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Posted below are from Mrs. G's 4A Honors American I class

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Posted below are from Mrs. G's 4A Honors American I class

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The Confederate States developed the first naval mines as a countermeasure to the Union's blockades. When a ship came in contact with a mine, it would explode and sink it. This led to the development of torpedoes, which are devices with an explosive charge that could destroy something. The torpedoes later were self-propelled.

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The use of the telegraph during the Civil War

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The use of the telegraph during the Civil War

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http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/civil-war-technology

The telegraph enabled communication between generals and their soldiers on the battlefield. Also in 1861 over 1 million sent the telegraph to help soldiers implement strategies that Commanders gave to them and  also to ive soldiers orders on what to do on the battlefield.

Luciano, Metak

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Railroads in the civil war were originally used for transportation. President Lincoln favored these railroads to move men and supplies.

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Telegraph

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Letterman instituted a supply system to make sure the hospitals and ambulances were furnished with all the medical supplies they needed.

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http://www.nps.gov/wicr/learn/education/upload/medical-tools-for-teachers.pdf

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http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-civil-war/resources/civil-war-and-early-submarine-warfare-1863

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Whitty Williams .  Amber Russel        Mines and torpedoes were both used for underwater warfare. Torpedo means self-propelled underwater missles and mines are stationary.

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Jonathan Letterman, Medical Director of the army of the Potomac,  was responsible for creating the first organized transport of wounded soldiers.

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The Warships were built low to the water and were steam powered. They were also iron cladded with metal. They were able to with stand multiple cannon shots

Keyona H. & Alex Cope

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The telegraph allowed President Lincoln to communicate directly with the union army and alter strategies during battle. However, enemies could also receive the information, and cut the wires

http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/civil-war-technology

https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/civil-war-docs/

V! & Naomi

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http://www.civilwarhome.com/gatlinggun.html
The Gatling Gun was invented by Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling during the Civil War. It was operated with a hand crank and had 6 seperate barrels that helped cool the gun when it was fired. It was capable of firing around 600 rounds a minute.

Joe Ruslander and Mary Ashburn King

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http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/minie-ball
Bullet with a hollow base that expanded when fired. Used in muzzle loading rifles.

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http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/navy-hub/navy-history/steel-steam.html

To protect themselves against the better developed cannons of the time.

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http://www.historynet.com/minie-ball

The invention of riffling made it travel up to 300  feet . The Minie bullet made defense even safer . It was the largest contributor to the battle wounds ( more than 90%)

Fallon & Jeb

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The civil war used railroads to transport supplies along with men. These transportation trains allowed the supplies and men to become easily targeted, which caused some problems.

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The Gatling gun was invented by Richard Gatling in order to scare people out of warfare. Unfortunately, the gun made war more deadly, and did not live up to the expectations of its inventor. Mary Milo and Sean

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http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-ballooning/civil-war-ballooning.html

By Luke, Holt and Hope

Hot air balloons were very useful methods of surveillance. Armies used balloons to observe the other side's operations. They also used them to get a better angle of attack on the other side. They were used as a form of reconnaissance to give them an advantage on the battlefield.

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Below are entries from Mrs. Greene's 3A Honors American I Class

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Below are entries from Mrs. Greene's 3A Honors American I Class

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Railroads were the most efficient means of transportation during the civil war. Generals were able to to send soldier, supplies and ammunition where they were needed. The Union had far superior railroads giving them a large advantage over the Confederacy. Will and James

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http://teaching.msa.maryland.gov/000001/000000/000072/html/army_of_the_potomac.htm
Railroads were first used in the Civil War to transport soldiers and supplies efficiently. The North had an advantage with better equipment and more tracks but the South was the first to use the trains. Northern railroad owners were more interested in making money than helping the cause.

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Long range weapons and the Minie bullet 

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Long range weapons and the Minie bullet 

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Increased range and accuracy of muskets. The Minie bullet made defense safer by making it easier/quicker to load guns. A rifle has grooves in the barrel and a musket does not. The Minie bullet has a much longer range and produced worse injuries
http://www.historynet.com/minie-ball

Eliza Cozart
Kristen Hamilton

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The implementing of iron plates in the ships helped reinforce the impact from enemy fire.
An example is when the two vessels engaged each other, and both the Monitor and the Virginia suffered direct hits that failed to penetrate their iron shells. This shows that the use of iron plates greatly  impacted the protection of the ships during the Civil War.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/battle-of-the-ironclads

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The implementing of iron plates in the ships helped reinforce the impact from enemy fire.
An example is when the two vessels engaged each other, and both the Monitor and the Virginia suffered direct hits that failed to penetrate their iron shells. This shows that the use of iron plates greatly  impacted the protection of the ships during the Civil War.

