BEGINNING OF ARMOURED SHIPS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 6362, 9 November 1907, Page 5

BEGINNING OF ARMOURED SHIPS.

Commencing a promising series of are tides on armoured ships, Mr J. If; More risen reminds us that the ancients protected .ftheir.War- vowels with felt, lead.,, 1 ami later‘with leather. It is said that , in the sixteenth- century a’Dutch'vessel’ was .partly covered with iron. In tho Spanish attack on OHmilkar, 1782. there were ten. floating' 'batteries with hulls, protected 'by bars of |iron, *and .covcnedi with cork: while ■ their >dodos had a solidly built ‘ roof covered with heavy green hides. The United ' States hod the first . steam warship in.-use during the war, .of ,181#, and: its guifcdock had 1 bulwarks' of wood: nearly five feet thick. The armament consisted ot 33-poundai» firing red-hot ball. The first suggestion, of armour-plating is isaid by .the writer S to have come from Jtobpri Fulton. . I'o 1- ■ ton,, in 1811, was 1 experimenting,^with torpedoes, and he proposed to have,tjiem carried (at the end of a pole) ,by vohhols, of DO tons or so;whoso decks;were-to bo covered with “pretty stout sheet Don," Tho last vessel designosi by- Fulton, a [■modification ‘ of'his Bubmannhi:*:tbo Nautilus,' watt to : have bad’ its docks plated with iron, but the construction «’.w not 'Completed. Stevens, in 1813, : design'd an iion-clad battery, saucershaped, and provided with propellers te make it revolve. Thii was very similar to Bloodgood’a’floating battery of 1807, and - both, :tbese : vessels anticipated the principle of'the revolving turret. "Nothing, . however, came of- these early designs, principally because ■ there wore not’sufficient facilities-at that date 'fol turning out the iron- plates. f