Her single vibrating lever steam engine powered by two boilers produced 340 horsepower and drove her at a top speed of six knots.
She was 179 feet long, had a beam of 41 and a half feet and displaced 987 tons. Described by some as a “cheese box on a raft” the small ship had all of her machinery located below the waterline on a completely iron hull that only drew 11 feet of water. The Monitor was like nothing ever seen on the ocean. Ericcson was not planning to submit a design but was persuaded to and his design, the Monitor was one of the three designs selected. Ericsson had be shunned by the Navy after a rifled cannon, which was not of his design or construction exploded aboard Princeton during a gunnery demonstration which killed the Secretary of the Navy and others. Ericsson was the inventor of the screw propeller and designer of the first U.S. I cannot imagine any warship ship new design ever breaking that record. The ship was entirely experimental, nothing like Monitor had ever been built before, but even so it was less than five months from the date she was ordered until she was commissioned and just a few days more than that before she was in action. Her design and construction were remarkable, especially for her day. The Monitor was one of three experimental designs chosen by the Navy’s Ironclad board to deal with the Virginia.
The tiny Monitor was progenitor of all the great battleships that followed and 153 years ago Monitor helped propel naval architecture and warfare into a new era when she challenged the CSS Virginia at the Battle of Hampton Roads. The Musashi was one of the two largest battleships ever constructed and her wreck was discovered last week where she sank in the Sibuyan Sea. One of these ships was the Japanese Super-Battleship Musashi. I have been thinking about two ships this past week.
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