I'm needing to find something that'll tell me the size of the worlds navies in the early 20th century up to WW1. does anyone know where i can look up that info?
You can use Wikipedia or a naval reference book. Keep in mind that things only a few years apart can differ greatly in utility for combat, as technology was changing quite rapidly in the pre-war era. Throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s fleets had used reciprocating engines and experimented with a variety of armament types and arrangements, but the Japanese wars against China and most crucially Russia showed what actually worked in practice. Around the same time turbines were found to be practical for naval applications. It's not so much that
Dreadnought had anything new on it as much as the fact that it combined those features for the first time on a battleship. It's also a nice point to use as the change between old and new, because the battlecruiser
Invincible followed shortly afterwards and new technology and the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War started to filter down into cruiser, destroyer, and submarine design.
So basically, prior to the
Dreadnought era you had pre and semi-dreadnoughts on top, then armored cruisers, protected cruisers, unprotected cruisers, torpedo boat destroyers, torpedo boats, and submarines of quite limited utility. After
Dreadnought it was the dreadnoughts, battlecruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, and more useful submarines. Heavy cruisers didn't catch on until the 1920s, and destroyers and torpedo boats merged into ships that could fulfill both roles and stand a better chance of surviving storms and operations further from the coast.
What's actually useful or modern can vary greatly, so just keep that in mind. Unlike the Age of Sail or the world after the 1920s, between 1860 and 1920 warships were like computers, becoming hopelessly obsolete only a few years into service.