Short answers, pulled from the story.
The French launched the Gloire, the first ocean-going ironclad warship, in 1859. This vessel was designed by Henri Dupuy de Lôme and featured a wooden hull sheathed in thick iron armor. The launch of the Gloire marked the abrupt end of the wooden ship of the line era.
The British government passed the Naval Defence Act in 1889. This legislation initiated a massive construction program that produced the Royal Sovereign class, the first ships retrospectively classified as pre-dreadnought battleships. These vessels standardized the layout that would define battleships for the next two decades.
The British launched the HMS Dreadnought in 1906. This revolutionary ship discarded the medium-caliber secondary battery in favor of ten 12-inch guns and rendered every existing battleship in the world obsolete overnight. The launch sparked a global naval arms race that forced navies from Germany to Japan to immediately begin constructing their own all-big-gun ships.
The Battle of Jutland was fought on the 31st of May 1916. It remains the only major fleet engagement of World War I and ended in a strategic stalemate between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet. Neither side achieved a decisive victory, and the German fleet retreated to port never to challenge the British blockade again.
The last active battleship, the Japanese Nagato, was scrapped in 1970. The final Iowa-class ship, the USS Wisconsin, was decommissioned in 1991, leaving no active battleships in any navy. By 1995, all four American Iowa-class ships had been struck from the Naval Vessel Register, marking the end of active battleship service worldwide.
The United States Navy announced plans in December 2025 to construct new battleships. This announcement suggests that the dream of the big gun may yet return to the seas despite the obsolescence of traditional battleships in the age of air power. The plans follow the legacy of the battleship which continues to influence naval strategy.