A MODERN DESTROYER
This type of ship was originally designed to protect the larger ships from torpedo boats, but now that duty has been eliminated by the elimination of torpedo boats, and destroyers have many uses with the fleets to which they belong.
At about this time, too, explosive shells were introduced, and as these were far more formidable than the solid shot of earlier times, naval men set about protecting ships in order to reduce the effectiveness of this new form of attack.
Iron had been introduced a few years earlier as a ship-building material, and so iron, naturally enough, was used as armour on some of the ships sent to Crimea, for wooden ships of the line had been badly battered by the guns of the Russians when a combined naval force of British and French ships had attacked a fort near Sebastopol. Both the British and the French instantly began to build armoured ships for use in the Crimean War. The British ships were not completed in time, but three of the French ships went very successfully through an engagement with a Russian fort in 1855.
These ships were, of course, awkward, heavy, and slow, but they did prove the value of armour, and so both the French and the British went to work placing armour on wooden ships and building ships of new design.
In 1859 an iron frigate called the Warrior, a ship 380 feet long, displacing 8,800 tons, was begun by the British. A wide strip of armour 4½ inches thick was placed on each side. This armour strip was 213 feet long and was wide enough to extend from a little below the water line to the upper deck. Both bow and stern were unprotected. This ship was, in appearance, merely an enlargement of the wooden steam frigates that had preceded her, but she made the surprising speed, under power, of 14 knots an hour.
While she was being built a new type of cannon was perfected which gave greater power with less weight and she was armed with these improved guns, each of which was of seven-inch bore and weighed between six and seven tons.
Then came the American Civil War and a still newer type of armoured ship was invented. This was the ship with a turret, and the first of these was the Monitor. She was designed by Captain Ericsson, the same man who perfected the screw propeller, and the turret, the most important feature of this ship, is the original one from which the highly perfected turrets of to-day have developed.
The idea of mounting guns in turrets had been suggested before, as a result of the experience gained in the Crimean War, but Ericsson, when he designed the Monitor, was the first to put the idea into practice.
