More Lessons Learned from an Earlier Age.

• Author: Lewis, Mark J.
• Position: Emerging Technology Horizons

* In August, I wrote about the development of the Confederate navy ironclad CSS Virginia, and the lessons it holds for the modern age. As I recounted, the Virginia represented a leap in technology that forever changed naval warfare.

But as I also noted, the Virginia met her match, the USS Monitor, after only a single day of fighting. Like the Virginia, the story of the Monitor's development also holds many lessons for our modern era.

Word that the former USS Merrimack was being rebuilt as an iron-covered warship had made its way back to the Union almost as soon as work began in June 1861. Intelligence gathering was widespread on both sides during the Civil War, and the Confederates clearly failed when it came to operations security for their most advanced naval project.

By Aug. 3, the U.S. Congress had already appropriated $1.5 million to build a countermeasure, about twice the cost of a contemporary ship-of-the-line, equivalent to about $50 million in current year dollars. Ironically, there is evidence that the Confederates pursued an armored warship because they erroneously believed the Union was building its own, inadvertently igniting an arms race.

Six days after monies had been appropriated, the Union Navy issued a request for proposals, due a month later. The winning design that became the USS Monitor wasn't even one of the early submissions, but instead was an addendum to a proposal for a more conventional armored sailing ship.

The Navy's review board chose the Monitor as one of three finalists from an original list of 17 proposals, but they remained skeptical of the wildly unconventional design. It took the intervention of President Lincoln himself, overruling the Navy Board, for the Monitor design to be selected, with a contract dated Sept. 21. Lincoln is the only president ever awarded a U.S. patent, for a device to float river boats over sand bars, so he was himself an inventor with a keen interest in naval engineering.

The Monitor's designer, John Ericsson, was one of the 19th century's most remarkable engineers. Born in Sweden in 1803, his skills as an inventor were recognized at a very early age. Though lacking in much formal education, Ericsson contributed novel ideas on everything from steam locomotives to heat engines and naval propellers. He immigrated to America in 1839, encouraged by Robert Stockton who had recruited Ericsson to work on the propeller-driven USS Princeton, the most advanced warship of its time.

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