in advance and a great deal of prefabrication was done from May 1905 with about 6,000 man weeks of work expended before she was formally laid down on 2 October 1905.

Dreadnought was christened with a bottle of Irvine's sparkling Australian wine[39] by King Edward VII on 10 February 1906,[40] after only four months on the ways.

[20] Dreadnought sailed for the Mediterranean Sea for extensive trials in December 1906 calling in at Arosa Bay, Gibraltar and Golfo d'Aranci before crossing the Atlantic to Port of Spain, Trinidad, in January 1907, returning to Portsmouth on 23 March 1907.

During this cruise, her engines and guns were given a thorough workout by Captain Reginald Bacon, Fisher's former Naval Assistant and a member of the Committee on Designs.

His report stated, "No member of the Committee on Designs dared to hope that all the innovations introduced would have turned out as successfully as had been the case.

[49] The most important issue, which was never addressed in her lifetime, was that the placement of her foremast behind the forward funnel put the spotting top right in the plume of hot exhaust gases, much to the detriment of her fighting ability.

Dreadnought became flagship of the 3rd Battle Squadron on 9 July, based at Sheerness on the Thames, part of a force of pre-dreadnoughts intended to counter the threat of shore bombardment by German battlecruisers.

She returned to the Grand Fleet in March 1918, resuming her role as flagship of the 4th Battle Squadron, but was paid off on 7 August 1918 at Rosyth.