Today, we learn from the present, but only after
it's turned into the past. 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.
The Civil War was a great
testing ground for military ordnance. It revealed a
whole new set of war machines. European observers
watched this parade of half-formed ideas like bugs
under a glass. They watched, but they didn't really
understand. Repeating rifles, ironclad ships,
aerial observation, and submarines all appeared as
imperfect embryos. The watching world didn't
understand that war was being transformed into a
new order of horror. Those machines caught us by
surprise when they converged on WW-I fifty years
later.
Take the Monitor and the
Merrimack. Our school textbooks paint
their epic battle at Hampton Rhodes as one of a
kind -- an oddity. But, thumbing through a
catalogue of Civil War ships, we're caught short.
Other ironclads were already being built while the
battle was going on. The Union built them from
scratch, while the Confederacy raced to convert
wooden ships.
By 1862 a great hobo-stew of iron ships ranged our
coasts and rivers seeking whom they might devour.
Here's the Confederate ship Manassas.
It began life as a wooden ice-breaker. Now it looks
like an iron whale. Screw propellers drive it the
way they drove the Monitor and
Merrimack. The Manassas
has only one small forward-firing gun, but its
front end is a massive ram. She rammed a few Union
ships in 1862. Then she finally ran aground and
burned.
Screw propellers were fairly new. Many ironclads
still used the older paddle wheel -- vulnerable to
enemy guns. Now huge round iron covers sprouted on
paddle-driven iron boats.
Designers also experimented with gun turrets. Some
looked like sawed-off cones -- some like domed
cupolas. Some were pillboxes. Some rotated, and
some didn't. Some gunboats had no turrets at all.
They still carried fixed guns that fired broadside
from loopholes -- like the old sailing warships.
Some ironclads had conventional hulls and rode high
in the water. But most hunkered down in the water
like the Monitor. Some exposed only a
few inches of hull above the surface. Those boats,
of course, were close to being the first
submarines. Submarines were also used first in the
Civil War. And all the while, this terrible
laboratory of war winnowed among the twists and
turns of inventive minds.
By 1914 the modern warship was no longer an
ineffective flight of fancy. Now it was an ordered
and efficient killing machine. And we were finally
ready to learn all that we'd failed to learn in the
Civil War.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