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https://mercersquare.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/minie-ball-and-its-parabolic-trajectory/

In the picture Is a diagram of a Minie bullet. It shows how it caused such an extreme amount of damage.
Taylor and Jimbo 😈

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Railroads were vital to both the north and the south. They allowed for mass transport of mean and equipment. Fleeing troops would also destroy rails.

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this HTML class. Value is http://www.americanc

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this HTML class. Value is http://www.americanc

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Jasmin and Brody
Explains how simple the gun works and very reliable. Then it explains from a soldier point of view how much the Gatling gun would make a difference in war. Military leaders approved of the gun and wanted to use it in the war

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Emma and Connor
"The barrels are so arranged as to fire independently of each other, so that an injury to one does not affect the others. There are no complicated parts, and the common soldier can keep it in order as readily as he can his musket. It is so substantial as to endure without injury the same usage as an ordinary field-piece. The discharge can be made with all desirable accuracy as rapidly as one hundred and fifty times per minute, and may be continued for hours without danger, as we think, from overheating. Two men are sufficient to work the gun, and two horses can carry it over the field with the rapidity of cavalry."

The gun was invented for efficiency on the battle field. The machine required less people to operate and was faster to discharge/reload. It had a more reliable accuracy and less operator injuries were acquired

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-They could withstand more bullets than wooden ships
-Steampowered engine
-Protected by iron or steel armor plates
-The material made bullets bounce off the ship
-The first naval engagement between ironclad warships was March 9, 1862 between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia

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guns. One of them is a monster the other some what smaller but large enough to make me shiver at the thought of the damage she might do. The turret can be turned in any direction. 18 men are required to man the guns how they can find room in the confined space round them I cannot imagine. The greatest danger they are exposed to is the loosening of the bolts fastening the iron plates which are sometimes driven into the turret by the violent concussions causing great damage. The quarters for the officers & men are of course entirely under water they seem to be quite comfortable although very small. It is very difficult to ventilate the vessel. The pipe for that purpose we observed on deck is a new invention. We were shown an engine for pumping in the air through the opening in the top of the Turret. After leaving the Moniter we went on board of another vessel, which has been awaiting Government orders for three weeks months. She has an apparatus for heating the steam after it comes from the boiler & so a greater amount of power is produced from the same amount of fuel. Capt Blake, her commander, received a sword for gallent conduct on board the Hatterras which was sunk by the Privateer Alabama. In the evening Miss Felton, the Misses Blagden , Mr. Welling Mr. Harris &c took tea with us.

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Visit to the Navy Yard to See an Ironclad, November 20, 1863

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guns. One of them is a monster the other some what smaller but large enough to make me shiver at the thought of the damage she might do. The turret can be turned in any direction. 18 men are required to man the guns how they can find room in the confined space round them I cannot imagine.

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The use of the telegraph during the Civil War

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The use of the telegraph during the Civil War

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http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/civil-war-technology

The telegraph enabled communication between generals and their soldiers on the battlefield. Also in 1861 over 1 million sent the telegraph to help soldiers implement strategies that Commanders gave to them and  also to ive soldiers orders on what to do on the battlefield.

Luciano, Metak

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http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/battle-of-the-ironclads
The implementing of iron plates in the ships helped reinforce the impact from enemy fire.
An example is when the two vessels engaged each other, and both the Monitor and the Virginia suffered direct hits that failed to penetrate their iron shells. This shows that the use of iron plates greatly  impacted the protection of the ships during the Civil War.

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Balloons and aeronauts conducted aerial reconnaissance and artillery spotting.  Those balloons were able to soar one thousand feet into the air, and their pilots were able to spy on the enemy.  The Union and the Confederacy both used balloons in battle, although the Union had better balloons.  These balloons were nearly impossible to shoot down in battle because of their positioning and the materials they were made of.
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-ballooning/civil-war-ballooning.html

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Underwater mines
Confederate mines were more successful than northern ones. Both sides mined harbors and rivers. Starting in 1862 with the sinking of the ironclad Cairo, Confederate torpedoes destroyed dozens of union ships and damaged several others. Union torpedoes only sunk 6 Confederate Navy vessels.
Jack, Tysean, Juan
http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/8-unusual-civil-war-weapons

