Would Britain of been better off it never launched HMS Dreadnought?

As other have mentioned the idea was already out there and other countries were already moving towards it with their designs. There's also the national prestige question. The Royal Navy had a reputation to keep up, and unlike with La Gloire where they could quickly answer with the much more advanced HMS Warrior here at best they'd merely be able to come up with something similar and look like they were following others so better to take the lead IMO. Plus with being able to build it in under a year thanks to building up a store or material and prefabricating parts before officially laying down the keel it also gave them the wow factor of coming out with something revolutionary and in such a short time.
 
As other have mentioned the idea was already out there and other countries were already moving towards it with their designs. There's also the national prestige question. The Royal Navy had a reputation to keep up, and unlike with La Gloire where they could quickly answer with the much more advanced HMS Warrior here at best they'd merely be able to come up with something similar and look like they were following others so better to take the lead IMO. Plus with being able to build it in under a year thanks to building up a store or material and prefabricating parts before officially laying down the keel it also gave them the wow factor of coming out with something revolutionary and in such a short time.

Thru out the late 19th century the Royal Navy often let other nations take the technological point on maritime advances. Their private shipyards, namely Vickers and Armstrong, frequently produced designs for foreign nations that were better than those they built for the RN.
 
Whilst tirelessly revising for my history A-level, I came across many claims that Britain inadvertently weakened its own position in the naval race with Germany by launching HMS Dreadnought.

Now I could see their inital position, as it made their massive numerical advantage in Pre-dreadnoughts irrelevant, but I fail to see how it would quite measure up. I mean, Japan had already begun building Satsuma and the USN had designed USS South Carolina and USS Michigan so surely someone else that Britain cared about would catch on?

Would Britain really have been better off having Fischer fall down the stairs before 1906? Or did the inital head start benefit the Royal Navy in the long run?

Admiral Fisher was also a fan of the Submarine and the power of the torpedo. He forsaw the end of the battleship era before most other people.

In a way the dreadnought was an admission that the old battleship era was over and was perhaps a gamble to persuade the rest of the world that the cost of such large manpower intensive ships would be prohibitive.

Maybe a mass fleet of destroyers, submarines, minelayers and minesweepers backed by large numbers of cruisers would have been more useful than a fleet of over 30 dreadnoughts by 1917.

I think it's unfair to blame Fisher for weakening Britain's position. Without him the Royal Navy would have been defeated in WW1.
 
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