Sunday, December 31, 2006
This Day in American History
On this day in 1862, the Union ironclad ship "Monitor" sinks in a storm off Cape Hatteras, NC. It had been the in-the-nick-of-time counterpoint to the Confederate ironclad "Virginia" (built on the former USS "Merrimack"), which had just given the U. S. Navy its worst day ever (until Pearl Harbor), when the two ironclad ships battled to a draw. Where the "Virginia" kept the old ship of the line cannons along the side and depended on aligning the ship to shoot, the lasting innovation of the "Monitor" was the armored turret which allowed the ship to shoot in any direction no matter where it was headed in the water. The turret with cannons lasted as a naval mainstay for at least 80 years, until airplanes made that former innovation pretty much obsolete.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 9:32 AM 
