| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In 1897 the British Admiralty transformed Spithead and the river Solent, which runs alongside the maritime town of Portsmouth, into a theater where popular naval culture and technology met. The 1897 naval review celebrated Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, but also had significance as the occasion of the first public display of Charles Parsons’s Turbinia, an experimental vessel thirty-two meters long and approximately the size of a torpedo-boat destroyer, fitted with his marine steam turbine.1 Historians of technology have referred to this moment as part of the “turbine revolution” that changed how societies produced power and propelled themselves across oceans and through skies.2 A considerable amount of revolutionary rhetoric has certainly surrounded the turbine’s early history. Emile Weyl, a retired French naval officer who wrote for Thomas Brassey’s influential Naval Annual, remarked that “the Turbinia is perhaps destined to revolutionize naval construction.”3 Weyl was joined by Brassey, a politician and publisher interested in naval matters and civil engineering, and numerous naval officers, engineers, and enthusiasts who subscribed to the possibility that a turbine revolution would strongly tip the balance of the European naval arms race in Britain’s favor. Turbinia, which broke the then-maximum speed record for a vessel of its size, demonstrated the potential role of the turbine in the large technological systems upon which naval supremacy rested. Indeed, Admiral Sir John Fisher, who between 1890 and 1915 held a number of high-profile posts in the Admiralty, made the turbine a central feature of the design for HMS Dreadnought (1906).4 A reassessment of the initial response to Turbinia and marine turbine, however, provides a far more complicated account than is usually presented.5 Two months before the 1897 naval review, Parsons described his invention in a paper at the Institution of Naval Architects (INA). The INA was the leading professional body for naval architects, formed in 1860 to improve the standing of naval architects in industry, the Admiralty, and government. Among the many newspapers and periodicals that covered INA meetings was The Times, which referred to the content of Parsons’s paper in terms of a “possible future” for marine engineering. This future was by no means certain, and the article cautiously stated that the technology was still “in a purely experimental, perhaps almost in an embryo, stage.”6 Indeed, many members of the INA, including the north England industrialist and shipbuilder Alfred Yarrow, were surprised that a practical marine turbine was at all possible.7 John Corry remarked that information “is too meagre with regard to the construction and details of the boat [so that] much is left to our imagination.”8 The clearest example of this lacuna concerned the marine turbine’s incommensurability with engineering apparatus designed for testing the performance of reciprocating engines, most importantly dynamometers. This article reexamines the initial display and interpretations of the marine turbine within the context of this measurement problem. It begins by exploring the resources that the spatiality of the naval review offered Parsons and his social network to shape and sustain particular discursive readings of the turbine. It shows how the pageantry, naval culture, and imperial grandeur of the naval review not only constituted an effective advertisement for the marine turbine, but had a vital interpretive function to play. Cultural values were embedded in the spatial resources of the naval review that Parsons’s social network could draw upon to situate and sustain readings of the turbine as a progressive and credible alternative to the reciprocating engine. The discourses provided by these witnesses, drawing on the spectacle and symbols manufactured at Spithead, formed a vital component of how practicing engineers, naval authorities, and nonspecialists understood the possibilities of a “turbine revolution.” Authority, Spectacle, and Witnessing The steam turbine had been the subject of scientific theories for centuries.9 Nineteenth-century engineers and physicists believed that the turbine, if it could be built, would be a potentially perfect thermodynamic system.10 Charles Parsons, who was the sixth son of William Parsons (the third Earl of Rosse) and a Cambridge wrangler, successfully invented a turbine to generate power in the 1880s (fig. 1).11 A legacy of theoretical promise did...
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