Laughton builds the sources needed for serious naval history

After leaving naval teaching in 1885, Laughton became professor of modern history at King's College London and used his Admiralty connections to establish archival research on naval records. With Admiral Cyprian Bridge, he founded the Naval Records Society in 1893 and served as its first secretary. The society assembled and published primary documents so that historians and officers could work from evidence rather than inherited anecdote. Later interpretations include The Foundations of Naval History and The Education of a Navy, while Laughton's own thinking remains scattered through editorial notes on collections such as the Barham and Nelson papers and through the minds he trained. His indirect legacy resembles that of a naval designer understood through the ships produced: Laughton's historical theory appears in the scholarship, source collections, and students that followed him. Building access to sources could be as institutionally important as writing a celebrated synthesis.