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http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/jonathan-letterman.html
Invented by Doctor Johnathan Letterman:
- known as the father of modern battlefield medicine
- in June 1862, he was named the medical director of the entire army
- given free range by General George McClellan
- started the first ambulance corps
- trained men to act as stretcher bearers, operate wagons to pick up the wounded, and bring them to the station
- instituted the concept of triage of treatment of the casualties
- developed evacuation system that consisted with three stations: field dressing station: located on or next to the battlefield where medical personnel would apply the initial tourniquets to wounds; field hospital : located close to the battlefield usually in homes and barns where emergency surgery could be performed and additional treatment given; a large hospital: located away from the battlefield and provided facilities for the long term treatment of patients
- Corps also arranged for efficient distribution for medical supplies-- saved thousands of soldiers lives at the battle of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg

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Below are entries from Mrs. Greene's 6B Honors American History I

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Below are entries from Mrs. Greene's 6B Honors American History I

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Transported soldiers, food, and weapons faster. They were used as armored vehicles. They were used as Rams to slam into enemies. They provided a quick escape for soldiers.

The North had a lot more money and train tracks than the South. Prisoners from the other side would be put on trains to prevent train attacks/derailing. A lot of money was lost when trains were destroyed.
http://www.historynet.com/railroads-critical-role-in-the-civil-war.htm

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Facts, information and articles about the Minié Ball, a Civil War bullet

Minie Ball summary: The Minié ball, or Minie ball, is a type of bullet used extensively in the American Civil War. The muzzle-loading rifle bullet was named after its co-developer, Claude-Étienne Minié.

Although the Minié ball was conical in shape, it was commonly referred to as a "ball," due to the round shape of the ammunition that had been used for centuries. Made of soft lead, it was slightly smaller than the intended gun bore, making it easy to load in combat. Designed with two to four grooves and a cone-shaped cavity, it was made to expand under the pressure to increase muzzle velocity. When fired, the expanding gas deformed the bullet and engaged the barrel's rifling, providing spin for better accuracy and longer range.

Its design dramatically increased both range and accuracy, which has long been accepted as the reason for the high number of casualties in the Civil War, although some historians today are questioning that because accuracy also depends on the soldier who pulls the trigger and throughout the Civil War, when target practice was minimal, the combatants tended to aim too high.

History of the Minie´ ball

Prior to the development of this new ammunition and weapons designed to use it, "rifles" were essentially smoothbore muskets with much longer barrels, such as the famed Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle of the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. They were cumbersome, slow to load, and couldn't be used with a bayonet, all of which limited their use to a few special units. Some muskets were created with a type of rifling, but the problem of providing a tight enough fit for the load within the barrel did not permit the true rifling that would come as a result of the Minie´ ball.

In the 1830s, Captain John Norton of the British 34th Regiment was serving in India. Some local tribes used blowguns, and Norton observed the base of their darts was made from pith, the spongy wood from the center of tree trunks. This pith expanded when a person blew into the blowgun's tube, closing the space between the tube and the dart to give a tight seal that increased the dart's range.

Based on this principle Norton developed a cylindrical bullet with a hollow base in 1832. His design was improved on in 1836 by a London gunsmith named William Greener, who created an oval-shaped bullet, one end of which had a flat surface with a small hole drilled into it. This hole traveled through most of the length of the bullet and was covered by a conical plug with a round, wooden base. Upon firing, the plug would expand to prevent gases from escaping-essentially the same principle as the blowgun dart.

An old saying holds that militaries are always preparing to fight the previous war, i.e., they tend to be hidebound in sticking with proven tactics and technologies instead of looking ahead. Perhaps that is why Britain's Ordinance Department rejected the new ammunition, despite a successful test by the 60th Rifles in August 1836.

Claude-E´tienne Minie´

The design of Norton and Greener was taken a step further by two French army captains, Claude-E´tienne Minie´ and Henri-Gustave Delvigne, who in 1849 created the conical, soft-lead bullet with four rings (similar to the three-ring version shown in the illustration above), and a rifle with a grooved barrel to go with it. Delvigne, who would go on to co-design several models of revolving pistols, had earlier created a conical bullet design, but Minie´made the projectile smaller and longer, easier to load. At the time, French troops were facing Algerians whose long rifles outranged French muskets, and the invention of Minie´ offered a solution to that problem. (Minie´is properly pronounced min-YAY, but Americans pronounced the name as "Minnie.")

