Sail to Steam to Iron - Half a Century of Change

[Music] [Music] the period of 1815 through 1860 was one of the most important transitional times in all of naval history it saw the end of major warships built of wood a material that had been the primary component of ships for millennia it also saw the addint at least for the time being of battle tactics that had remained roughly the same for over 200 years along with the ship design that was essentially about the same age finally it would also mark the beginning of the end for wind power the primary propulsion for ocean-going warships since ocean-going warships were a thing in just under a single lifetime warships went through six massive developmental stages resulting in ships that had been launched as brand new becoming obsolete before their new left tenants had even reached captain as compared to the period immediately before where a 50 year old ship kept in good condition was perfectly good as the flagship of a major fleet these steps can broadly be defined as the following one the traditional fleet to seppings improvements three early wooden steam warships for iron hull ships five the developed wooden steam warships and six iron clads furthermore of the development of warships in this period can be best analyzed by looking at the Royal Navy and that's not just because I'm British it's simply because it was the single largest and most coherent naval power of the period similar to how looking at warship development in the first century would be best served looking at the Romans almost all other navies were either rebuilding from the Napoleonic Wars or had limited financial and technological resources and so would advance in stops and starts with many simply copying whatever the British were doing of course various nations would invent interesting technologies or methods of construction but these tended to either fade away over time or else being operated into British methods with that said we must remember that for most of this period Royal Navy officers and designers can broadly be said to have been in one of three camps with the precise emphasis of development varying in pace according to which one had the most representatives in the highest offices the Royal Navy was far from United on the pace and development of technology for the sake of simplicity I shall categorize them as the following Group one are the ultra modernists they saw the main threat to the British fleet as new wonder weapons being developed with the rise of mass industry allowing for rapid development and deployment of these devices they knew that the channel and the North Sea weren't exactly that wide and they feared that the sudden deployment of a fleet of ships carrying some new gun or protection system would allow hordes of unwashed foreigners to land on English shores periodic invasion scares being weirdly common during the British Empire's heyday their count to this was to advocate for the Royal Navy to adopt every new killer technology as fast as humanly possible to stay on the cutting edge ship group to our the arch traditionalists pretty much the exact opposite of the ultra modernists they saw the Royal Navy was already the most dominant with its existing fleet and feared that risking obsoleting the entire fleet for something new and untested might not work or might fail in British hands and then be made to work elsewhere thus resetting the clock on a lead that they'd spent the best part of the last couple of centuries trying to build they therefore generally advocated staying with tried and tested methods and would only accept a new technology when every possible nitpicky detail had been worked out group three which I term the developmental group they sat somewhere in the middle and they wanted to keep the Royal Navy up to date but also didn't see the point in wasting money chasing dead ends they advocated an approach of using Royal Navy assets and officers to investigate and test new technologies refine them and then see if various individual developments could could be combined into a better whole the idea being to let foreign countries and small-scale tests make all the mistakes and the one-off new things then leveraged the British industrial advantage to mass-produce a much better product once others started trying to use a particular invention to their own advantage it's incredibly easy to portray the Royal Navy of this period pretty much as you want simply by focusing on one or the other faction people who want to show it as a backwards institution can make a big deal about an archer a traditionalist admiral whining about how his beautiful white sails would be smudged by all the dirty smokestacks or whilst those who want to show it at the leading edge of technology can look at the magpie like addiction of the ultra modernist grant to grab anything shiny and new they could possibly get their hands on and the sarcastic can of course look at the developmental group approach and comment that the Royal Navy had spent the last couple of centuries using the French Navy as their unpaid fleet reserve so what else was knew if they were stealing technology as well as whole warships so bearing all that in mind let's look at warship development for the first