U.S. Industrialization and Naval Technology before the Spanish-American War

When most people think of Civil War-era naval technology, it is generally USS Monitor that comes to mind. The low, iron-covered hull with its distinctive round turret is very different from the wooden-hulled steam frigates that made up most of the Civil War U.S. Navy, with their traditional rigging and sails. But while Monitor was dramatic, both in shape and symbolism, the slow, coastal monitor itself was just one signpost in the long, evolutionary change that took navies from sailing ships to steel battleships in one generation.
 
This process could only take place owing to the rapid industrialization experienced in Europe and the United States during the late 19^th-century, with an explosion of scientific inventions, engineering capabilities, and improved manufacturing processes that dramatically changed the world. The defining characteristics of this period are steam power, rail roads, and industrial manufacturing. These, in turn, were enabled by the ubiquity of steel, without which modern industrial civilization could not flourish.
 
Steel itself is a low carbon iron alloy, possessing high strength (both compression and tension) and toughness (absorbing significant energy before breaking), it can be made into virtually any shape and can withstand a wide range of temperatures. It was thus a perfect material for the new, engineering-focused maritime industries of the late 19^th-century.[1] The US Navy, in turn, would use these new technologies both in support of its traditional mission—enforcing the Monroe Doctrine and keeping U.S. interests in the America’s safe from European intervention – and to enable overseas expansion in 1898.
 
While steel has been known to ironsmiths for centuries, before the 1850s it was very costly to produce, both because blast furnaces required immense amounts of fuel and turning high-carbon pig iron into steel required multiple processing steps. Until steam-powered coal mines became more efficient, the cost of coal alone hindered development. In both the U.S. and Britain, for example, only 2% of total pig iron produced was turned into steel in the early 1800s, and that mainly for tools, files, cutlery, and surgical instruments.[2] Despite its many uses, the higher price and difficulty of production meant almost twice as much iron was produced as steel as late as 1880.[3]
 
The breakthrough came with a process invented in Britain by Henry Bessemer in the 1860s, who discovered that compressed air blown through liquid iron removed impurities and carbon. While much cheaper, the steel created by this process was too brittle for high-tension requirements, like bridges, tall buildings, or ships. Replacing Bessemer’s closed converter system with an open-hearth and ever larger blast furnaces in the 1870s gradually made steel stronger, more flexible and cheaper. By 1900, the average U.S. mill produced more steel in a day than all the U.S. mills of 1850 had produced in a year. Put another way, the cost of a steel rail in 1867 was $167 each. By 1898 it had fallen to $17.62, a 90% drop in price.[4]
 
The vast expansion of steel making firms, and the lower cost of steel itself, made the construction of steel ship hulls affordable. At the same time, the growth of the chemical industry, improved industrial lubricants, the steam hammer, and even standardized ball bearings, allowed steel alloy machine tools to cut and shape metal to ever finer tolerances. Famously illustrated by Samuel Colt (who tossed the components for a half-dozen revolvers on a table, asked a client to randomly assemble one, and then fired the resulting pistol at a target), the ability to make interchangeable parts made the production of steel shapes, fittings, and high-pressure steam boilers components for the maritime industry safer, cheaper, and faster.[5]
 
Steam engines in turn grew vastly more efficient and powerful. From the large, primitive steam engines first used to pump water out of coal mines in the 18^th-century, engineers developed first higher pressure, then compound steam boilers (which were smaller and fuel-efficient) for driving ship engines. Technological change thus fed itself, with rapid improvements in one area impacting others almost immediately. [6] And it was this combination of cheaper steel, high-pressure boilers, and steam turbines, the latter enabled by precision machine tools, which allowed maritime engineers to build fast, steel warships. Or, in other words, what in the U.S. was called “the new steel Navy.”[7]
 
The late 19^th-century Victorian-era is not just known for the industrialization that allowed steam ships, modern ordnance, electricity, public health and modern medicine, and underwater communication cables. It was also the second great age of global imperialism, with soldiers and bureaucrats extending European rule over vast areas of Africa and Asia, and a growing era of great power competition over colonies, trade, diplomatic influence. Steamships were integral to this effort, and warships too were needed, if only to protect overseas trade, enforce colonial rule, and guard home waters against enemy attack.[8]
 
More so than armies, navies required a constant influx of sophisticated technological products—ordnance, armor, steam turbines—and thus the period established what was later called the military-industrial complex. Rapid technological change led to the creation of French and British steam-powered iron-clad wooden warships in the 1850s, which were used in the Black Sea during the Crimean War and in the gigantic riverine fleet of Union ironclads during the U.S. Civil War. During this period many navies continued to build steam-powered wooden sailing ships, similar to the screw sloop-of-war USS Wyoming, as they could sail faster than the heavier ironclads. Navies did experiment with iron-clad ocean-going, and eventually iron-hulled ocean-going warships, both for protection and eventually speed as steam engines improved. In a challenge and response dynamic that would mark British and French competition in this era, the French navy launched the first iron-plated ocean going ship Gloire in 1855, the Royal Navy followed with the iron-hulled HMS Warrior in 1860, and the French responded again with their own iron-hulled warship Courronne in 1863.[9]
 
