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THE ironclad Monitor is one of the preeminent symbols of the Civil War and the monitor myth is one of that war's most dramatic stories. The myth tells us how the brilliant inventor John Ericsson convinced mossbacked naval officers to try his revolutionary armored warship. After Herculean effort, his Monitor ventured forth to battle, miraculously surviving a gale on her way. Arriving in the nick of time, the "heroic little cheesebox on a raft" met the Confederate behemoth Merrimack in a seagoing version of David and Goliath, with the fate of the Union at stake. Further, the myth has a happy ending: forsaking its earlier skepticism, the Navy built a fleet of monitors and won the war with them.1
The Monitor's real story is more prosaic. Still, the Navy did order an entire fleet of monitors: fifty-two coastal and seagoing ironclads based on Ericsson's design, compared to four of other basic designs. Why, then, such a near-total-even preemptive-commitment to Ericsson's design? The Union's decision to build its fleet to a single revolutionary patternto place all the country's naval eggs in one Ericsson-designed basketwas among the most curious of the war. This paper contends that the keys to this decision lie in the nontechnical aspects of the design process.
The need to apply armor to ships was evident well before the Civil War, a logical response to the way in which Henri-Joseph Paixhans's shell-firing guns had completely upset the long-established balance between maritime attack and defense. By 1861, both British and French naval architects had built successful ironclad vessels, and the concept of iron armor was firmly established. Opinions quickly diverged, however, on the optimum characteristics of ironclad ships. Not until the 1880s did a reasonably "standard" armored ship emerge as an analogue to the "standard" Napoleonic-era seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-line.
In the ironclads of the 1860s, practice outstripped theory in every area from the ballistic properties of their guns to the attachment of their armor, yet warship design continued to advance despite the lack of sound theory. For an analytical lens through which to examine this phenomenon, we will use Walter G. Vincenti's rationalized description of the empirical process by which engineers advance technological knowledge. Engineers advance knowledge, Vincenti postulates, through a process of "variation and selective...