half of the 1800s we'll check in periodically with HMS Blenheim as this ship's career reflects a number of these significant changes quite well we start our story in 1815 the Royal Navy is downsizing at the end of the Napoleonic Wars with about 200 ships of the line and anything from 800 to a thousand major warships of some description in commission it's got something of an embarrassment of riches when it comes to ships and can afford to be extremely picky about which ships it chooses to take forward worn-out ships prizes with weird performance characteristics emergency war builds and the like can all go only the newest best performing and most powerful ships will be retained for several decades hence surplus British warships will fill almost every function in coastal areas from prisons to accommodations to schools to storage facilities targets offices and construction Hulk's even the HMS victory is nearly broken up in this period it's half century of service and battle damage making it look relatively unattractive compared to the brand-new 120 gun first rates of the Caledonia class which are themselves based on victories lines only public interest preserves the ship through this period the prize that was formerly USS President which has deteriorated over the past few years is actually broken up although the chance to troll the USA is seen as a worthy and Noble coal and an exact copy is made named HMS president and mostly assigned to the squadrons based in the Caribbean or Canada where it can frequently patrol up and down the American coast as a reminder of something the American reply of course is to occasionally have the USS Macedonian patrol the same areas presumably with much pointing and jeering on both sides anyway it's at this point that we first meet hms Blenheim she is one of the Avenger class a large group of about forty third rates armed with 74 guns that was somewhat based on a captured French ship hence the class name she's a good solid ship and becomes one of the workhorses of the battle fleet reflecting the various minor improvements made to ships during the past few decades of near-constant conflict she's built in the traditional style with size limited by the fact that wooden ships beyond a certain length work themselves to pieces far too quickly for anyone's liking ships in this period are basically outgrowths of the Napoleonic Wars very recognizable to officers who started the war but just slightly better they're better built slightly faster slightly more heavily armed etc etc however changes afoot ten years earlier shipwright robert seppings had demonstrated diagonal bracing using short Timbers on the seventy-four gun HMS Kent this meant that the ship's hull frames could now be effectively a series of triangles a fairly strong shape as opposed to the previous rectangular forms which were so vulnerable to working out of shape at sea two years ago in 1813 he had been appointed survey of the Navy and was now introducing this method and a host of other innovations of the use of iron straps and fixings to further increase a ship's hull stiffness along with a rounded bow and a circular Stern these were much stronger and both increased the strength of the ship as a whole and in particular meant that the old weakness of raking a sail warship was largely removed the old open structures that were so vulnerable to gun fire being replaced with timbers that were just as strong as the sides of the ships the overall effect therefore was to usher in the second era that we discussed at the beginning as ships were now able to be built far stronger and needed far fewer single massive Timbers which had always been in short supply but by the end of the Napoleonic Wars had almost run out completely this allowed ships to be built fully 25 percent larger than before and still be significantly more durable and seaworthy on the very largest ships a third deck of guns had always been needed to strengthen the hull although it did make them slightly less stable and slower now it was possible to make a ship that was just as long or even longer with a lower profile to deck design that could carry almost as many guns in a much more comfortable layout this would all culminate in the construction of HMS Rodney in 1827 she was a 90 gun to Decker about the same dimensions for length and beam as a Cal dona class first-rate but in the finest traditions of the developmental group she was built as a response to the new American and French ships of the line she was large enough strong enough and stable enough to carry a full of 32 pound of battery across all gun decks unlike the foreign designs that maintained a full 32 pound gun fitting by using progressively shorter barrels the higher up in the ship that you went the Rodney could carry full length long guns on all gun ports with the sole exception of a couple of 68 pound Karen aids for use as giant shotguns for when a captain looked over saw an enemy crew at close range and decided he didn't want to see them anymore the advances can be seen in the fact that Caledonia herself although of similar dimensions and a deck higher could not carry a full 32 pound battery due to her hull being built in the traditional style and therefore nowhere near as strong a