The "Battleship of the Future" - SMS Kaiser Franz Joseph I

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]When you think of Austria today, you probably picture snowy mountains, classical music, and Vienna coffees, right? You definitely don't picture a massive world-roaming navy. But, back in the late 1800s, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a fairly serious fleet. And today, I want to tell you the story of [music] one specific ship that perfectly captures how crazy, fast-paced, and unpredictable the naval history could be. Let me introduce you to the SMS Kaiser Franz Joseph I.

[00:00:28]Also, this is a fairly long name, so the rest of the video I will refer to her as Franz Joseph.

[00:00:34]>> [music] >> To understand why this ship was built, you have to look at Austria-Hungary's neighbor, Italy. Even though they were technically allies at times, they really didn't trust each other. They shared a coastline on the Adriatic Sea, and they were always peeking over the fence to see what the other was doing. In the 1880s, Italy built two shining new cruisers named Giovanni Bausan and Etna.

[00:01:02]Austria-Hungary panicked a little [music] and realized they needed a response. So, in June 1890, the Austro-Hungarian Navy officially commissioned the Kaiser Franz Joseph I.

[00:01:12]She was a big deal because she was the empire's very first protected cruiser.

[00:01:16]Now, if you are not familiar with the term, a protected cruiser basically means the ship wasn't wrapped entirely in heavy armor. That would make it too slow.

[00:01:25]Instead, it had a thick, curved steel deck hidden deep inside the hull. This deck sat right over the engines and the explosive magazines, protecting the most vital parts of the ship from enemy shells, while keeping the ship light and fast enough [music] to hunt down enemies. In terms of firepower, she was packing a punch. She had two massive 24-cm main guns, one on the front [music] and one on the back, plus six 15-cm guns on the sides. But, the most interesting design feature of the Franz Joseph was her nose. She had a very prominent, sharp ram bow poking out of the water. Why, you might ask? [music] Well, it goes back to a famous fight called the Battle of Lissa. A few decades earlier, a much smaller Austrian fleet managed to defeat the Italian Navy largely by crashing into them and ramming their ships until they sank.

[00:02:17][music] The Austrians were so proud of this that they kept sticking giant metal spikes on the front of their ships thinking that ramming was the ultimate way to win a sea fight. When Franz Joseph and her sister ship, the Kaiserin Elizabeth, were finished, the commander of the Navy, Admiral Sterneck, was absolutely thrilled. He actually hailed them as "battleships of the future."

[00:02:42]Sterneck was a big believer in a French naval theory going around at time called Jeune École, which roughly translates to young school. This theory was basically the 19th century version of a tech startup trying to disrupt a big industry. [music] The idea was simple.

[00:02:58]Why spend a fortune building massive, slow, heavily armored ships when you can just build small, fast ships and arm with cheap torpedoes? The displacement and the speed of the Franz Joseph perfectly fit this new >> [music] >> theory. Sterneck's master plan was that the Franz Joseph wouldn't fight alone.

[00:03:17]Instead, she would act as the muscle leading a fast-moving torpedo division made up one light cruiser, one destroyer, and six little torpedo boats.

[00:03:28]It sounded like a brilliant plan, but there was a major problem. Technology and trends change incredibly fast. Right around the time the Franz Joseph was hitting the water, an American naval historian named Alfred Thayer Mahan published a book that completely changed the world. Mahan pushed the decisive battle doctrine. He argued that the only way to truly control the oceans was to build the biggest, most heavily armored battleships possible and smash them against the enemy's fleet in one giant winner takes all battle. Every major navy in the world read Mahan's book and said, "Yeah, let's do that." Just like that, the Jeune École A theory was thrown out of the window. And because of this massive shift in strategic thinking, the Kaiser Franz Joseph I was considered obsolete almost immediately after she was commissioned.

[00:04:20]But you don't just throw away a brand new expensive warship. Even if she wasn't the battleship of the future anymore, she still had a very important job to do. Austria-Hungary shifted her focus to coastal [music] defense and something navies call showing the flag.

[00:04:36]Basically, they used the ship as a floating billboard to show the rest of the world that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was powerful and relevant. Before World War I, the Franz Joseph lived a pretty adventurous life for an outdated ship. She sailed on several long overseas voyages, she represented the emperor at international events. Most notably, when the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China at the turn of the century, the world powers sent troops to protect their people and [music] interest. The Franz Joseph actually did a few tours of duty out in Asia to protect Austro-Hungarian citizens and show that the empire had a global [music] reach.

[00:05:15]However, everything changed in 1914 when World War I was started. By this point, the Franz Joseph was fairly old. She was too slow and her weapons were too [music] outdated to go toe-to-toe with modern battleships. So, she was kept close to home. She was stationed down in the Bay of Kotor, which is modern-day Montenegro. Her main job was to be a heavily armed guard dog protecting the entrance to the naval base. She wasn't completely useless in the war, though.

[00:05:41]At one point, her guns were used to fire up into the nearby mountains to support ground troops fighting against Montenegrin forces on Mount Lovćen, but as the war dragged on, the navy realized her heavy guns would actually be more useful on land. So, they stripped off her main weapons to use elsewhere, and she was downgraded to a headquarters ship. Her glorious days of sailing to China were replaced by officers doing paperwork in her cabins. When World War I finally ended in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. The empire was broken [music] up to different countries, and as the empire ceased to exist, they had no longer a coastline, meaning they no longer needed a navy. The victorious allies started dividing up the leftover Austro-Hungarian ships among themselves, and the Kaiser Franz Joseph I was given to France. But, the ship never actually made it to a French harbor. In October 1919, while she was still sitting in the Bay of Kotor waiting to be taken away, a massive violent storm rolled in. The old cruiser, heavily loaded with extra equipment and battered by the weather, began to take on water. Her hatches were open, and the water rushed in too fast for anyone to stop it. She rolled over and sank right there in the bay.

[00:06:59]>> [music] >> And, honestly, it feels like a very fitting end to her story. Built to be a futuristic warship, quickly left behind by changing technology, she spent her life traveling the world before guarding her home until the very end. Sinking in that storm meant she never had to be scrapped or serve under foreign flag.

[00:07:20]She went down on her own terms, and that is the story of the SMS Kaiser Franz Joseph I.

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