These overseas developments, and the rapid technological and economic change experienced at home after the Civil War, slowly percolated through the U.S. Navy and Congress, perhaps first in the growing realization that the mass of leftover Civil War material decaying in warehouses all over the country was profoundly obsolete. Muzzle-loading cannons and coastal ironclad monitors were fine for suppressing rebellion, but by the 1880s they were clearly useless for engaging a modern enemy.[10] More shocking, however, were reports from the Chilean-Peruvian-Bolivian War of the Pacific (1879-1883), during which the Peruvian ironclad turret ship Huascar held off the wooden ships of the Chilean Navy practically by herself for almost six months in 1879.[11] Concern in U.S. Navy circles over South American navies overtaking the U.S. in technology developments led to, among other things, the creation of the Office of Naval Intelligence three years later.[12]
 
Still, even with Huascar’s exploits in the papers, it was difficult to shift public and political opinion. American domestic politics focused on continental expansion and the complicated, seemingly never-ending controversies surrounding Reconstruction. It was only after the 1880 elections, with the Republicans in control of Congress and the Presidency that the House Naval Affairs committee and the new Secretary of the Navy, William H. Hunt, formed another committee to look into the question of a new navy. The resulting board, chaired by Admiral John Rodgers, recommended a shift to steel hulls (away from iron) and modern guns, both of which required advancements in the U.S. steel and ordnance industries.[13]
 
What followed was an almost three-decade long process of experiment and transition as industrial and naval technology evolved. U.S. naval engineers looked with envy at the dozens of British and French warships built in the 1870s, which allowed experimentation in engine speed, stability, turrets, and especially armor.[14] These innovations were one of the drivers of U.S. investment (mostly over worries a French or British warship would end up purchased by South American navies), which started in the U.S. with the passage of a naval appropriation bill in 1883 to construct three steel cruisers and a dispatch boat, called the ABCD ships owing to the first letters of their names.[15] The attempt to build the warships domestically, which the Navy and Congress demanded, proved nigh impossible, however, with armor, fittings, and ordnance heavily dependent on European suppliers. The combined inexperience of both Navy and shipbuilders resulted in steel vessels that were criticized as “too weak to fight and too slow to run.”[16]
 
But change, though evolutionary, did occur and, under the prodding of the new Secretary of the Navy, William C. Whitney, U.S. steel and ordnance makers slowly developed the skill and capacity to build steel warships. While his reputation was slightly marred by stooping to purchase warship plans from British architects in the mid-1880s,[17] which remained an irritant in UK-US relations, Whitney later wrote his greatest achievement was not particular ships or policies but rather the development of domestic facilities that freed the U.S. from dependence on foreign suppliers. In 1886, for example, Congress not only authorized two armored cruisers, a protected cruiser, and a torpedo boat but also allocated money for machines, tools, buildings, and machinery to build ordnance domestically. This accomplishment is perhaps best illustrated by the transformation of the Washington Navy Yard from a forge and anchor casting facility into a modern naval gun factory by 1887.[18]
 
The two armored cruisers in the 1886 legislation, Maine and Texas, were authorized in part owing to concerns over the 5,000-ton Brazilian armored cruiser Riachuelo, which had been launched by Samuda Brothers Shipyard in London in 1883. Riachuelo had an unusual design in that two large turrets (each equipped with two 9.2-inch guns) were placed off the center-line, with the forward turret to port and the aft starboard. The superstructure ran the length of the warship, with two funnels in the center, six secondary 5.5-inch guns (plus tertiary anti-torpedo boat armament), and three fully-rigged masts for sail power to augment her steam engines.
 
Maine and Texas were similar in design to start, though changes in the design got rid of their sails and rigging. Equipped with more powerful steam engines (of about 9,200 horse power as compared to Riachuelo’s initial 4,500 h.p), the two U.S. warships featured the same turret offset design (except with four 10-inch guns) along with a secondary armament of six 6-inch guns and similar anti-torpedo boat quick firing light guns. All three ships had heavy compound belt armor, which was intended to protect the hull from shells striking horizontally, and limited speeds to under 17 knots.[19]
 
Launched in 1890, Maine did not actually commission until 17 September 1895, primarily owing to component and armor plate delays. In that sense USS Maine symbolizes the struggle to establish a domestic naval construction industry in the United States. Designed and built during a period of rapid change, USS Maine was partially obsolete by the time she entered service – being too light to fight the British and French battleships then under construction and too slow and too short-ranged to serve as a cruiser. But by the time USS Maine met her untimely end in Havana harbor on 15 February 1898, much more powerful U.S. warships were already finished and in service. Battleships USS Iowa, USS Oregon, USS Massachusetts, and USS Indiana, along with armored cruisers USS Brooklyn and USS New York, played key roles in the Spanish-American War that followed.
 
Other, even more advanced warship (USS Kearsarge and USS Illinois-class) were under construction. These new designs, twice the size of USS Maine and with heavier armament, better armor, and faster speed set the stage for the major 20^th-century battleship designs to come.[20]