result as a result of these changes the HMS Blenheim had been downgraded out of the line of battle her mixed battery of 74 guns no longer able to hold a candle to the new standard and 90 gun ships like Rodney and the monster first first rates that were about to come as a result after a couple of decades in reserve after the end of the Napoleonic Wars she would find herself backing Commission and commanded by captain Sen house who was incidentally a distant relative of mine in the late 1830s and would be sent out to one of the traditional stations for British warships in the Imperial period when there were no longer any first line unit postings available for them the China station where she was somewhat unlikely to meet any modern opposition the 1830's also saw a number of changes in control at the Admiralty changing politics saw seppings depart in 1832 being replaced by William Simmons who some of you may remember from a drydock episode he represented a combination of ideas from both extremes of the Royal Navy's factions driving for ships that built on seppings improvements but sought to improve speed and sailing qualities above all else resulting in ships where the v-shaped hulls underwater that proved to be a very fast but also very prone to violent rolling and had a decided lack of stability in poor weather this ship shift away from military practicality reflected the old school thinking winning out over the now fading lessons of war but due to the factional nature of the Navy the same year also saw the establishment of the gunnery school HMS excellent with a result that by the end of the decade you had a navy sailing around with some of the most accurate and rapid gunnery crews afloat burt with new ships that were manifestly terrible gun platforms and whose crews envied the older vessels in the fleet the end of the 1830s also saw the rapidly approaching obsolescence of a lot of the fleet that come out of the Napoleonic Wars in the 1840s would see a period of chaos as ships went out of commission the Navy did its best to stop further simin dye vessels from being built and the first major input from the third phase of development early steam began to become apparent steam had been known and in use by the Royal Navy since the 1830s in the form of paddle wheel tugs but they had resisted its use in warships for a number of reasons firstly the ships were all still built of wood and outside of carefully managed galley stoves which were only run in times of safety the idea of telling Navy officers to install a massive fire aboard their wooden tar coated gunpowder filled ships was understandably a hard sell and they'd spent centuries trying to keep fire and warships as far apart as possible and now they were being told they might have to sail into battle with a massive furnace live aboard a ship without the enemy firing a shot secondly early steam engines were incredibly inefficient and took up a huge amount of space and space water warship was already spoken for with guns mens and supply this was before the need to also carry fuel for the furnace was taken into account and compounded by the fact that no realistic amount of fuel would get you very far thanks to the aforementioned inefficiency so you'd still need sails to go anywhere beyond the coast thirdly haggle wheels took up a huge amount of broadside space which was exactly where the guns needed to go they were hopelessly vulnerable to damage and caused huge amounts of drag when the ships weren't using their engines which would be most of the time however with very small improvements to engine technology over the next few years the Admiralty was willing to try things out and a number of paddle wheeled frigates were ordered alongside a newer technology the screw propeller to try and retain firepower the paddle wheel frigates were given at fewer larger guns as compared to the more numerous broad sides of the screw ships here is where we meet the Blenheim again alongside the new frigates that the ship was recalled in the mid 1840s to be refitted as a block ship this involved fitting it with a screw propeller and steam engine and lengthening the ship to make room becoming effectively a floating battery for home defense with her armament reduced from 74 to 60 guns in part to account for the weight of her new equipment she would join the experimental squadron as part of this programme of upgrades to assess her performance before and after refit in the midst of all this and much rejoicing in the Navy Simmons was forced out and replaced temporarily with John eed who'd been quietly working weight improving on seppings designs by replacing the wooden diagonals with iron beams further improving the strength of ships the upcoming proliferation of both screw and paddle frigates looked like it would provide a wealth of comparisons to further the development of one or the other technology thus of the third period under discussion meandered slowly into being the early wooden steam warships a collection it must be said of largely experimental small ships both new build and conversions although it should not be thought that these were tiny ships they were only small in relation to the enlarged designs coming into service many of them were carrying 18 to 