The British War Ministry was sufficiently impressed with the design to pay Minie´ a royalty of 20,000 pounds in 1852 to use it for British weapons. (This ignited a legal war between Greener and the British government, which finally awarded him the relative pittance of 1,000 pounds in recognition of his earlier work.)

When the Crimean War erupted between Russia on one side and the British and French on the other, the two western European nations demonstrated the effectiveness of their new weapons against the Russians' smoothbore muskets. The London Times called the Minie´ "the king of weapons" that swept through the ranks of the czar's soldiers "like the hand of the Destroying Angel."

The Minie´ ball in the American Civil War

The United States had observers present during the 1853-1855 Crimean War, including the future commander of the Army of the Potomac, George B. McClellan. The Minie´ball came to America, where it was improved on by James Burton, an armorer at the U.S. Arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). This hollow-based design could be mass-produced cheaply. Burton's version of the new ammunition, along with the rifled musket for firing it, was adopted for use by the U.S. Army by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Two different-size Minie´ balls were used: The Harpers Ferry rifle fired a .69 caliber round, while the Springfield design used .58 caliber.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, most state arsenals contained smoothbore muskets, and these were used extensively by both sides out of necessity. As the war progressed, smoothbores were phased out on both sides, replaced with rifled muskets, although the earlier weapons never totally disappeared from combat. The factories of the North were able to spit out the new muskets at a phenomenal rate compared with the less-industrialized South; in large measure, the North's production capacity was due to mass-production techniques created by Eli Whitney, famed as the inventor of the cotton gin.

Rifled Muskets Compared with Smoothbores

The smoothbore had an effective range of 50 yards and an extended range of 200 yards. The rifled musket increased the lethality of ranged combat by providing an effective range of 300 yards, with an extended range of a half-mile. No longer could artillery crews set up just outside musket range to deliver devastating grapeshot or canister fire, as they had done during the Napoleonic Wars, because the rifled musket could easily pick off those crews if they were within the 300 yard-range of canister. (The development of conical-shaped shells also began a revolution in artillery as ammunition like the Parrott and James shells allowed for true rifling in cannon, giving the guns longer range and greater accuracy.)

A smoothbore's load was a solid ball that rattled its way down the barrel when it was fired; judging what angle it was going be traveling when it left the muzzle was difficult, virtually impossible under the rapid-fire conditions of combat. The soft-lead Minie´ball, as noted above, expanded to fit the rifling of the barrel, giving it greater accuracy. At extremely close ranges, however, the smoothbore could be loaded with "buck and ball," the 69-caliber ball and two smaller ones ("buckshot"), so that every shot sent three bullets spinning toward the enemy. Since troops armed with rifled muskets could stand off and fire from a greater distance, this smoothbore advantage only occurred during close-quarters fighting.

Increased musketry range caused a revolution in warfare: no longer could an attacker advance to charge range, suffer a volley or two from the defenders, and then attack with bayonets. The new weapons allowed defenders to inflict heavy casualties on the attackers as they advanced into charge range. Warfare had clearly tilted in favor of the defender.

While firepower had increased, communications hadn't. The use of flags, bugles and drums to convey information still demanded keeping men close together for command control. This, and the traditional success of bayonet charges that still influenced many commanders, forced troops to continue to fight in closely packed formations that presented opponents armed with rifled muskets large targets.

Wounds Caused by Minie´ Balls

The soft lead that allowed Minie´ balls to expand within the rifle barrel also caused them to flatten out and/or splinter when they hit a human target. A smoothbore's solid shot could break bones and tear through tissue, but soft lead bullets shattered bone and ripped tissue. Overworked Civil War surgeons often had to amputate limbs wounded by Minie´ balls. Adding to the damage, some soldiers notched their bullets to insure they would spread out when they hit their target. In the 1870s, doctors urged an international ban on soft-lead bullets, saying they caused the same sort of damage as explosive bullets.

End of the Minie´ ball

The reign of the "king of weapons" did not last long. During the course of the Civil War breechloading weapons and repeaters proved they could provide a much higher rate of fire than the rifled musket (their conical bullets with attached cartridges evolved from the Minie´ball). Prussia demonstrated to European armies the impact of more rapid fire on the battlefield when its "needle gun" breechloaders badly outclassed Austrian weapons during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The era of ramming powder and a Minie´ ball down a barrel from the muzzle lasted less than a quarter of a century, but during that time the new conical bullet and the rifled musket had shown the need for armies to develop new tactics that recognized the increased strength of defenders and the slaughter awaiting troops packed into tight linear battle formations. Tragically, that lesson wouldn't take hold until after the carnage of World War I, 1914-1918.

