Monitor not only used a newer and better screw propeller, it also carried the first gun turret. But his greater triumph came in 1861 when he designed the radical ironclad Monitor. That was Swedish inventor John Ericsson.Įricsson had already built a fine steam warship, the Princeton. He replaced paddle-wheels with a then-radical, but very effective, screw propeller. It took another civilian outsider to jumpstart the technology of steam warships once the Civil War had begun. Then they did not move with anything like the speed that civilian builder Fulton had. Only after civilian steam packet service was in full swing did they begin serious steam warship building. The Confederate forces finally burned it when they found it in Pensacola, early in the Civil War.Įxcept for a steam dispatch boat, the US Navy didn't have another finished steamship until 1842. Called Fulton (the second), it also saw some West Indies service. Not until 1837 did they agree on a design and build a 180-foot steamer. Meanwhile, commissioners studied the matter. So what did the Navy do, now that the advantages of steam were clear? Well, they bought a small steamship, used it for three years in the West Indies, then mothballed it. Finally, in 1829, someone's carelessness in its powder magazine caused an explosion that blew it to bits. During the years of peace that followed, The Fulton saw only ceremonial service. Fulton died a few months before it was finished, and the ship was renamed The Fulton in his honor. Others had built steamboats before Fulton but it was he who'd quickly brought them into wide public use.ĭemologos was a radical design: The engine and paddlewheels were sandwiched between two hulls, where enemy fire couldn't reach them. Fulton had aggressively built commercial riverboats. Fulton's original steamboat patent was only eight years old. It was called Demologos or Word of the People, and its builder was Robert Fulton. The Navy's first steamship was built in New York during the waning days of the War of 1812. Like most military technology steam warships sprang from civilian invention. The plowshares-to-swords story of the US Navy and steam spanned two wars. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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