History
The United States Navy takes most of its traditions, customs and organizational structure from that of the Royal Navy of Great Britain. Based on the Royal Navy model, there were originally two kinds of officers on a naval ship of the line, the commanding officers, who were "gentlemen" and commanded the ship, and the warrant officers, who were technical specialists who ran important tasks. In the nineteenth century, with the introduction of steam power, a third group of officers developed, engineers, who ran the steam plant. As the technology developed, the engineers were requesting more rights, including command. This system evolved in similar fashion in the Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War and in the successor United States Navy into the nineteenth century. Eventually, this dispute led the Department of the Navy to abolish the differences between the groups, amalgamating them into Unrestricted Line Officers in 1899. This fact can lead to confusion with non-American naval personnel, lacking the division between the two groups. The Russian Navy is an example of one with a difference between Deck and Engineer officers.
Read more about this topic: Unrestricted Line Officer
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)