Read more about Civil War guns and bullets

Weaponry: The Rifle-Musket and the Minié Ball

By Allan W. Howey

By the time the smoke had cleared and the veterans headed back to their homes, the American Civil War had exacted a terrible human cost. In four long years of bloody fighting, half a million of the three million men and boys in blue and gray had been wounded in combat. Two hundred thousand others had been killed.

These staggering figures may be less surprising after considering all the macabrely ingenious killing machines taken onto Civil War battlefields-rifled cannon, multi-shot arms, crude machine guns, and repeaters, to name a few. But it was not these spectacular weapons that drew the most blood during the Civil War. Ninety percent of the soldiers killed on the fields of battle owed their fate to a deceptively simple hand-held gun and its companion projectile: the rifle-musket and the minié bullet.

The rifle-musket and minié bullet together changed the face of warfare forever. For the first time in history, infantrymen could aim their weapons at a target a fair distance away and actually have a chance of hitting it. The days of successful frontal assaults by infantry and cavalry were over; defenders armed with the new rifle-musket could fire from a safe place and knock down attacker after attacker before they got close enough to do damage.

All this is quite a bit of notoriety for a humble-looking firearm with few visible characteristics to distinguish it clearly from its 1850s predecessor. But in many ways the Civil War rifle-musket was a brand new weapon that boasted the best features of its predecessors. It also had a more reliable ignition system and, more important, it fired a greatly improved projectile, the minié bullet.

The lineage of the Civil War rifle-musket reaches back to early-17th-century France. About 1610, the muzzleloading, smoothbore flintlock musket was invented as an improvement on the matchlock musket, a similar firearm that depended on a lit match for ignition. As the name muzzleloading, smoothbore flintlock musket suggests, the gun was loaded (with loose gunpowder and a round ball) at the mouth of its barrel. The bore, or inside of the barrel, was smooth; unlike the later rifle-muskets, it contained no spiral rifling grooves to force the projectile to spin evenly and thus travel rapidly in a straight line like a spiraling football. The ignition system featured a hammer-called a cock-that held a small piece of flint. When the shooter pulled the trigger, the cock fell and scraped the flint against a rough piece of metal known as the frizzen pan cover. This showered sparks onto loose gunpowder in the frizzen pan, which then ignited the main powder charge inside the barrel, behind the projectile. The British army beat the French army to the punch and officially adopted the weapon in 1682. It eventually became the standard infantry firearm of Europe and America and remained so until the muzzleloading rifle-musket replaced it in the 1850s.

What made the smoothbore flintlock musket so dominant an infantry weapon for so long was that it was easy to load; an experienced soldier could load and fire up to four times a minute, a rapid rate of fire for the time. Since the gun's barrel was not rifled-it had no grooves that a bullet needed to fit snugly against-the projectile could be cast slightly smaller than the bore diameter. That allowed the ball to fall to the bottom of the upturned barrel with little resistance. To load the weapon, a soldier pulled a paper cartridge containing both powder and ball from his cartridge box and tore off the powder end with his teeth. He primed the flintlock by pouring some of the loose gunpowder from the cartridge into the frizzen pan and closed the pan cover to keep the priming charge in place and dry. Next, he poured the remaining powder down the barrel and rammed the ball down on top of the powder with a metal ramrod. Finally, he stuffed the empty cartridge paper down the barrel to serve as a plug, a stopper strong enough to keep the ball from rolling out by the force of gravity, but weak enough not to obstruct the travel of a fired ball.

The ease of loading the smoothbore musket allowed soldiers to fire quickly, but the shots were not likely to hit their targets. Accuracy and range were not the weapon's strengths. In fact, firing one of these guns would be similar to shooting a marble from a modern shotgun. The weapon did not even have a rear sight for precise aiming because aiming was a fruitless effort. The statistics boil down to this: at 40 yards, the flintlock smoothbore could usually hit a target measuring 1 square foot, but at 300 yards, only 1 shot in 20 would hit a target of 18 square feet. As Colonel George Hanger, a British officer who fought in the American Revolution, wrote in 1814:
A soldier's musket if not exceedingly ill-bored (as many are), will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards, perhaps even at 100; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, providing his antagonist aims at him; and as for firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you might just as well fire at the moon and have the same hope of hitting your object. I do maintain and will prove, whenever called on, that no man was ever killed at 200 yards by a common soldier's musket by the person who aimed at him.
The chance of firing a smoothbore musket and hitting something beyond rock-throwing range was slim, but there was an alternative weapon: the rifle. The venerable Kentucky flintlock rifle, for example, the weapon favored by frontiersmen and by sharpshooters in the American Revolution, was extremely accurate at long ranges. Common practice targets were the head of a tack at 20 yards, the head of a turkey at 100 yards, and the body of a turkey at 200 yards-challenging targets even for today's sharpshooters with modern rifles and telescopic sights. At 400 yards, an American soldier with a Kentucky rifle could easily hit a target as large as a horse, a fact that made British cavalrymen very uneasy.

