Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[592] The floating-batteries which had been used in the attack upon Kilburn were condemned as incapable of exact steering. Thanks to M. Dupuy de Lome, France had the honor of possessing the first real war-vessel with iron-plated sides; but the Gloire, in 1861, had not accomplished anything beyond simple efforts at navigation. In England the Warrior was not launched until the close of that same year. Among the inventions of all kinds elicited by the new problem proposed to naval architecture, there was one which, although still confined to the sphere of models, nevertheless already attracted the attention of the most competent men. The honor of this invention is shared between Captain Cowper Coles, a man of fertile resources and daring enterprise, who was doomed to perish in so unfortunate a manner with the vessel he had looked upon as his master-piece, and the Swede Ericsson, who had long been a naturalized citizen of the United States, where he had already become celebrated for his construction of the Princeton, the first war-ship provided with a screw-propeller, and by important improvements in steam machinery. This invention, now familiar to everybody, is that of vessels with revolving turrets, which Ericsson had submitted to the French government as early as 1854, during the siege of Sebastopol. He was aware that, in order to solve so novel a problem, it would be necessary to discard all traditions regarding naval architecture, to abandon the system of high-decked ships, as the engineers of the sixteenth century had given up the castellated forts of the Middle Ages for the low profiles of modern fortifications; then the necessity of encasing the sides of vessels with heavy iron armor introduced a complete change in the conditions of the equilibrium which establish their water-line. This armor, in order to afford efficient protection, had to be of such thickness that it greatly overweighted vessels of moderate size; and in order to reduce the proportional relations between the weight of the armor and that of the volume of water displaced by the hull to a figure compatible with the essential conditions of navigation, it was necessary to build vessels of enormous tonnage. The Warrior was then the type of such vessels, to which European navies have persistently adhered, notwithstanding the fact that the increasing thickness which it has been found indispensable to impart to their sheathing no