A Brief Dry Spell for the U.S.S. Monitor

Steve Earley/The Virginian-Pilot

IRONCLAD The U.S.S. Monitor, designed by John Ericsson, was not just the Union's first ironclad vessel but an entirely new kind of warship. Here, conservators work in the upside-down turret.

The technology that changed naval warfare started with a five-sentence ad in 1861, and resulted in the U.S.S. Monitor less than six months later.

The technology that revolutionized naval warfare began with a five-sentence message delivered to The New York Times 150 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1861, and the information was not exactly classified. It was an advertisement placed by the Union Navy, to appear the following six days, under the heading “Iron-Clad Steam Vessels.”

“The Navy Department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind,” the ad announced, describing its desire for a two-masted ship “either of iron or of wood and iron combined. The plans had to be submitted by early September, giving designers less than a month.

Less than six months later, a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight.

But somehow it survived both the Navy bureaucracy and a broadside barrage to become one of the most celebrated ships in the world. Its designer and crew were the 19th-century celebrity equivalent of astronauts. Long after the ship sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the turret remained a cultural icon: an “armored tower” in Melville’s poetry, an image on book covers and film posters, a shape reproduced in items from toys to refrigerators.

Now the original turret, which was recovered from the ocean floor nine years ago and placed in a freshwater tank to protect it from corrosion, is on display again. It has been temporarily exposed to the air so that it can be scraped clean — very carefully, in front of museum visitors and a live webcam — by a team of researchers at the U.S.S. Monitor Center of the Mariners’ Museum here in Newport News. The team expects to have nearly all the barnacles and sediment removed by the end of this month, giving the public a new look at the dents from the Confederate cannonballs and shells that would have sunk any ordinary ship of its day. Then the turret will be submerged again in fresh water for 15 more years, until enough ocean salt has been removed from the metal to allow it to face the air permanently.

The more that researchers examine the turret and about 1,500 other artifacts from the Monitor, the more impressed they are with its designer, John Ericsson. Besides the 360-degree rotating turret, there were dozens of other patentable inventions in the ship, including a new type of compact engine and a new toilet that could be flushed below the waterline.

“What makes the Monitor so remarkable is that she’s almost a stealth vessel because all the systems except the ordnance are below the waterline,” said Anna Holloway, the curator at the Monitor Center. “Keeping the engine safe from attack was a big breakthrough. Not only did Ericsson create this radically new type of vessel, but his designs were so nearly flawless that foundries and contractors from around the Northeast could fabricate the parts, and they all fit together when the ship was assembled in Greenpoint. It boggles the mind.”

The Monitor has been so familiar for so long that it is hard to realize just how radical it seemed at the time — and how much luck was involved in building it. The ship’s history is a case study in the difficulties of technological innovation. The Monitor had a genius for a designer and a lobbyist so well connected that President Abraham Lincoln made a personal plea for it, yet when a scale model was first presented in Washington, the members of the Navy’s Ironclad Board rejected it.

“Take the little thing home and worship it,” one board member said disdainfully, “as it would not be idolatry because it was made in the image of nothing in the heaven above or the earth below or the water under the earth.”

The Monitor’s designer might have taken that as a compliment. Mr. Ericsson once described himself in a letter to President Lincoln as having “practical and constructive skill shared by no engineer now living.” But skill was no guarantee of success, as he knew from bitter experience.

A native of Sweden, Mr. Ericsson moved to London and produced one innovation after another, including a screw propeller to replace the paddle wheel on the steam-powered warship. But the British Admiralty was too conservative to adopt it, and he foundered financially. After a stint in debtors’ prison, he found a new patron and moved to New York.

The United States Navy commissioned a warship, the Princeton, that proved to be one of the most advanced in the world, thanks to a screw propeller and other innovations by Mr. Ericsson. But after its success, he was pushed aside by his partner in the project, Robert F. Stockton, an American naval officer (and future United States senator from New Jersey) who took public credit for Mr. Ericsson’s inventions — until a public disaster.