John Ericsson was far too experienced an engineer to laden his project with untried and untested technologies. These widely-believed statements about the novelty of USS Monitor and the selflessness of her designer are patently false. These statements were quickly picked up by journals and magazines around the country celebrating the life of John Ericsson, and have been uncritically quoted ever since. Newton to secure patents for these, but he declined to do so”. A generation later, Ericsson’s biographer, William Conant Church, writing just a year after his subject’s death, attributed the statement to Monitor’s first assistant engineer Isaac Newton, who “estimated…that she contained at least forty patentable contrivances. Very properly, what these inventions are, is not proclaimed to the public”. Abbott described Monitor as not “merely an iron-clad vessel, with a turret but there are, in fact, between thirty and forty patentable inventions upon her, and the turret is by no means the most important one. Abbott’s The History of the Civil War in America, first published in the spring of 1863 even as the battles of Vicksburg and Chancellorsville were raging, and Gettysburg was still a lively manufacturing town untouched by war. In reality, it ended in a draw.Introduction: “Forty patentable contrivances”Īmong the many myths that grew up around USS Monitor was that she not only represented a revolutionary concept in naval warfare, marrying steam, armor and a revolving turret, but that her inventor, John Ericsson, had stuffed the ship chock-full of new technologies. After shelling one another for four hours and unable to sink the other, they retired, each thinking they had won the battle. The Monitor had arrived and the first Battle of the Ironclads commenced. At this point the crew of the Virginia realized that it was another ironclad ship. As it was coming within range to fire upon the disabled Union ship, the Confederate crew found that a new vessel had slipped into the area under cover of darkness and had stationed itself between them and the Massachusetts. Early the next morning the Virginia set out to finish its work from the previous evening. It retired back to Norfolk as the sun went down seeing that the other major Union vessel in the area the USS Massachusetts, had been disabled. It sailed out of Norfolk, Virginia late in the evening and sank two Union vessels: the USS Cumberland and the USS Congress. The Confederates wanted to nullify the Union’s advantage of naval power, while the Union wanted to take away any strategic economic support the Confederacy might obtain from its remaining ports. The Union’s version of the ship would be called the USS Monitor.Įach side raced to complete their design before the other. The first of these vessels was made by the Confederacy and was named the CSS Virginia. This technology served the navy first in 1862 at the Battle of Hampton Roads. With the invention of steel plate technology, both Union and Confederate warships would make the wooden seafaring vessels of the world obsolete. It was these ships, more so than any other wartime naval innovation, which would revolutionize naval warfare and have long standing effects after the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865. īy the middle years of the war, the Confederacy and Union both had introduced ironclads in order to overcome the wooden fleets that each country maintained. In stopping the Virginia’s rampage, the Monitor, prevented a Confederate naval attack on the national capital, protected the Atlantic blockading squadron and offered a workable model for other ironclad vessels to be used by the Union Navy. The significance of the Monitor in American naval military and technological history cannot be overstated. Ironclad vessels revolutionized warefare at sea
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