30 guns but were as long or longer than an old 74 gunship like Blenheim specifically because of the improvements to shipbuilding during this chaotic period as relations between the Admiralty and Simmons had hit a point of near complete non-communication before his resignation and before each successor Lord John Hay was likewise disposed of after he tried to turn a bunch of brand-new line warships into block ships to be replaced with the excellent Isaac Watts it must be said the civilian side of naval administration had ganged up with the ultra modernists to force through the brief fourth period under discussion namely the early iron ships these were effectively ordered almost entirely because of the performance of the Honourable East India Company ship nemesis an ocean-going iron hold paddle frigate of the East India Company from an age where it was of course entirely possible for a mega corporation to construct a full-on warship alongside more regular Royal Navy vessels she had torn through the Chinese fleets in the First Opium War her iron hull and watertight bulkheads allowing her to operate with near impunity against lighter guns and minimizing the damage of heavier weapons which would simply leave a neat hole easily patched as opposed to the ragged gouges on flying splinters that were associated with the penetration of wooden holed warships it seemed like the perfect chance Britain led the world in iron production and this new form of ship seemed to offer a lot of benefits with no downsides the Admiralty wanted to run some tests outside a Chinese war zone but the aforementioned chaos allowed some of them to be ordered anyway but it very quickly became apparent that for reasons that were not immediately understood iron hauled ships in British waters could not replicate the survivability of the Nemesis with large holes and large shards of flying iron resulting from tests the Admiralty had hastily thrown together this resulted in a sharp break being applied and the various frigates being finished off as troop ships well away from any combat roles the reason was actually due to material physics in the warmer waters of the seas off China the iron behaved in a very ductile manner bending a before breaking in the colder European waters the iron behaved in a very brittle manner shattering rather than bending on impact this was because the iron produced at the time underwent what was called the ductile to brittle transition at a temperature range that was just about between the two a problem that keeps cropping up in naval structural steel down to this day when it isn't made properly simply put iron and steel along with most other method metals undergo this change in behavior due to their internal crystalline structure at different temperatures depending on the composition and to exaggerate the point somewhat at the lower side of this temperature band the ductile side they would behave like a sheet of cardboard would if you shoot it with a rifle on the higher side of the brittle side yet acts more like a sheet of glass when you shoot it with a rifle this issue would go on to play a role in 20th century battleship armor but that's for another video this all brought a rather sudden halt to the first attempt to get iron ships into the Navy but while all that had been going on the engines designated for those vessels had been taken out and installed in more conventional ships resulting in a period of extensive testing and possibly a slightly rigged competition between HMS select onh miss rattler which proved what many had already concluded which was that the screw was much better than the paddle for a steamship this was followed by an extensive competition between different screw types to find the best version which resulted in the overlapping third and fourth periods ending with the start of the 1850s and the beginning of the fifth period the fully developed wooden steam battle fleet however coming up on the lefts appealed it was the French who took the limelight for this particular innovation with their own innovative designer on rediff we do Lum and feel free to crucify me in the comments French speakers a getting a 90 gun purpose-built screw propelled steam battleship ordered in 1847 and launched in 1850 the ship heard in typical French French fashion undergone three separate name changes before it finally emerged as the Napoleon whilst the Royal Navy had been experimenting and arguing with itself a period of anglo-french tension had spurred the French Navy to go with de loams radical new proposal this of course started another invasion panic in the British press but the Admiralty was waiting on results from our old friend the Blenheim which if you recall had been lengthened at the same time as its conversion into a block ship reflecting new understandings of hydrodynamics and she was being compared with some of her sister ships that had undergone the same conversion but without the whole alterations luckily she proved very successful and alongside the tests of the various frigates and in particular HMS arrogant success against pure sail ships the Admiralty felt confident enough to order a series of new ships along similar lines to the Napoleon starting in 1850 with two ships of approximately 