Arthur Pollen - Fire Control

Fire Control

Through a relative, Commander William Goodenough, Pollen saw a naval gunnery practice near Malta in 1900, and the accuracy was so poor that even at ranges of less than a mile the big guns could not reliably hit their targets. On the board of the Linotype Company at the time was Lord Kelvin, widely regarded as Britain's leading scientist. It was Kelvin who proposed using an analogue computer to solve the equations which arise from the relative motion of the ships engaged in the battle and the time delay in the flight of the shell to calculate the required trajectory and therefore the direction and elevation of the guns. Kelvin's brother James Thomson was responsible for producing a tidal analyser using a ball, disc and cylinder differential analyzer which was the original source of the suggested analogue computer.

However first accurate data is needed of the target's position and relative motion. Pollen developed a plotting unit (or plotter) to capture this data. He added a gyroscope to allow for the yaw of the firing ship. Again this required substantial development of the, at the time, primitive gyroscope to provide continuous reliable correction. Pollen utilised the resources of Linotype for his work, specifically the services of a designer named Harold Isherwood. Trials were carried out in 1905 and 1906, which although completely unsuccessful showed promise. To further the development of fire-control Pollen set up in 1909 the Argo Company, and in 1911 took a holding in the firm of Thomas Cooke & Sons of York, who had been manufacturing components for his equipment.

Early on Pollen was encouraged in his efforts by the rapidly-rising figure of Admiral Jackie Fisher, Admiral Arthur Knyvet Wilson and the Director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes (DNO), John Jellicoe. Many officers in the navy were naturally interested in the prospect of being able to have ranges calculated for them so that they could achieve a greater rate of hits against the enemy. In early 1906, while presenting his planned "Aim Correction" system to naval officers, he met for the second time a promising gunnery lieutenant, Frederic Dreyer. The nature of Pollen's work involved close cooperation with the Navy, and upon Dreyer's appointment as Assistant to the DNO with responsibility for fire-control he was invited to view Pollen's Linotype works at Broadheath, near Altrincham. Pollen had had a long relationship with Dreyer's predecessor, Lieutenant Harding.

Pollen continued his work, with tests carried out on Royal Navy warships intermittently. Equipment was repeatedly purchased, despite the misgivings of successive DNOs Reginald Bacon and Gordon Moore.

The fundamental difference between the systems was that the Dreyer system was a "dual rate" approach that plotted ranges and bearings separately, versus time rather than using a single rangefinder to take both ranges and bearings to drive the drawing of a plan view of own and target ships, as in the Argo system. The systems differed in other particulars.

The single prototype Dreyer Fire Control Table (called simply "the Original") did not include a gyroscope, though the first adopted for service in 1912—the Mark III—did. Conversely, the automatic plotting of rangefinder readings on the Original Dreyer table and early service examples was later discarded in favour of manual plotting keyboards which were capable of plotting the data of multiple rangefinders. Dreyer played a key role within the Admiralty in deciding which system to use, and always chose his own.

Certain aspects of the Dreyer Table Mk III were found by a subsequent Royal Commission to be similar to Pollen's work and £30,000 compensation was paid to Pollen in 1926 based on a theoretical number of his Argo units which might have been fitted in Royal Navy ships, most of which were never constructed. Pollen's supporters have argued that the poor performance of Naval gunnery at the Battle of Jutland and at Gallipoli was due to the shortcomings of the Dreyer system, but others cite the tactics of the commander of the British battlecruisers, Vice-Admiral David Beatty.