USS MONITOR SIDE LEVER ENGINE

[GreenTwin]

Ericsson's ironclad was far from perfect, and I have read about many notable gaffes in its design, such as the fact that it was not seaworthy, ventilation was bad, the turret was not stopped before firing the guns, and so no accuracy at all, and the vulnerable observation post at the front of the boat was hit, blinding the captain; for practical purposes stopping the battle and causing the Monitor to retreat to shallow water.

It should be understood that the Monitor was designed and built in great haste, and used a lot of methods that had never been used before. In the context of the war, and the urgency of needing a boat to effectively counter the South's own ironclad, one can better understand why there was not much time to fine tune the Monitor's design, much less prove new ideas.

You can imagine the difficulty of trying to troubleshoot a new design while being fired upon in battle.

The fact still stands though that naval warfare changed forever after the first ironclad battle.
It was the beginning of the end of wood warships.
Despite its flaws, the Monitor was and is (in my opinion) a very significant technical achievement, used at a very historical moment for the country, and so it will always retain its notoriety.
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[GreenTwin]

If you study the Battle of Hampton Roads, there were some impressive technical achievements on both sides.
The south recovered the burnt Merrimack, and rebuilt it into an armored (with wood) ironclad (woodclad to be exact).
The rebuilt Merrimack (the Virginia) was a formidable gunboat, and it ultimately forced the withdrawl of the Monitor by shooting the Monitor's observation station.

I think the Monitor was more maneuverable, and its shallow draft turned out to be a major technical advantage.
The South had prepared boarding parties, and was prepared to ram the Monitor and overtake/burn it.

The battle fo Hampton roads was technically a defeat for the Monitor, since it retreated to shallow waters after its captain was blinded by a hit to the observation post.
The Virginia did not retreat from the battle.

The Monitor did achieve what it was designed to do, and that is to provide enough of an obstacle to the Virginia to prevent it from freely attacking northern warships.

If the Monitor had control of its turret, it could have potentially landed repeated shots in the same location on the Virginia, and thus penetrated the wood cladding.

The battle was an interesting study in what I consider high-tech vs low-tech technology.
There was some very creative ingenuity used on both sides.
The south built a very formidable gunboat from a burnt/sunken boat, in a very short period of time, using limited resources, and this is a significant technical achievement that often gets overlooked in the history books.

I see similar things today in control designs, with one approach to use complex algorithms to control industrial processes, and another approach using fuzzy logic with lookup tables to achieve as good or often better accuracy.
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