90 guns of the James Watt and Agamemnon as well as converting the sands puray then under construction from an 80 gun sail ship to a 70 gun steamship all equipped with screw propellers thanks to the speed of British yards sends prey commissioned only six months after Napoleon in November 1852 followed by Agamemnon and then James Watt although the purpose-built ship's proved a success the Sainsbury was less so turning out to be a poor sea boat once converted and it being said that the only remarkable thing about her engines which had been reallocated from a block ship was the frequency at which they broke down with the lessons good and bad learned from these ships the Admiralty at this point mostly in the hands of the developmental group set about leveraging their industrial advantage to the maximum whilst Agamemnon was a good match for Napoleon the next ship which surely must have been named to allow the Royal Navy to keep up its high tradition of trolling its rivals was called st. Jean de Ark and was to be a 101 gun vessel this effort was taken still further with a large three decked 121 gun ship the HMS Windsor Castle which was still in a construction being altered on the stocks by means of inserting two additional whole sections to turn it into a 131 gun strew screw driven steam battleship of immense proportions although since her launch coincided with the death of the Duke of Wellington she would be renamed HMS Duke of Wellington for her active service career more 90 gun ships were ordered or converted and the 120 gun ships Royal Albert Marlborough Prince of Wales and Royal Sovereign all received similar upgrades to the Windsor Castle each with more refined and powerful machinery and hull alterations based on the experience of the one before these large ships would mostly have very long careers even after the next set of developments saw them rapidly relegated to second rank roles followed by obsolescence the Duke of Wellington would eventually become a barrack ship and reach within a couple of years of the launch of HMS dreadnought before being broken up Marlborough would join the torpedo school HMS Vernon and wouldn't be broken up until after the Washington Naval Treaty Prince of Wales would eventually become HMS Britannia and take on a role as a cadet training ship going to the breakers in the middle of World War one and Royal Sovereign would later undergo a second change being cut down a few decks to become the Royal Navy's first and only wooden hold turret ship lasting in this guise until 1885 the French efforts having reset the clock on modern battleships both nations strove to keep up the momentum with a variety of 80 90 100 and 110 to 120 gunships flying down the slipways and out of the refit yards over the next few years with practically every way of having newer better and more powerful machinery and guns the great irony of it all was that this crash building program on both sides radically modernized both the Royal and French navies in preparation for an expected titanic clash between them but would actually result in a very different outcome as a few years later in 1854 Russia made inroads on the Ottoman Empire and both Britain and France found themselves unexpected allies against Russian ambitions thus the massed guns and fleets of the two largest and most modern navies on the planet were suddenly turned against the Russian Navy which had precisely one steam battleship at the seventy-four gun V Borg and this ship was supposed to lead the Russians sail forces against a combined offensive of a 19 steam-powered battleships including the Leviathan Duke of Wellington and its slightly smaller French opposite number Montebello backed up by dozens more conventional sail battleships and a wide variety of sail and steam frigates with many more steam battleships currently under construction for the Russian sailors the phrase and then it got worse so common in Russian history was definitely in full effect it should come as a surprise to exactly nobody to find that the Blenheim was gamely sailing along with the Baltic Fleet a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars rebuilt for a new conflict rather sensibly the Russian fleet decided that dying in a fire was not something they especially desired and point-blank refused to engage of the combined fleets leaving the franco-british forces with little to do but shoot up Russian faults which they did some considerable effect the steam ships comfortably using their engines to sail in engage and then leave at will in contrast to their sail powered cousins who had to rely on steam frigates to tow them in and out of position seppings and EADS innovations proved their worth with Agamemnon sustaining no less than 214 hits in a single engagement against Fort Constantine verts sailing away basically fully operational with only 4 dead and 23 wounded to show for it however two other things became apparent in this conflict firstly the sheer number of guns on some of the larger ships was less useful than expected compared to fewer larger guns which were carried on some other ships and secondly the presence of armored floating batteries showed these were even more capable of absorbing fire than even the most durable wooden vessel the