For 500 years the defence of this country depended on supremacy at sea and that depended mainly on one kind of ship, the battleship. Until Trafalgar it was the ship of the line, a hundred guns and lots of sails. Later it was the Iron-Clad-iron hulls, iron armour and the iron ram to slice through wooden warships. The most powerful Navy in history built the largest battleship the world had ever seen-the Dreadnought. It was the wonder-ship of the Edwardian era. But across the Atlantic the Wright brothers successfully developed something which was to dethrone the battleship-the flying machine. It was another thirty years before the Royal Navy was finally convinced and the aircraft carrier became the first ship of the line. In the Pacific in the Second World War carrier fleets clashed in battle after battle but only the airmen sighted the enemy. Torpedoes and bombs, not guns and shells, became the decisive weapons. Britain's naval strength has steadily declined yet ironically her ingenuity has kept her in the forefront of carrier technique. Today carriers are again on the brink of change as dramatic as any of the past fifty years. Produced by DEREK Smith from the Midlands