immediate post-war period from 1856 saw a few ships completed other than those already under construction and a few huge steam-powered frigates of the Mersey class which tested even seppings stronger hull form the lessons of the Crimean War were being absorbed whilst the remaining suitable at sail ships of the line were being considered for steam conversion towards the end of the decade construction picked up again as someone noticed the war had let the French catch up and both sides were standing at about 30 steam battleships at this point Blenheim as a steam block ship was back down to being a second rank ship and was assigned as a guard ship in the channel the crew quite happily enjoying the prize money from a number of captures made during the campaign but as with the launch of Napoleon it would be the French who kicked off the final stage the ironclad warship era realizing that the British would soon convert or build a whole slew of new steam battleships and leave them at a disadvantage yet again the French tried to one-up things once more by launching the gua in 1859 this was unsurprisingly de l'homme again the ship of being a wooden hull with iron armor plates bolted onto it armed with fewer larger guns taking the lessons of the Crimean Water heart as much as French industry was capable of doing but it was in so doing that they overreached since whilst French industry could come within a shouting distance of the Royal Navy four wooden ships and indeed the persistent ability of the French to build more ships all the time had been a major issue in the Napoleonic Wars when it came to industrial iron production the British were significantly ahead and this is where the developmental group saw its biggest triumph they had carefully tested and retested guns armor engines and other factors and when called upon to produce a response they came up with hms warrior an iron hold iron framed and ironclad warship whose only wooden structural elements came in the form of some backing for the armor plate and of course at the deck although her overall form was based on the Mersey class of frigates she was faster more heavily armed more heavily armored and far more durable and seaworthy compared to the GWAR this started off the final era the ironclad warships multiple existing warships and ships on the stocks would be adapted to ironclads built in a similar manner to guar with iron plate bolted on to their wooden holes meanwhile new full iron clads of varying sizes and styles would come along with the principles needed for wooden ships falling rapidly by the wayside distant look at the Mersey or the warrior would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two but a few years later HMS Minotaur and its French counterparts were visually distinct from their wooden predecessors by quite a significant amount technology would continue to advance rapidly with the race now being between guns and armor which would see even the warrior obsolete within 10 years as a frontline ship although other navies would continue to come to commissioned steam-driven wooden warships for some years with the austro-hungarian SMS Kaiser showing that whilst vulnerable they could still hold their own against ironclads when the ironclads weren't operating at peak efficiency which goes back to the eternal factor of crew training being near enough the most important factor in any naval conflict there was also a bit of fun trying to find an appropriate antifouling measure since wooden ships had avoided this for decades by using copper sheathing but sheathing an iron ship in copper in the presence of saltwater sets up a massive galvanic circuit which basically erodes away your iron ship are very very quickly eventually a combination of toxic paints various experimental non galvanic metals and the use of sacrificial zinc blocks would alleviate the problem but not before a few embarrassing incidents and some even more hilarious solutions including one proposal to coat iron ships with a sacrificial wooden outer layer but the era of ironclad development is the subject for another time and as the Sun sets on the era of wooden warships we find our faithful guide through this period HMS Blenheim serving out its last year's in Portsmouth Pembroke and Milford Haven as a coastal guard ship finally broken up in 1865 having seen the Royal Navy developed through all six stages from a Napoleonic fleet of which he was a part through the steam-powered force to iron clads a final step which she couldn't quite reach and with that we leave the development of warships from sail to iron to return at some point in the future to take us forward to the pre-dreadnought era that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 314,799

Rating: 4.9387784 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Napoleon, HMS Blenheim, HMS Rodney, Royal Navy, HMS Agammenon, HMS Sans Pareil, HMS Windsor Castle, HMS Duke of Wellington, Crimean War, HMS Comet, HMS Monkey, HMS Electo, HMS Rattler, 1815, 1860, HMS Warrior, Age of Sail, Seppings, Symonds, Watts, HMS James Watt, Sail to Steam, Sail to Ironclad, HMS Birkenhead, blockships, floating batteries

Id: IWPUloWz7gA

Length: 34min 18sec (2058 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018