The problem with the rifle of the time was that loading it was a difficult and slow process. Because the ammunition had to fit inside the barrel tightly in order to fit in the spiral rifling grooves, soldiers had a tough job forcing it down from the muzzle, especially under combat conditions, when repeated firing quickly filled the grooves with the residue of burnt powder. Before long, the rifleman literally had to pound the tight-fitting bullet down the barrel. As a result, the rifle's rate of fire was only one-third of the smoothbore's, making the gun impractical for general military use. Soldiers were better off firing three or four shots a minute in the general direction of an approaching enemy unit than firing once a minute with pinpoint accuracy at individual targets.

What the infantryman needed was a firearm that combined the best of the smoothbore flintlock musket with that of the rifle-a gun that was easy to load and could hit a small target at 200 yards. That gun was the muzzleloading rifle-musket, and with it came the improved bullet that made it possible. Known to common soldiers as the minié ball (which they pronounced 'minnie ball), the conical bullet could be loaded quickly and easily down a rifle's muzzle and still fit the barrel's rifling grooves tightly when fired. But before all this came to bear, inventors and sportsmen were working to perfect a new ignition system.

In 1807, the Reverend Alexander Forsyth, a Presbyterian minister from Belhelvie, Scotland, patented a new, more reliable ignition system than the flintlock system. Rather than have a shower of sparks ignite loose gunpowder, Forsyth employed a flat-nosed hammer to strike powdered fulminate of mercury, which detonated on contact, setting off the main charge of gunpowder inside the barrel. In 1814, Joshua Shaw of Philadelphia improved on Forsyth's system by packing the fulminate inside a small iron cap and placing it on a hollow nipple fixed to the gun barrel, and in 1816, he replaced the iron with copper. The copper percussion cap was easy to use and virtually impervious to water and wind.

European and American armies embraced the new percussion, or caplock, system because of its reliability. The British army adopted it in 1834 after comparing the results of 6,000 test rounds fired from flintlock and percussion firearms. The flintlocks misfired 922 times (15 percent of the time), while only 36 (0.6 percent) of the percussion weapons misfired. The U.S. Army followed the British lead and adopted the percussion system in 1841. The following year, American armories began building smoothbore percussion muskets and converting older flintlocks to percussion weapons. Progress was slow, however, and the vast majority of American soldiers carried flintlocks in the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848. Even 13 years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, Union and Confederate authorities issued smoothbore flintlock muskets to thousands of unlucky soldiers.

The percussion ignition system made infantry weapons fire more reliably, but there remained the challenge of coupling easy loading with long range and accuracy. And it was here that the minié bullet entered the scene. Developed over a generation, its final design was the fruit of independent work by men from Great Britain, France, and the United States.

Great Britain took the lead. As early as 1818, Captain John Norton of the British 34th Infantry began experimenting with bullet design. Norton shaped the nose of his new bullet like a cone with a rounded point and made its cylindrical base hollow. The hollow base was the bullet's definitive feature. It allowed the bullet to be cast a bit narrower than the bore's diameter to allow easy loading, since when the gun was fired, the pressure expanded the base to fit the barrel's rifling grooves tightly. The inspiration for the bullet came to Norton while he was stationed in India and observed natives using blowpipes as weapons. He discovered that the base of the blowpipe arrow was made of elastic locus pith. When the natives blew, the pith expanded to form an airtight seal against the pipe's inner walls. It seemed a small jump from there to making a bullet with a base that would expand from the pressure of firing.

In 1836, a London gunsmith named William Greener found a way to improve Norton's design for expansion of the bullet base. He inserted into the hollow area a wooden plug that would push forward when the gun was fired and force the bullet's base outward. The result was that the bullet fit more uniformly inside the barrel, producing more reliable and accurate fire.

Norton's bullet with Greener's refinement eventually came before the British army for approval for use in the field, but the army's old-school officers rejected it. It was an overly conservative decision that squandered the opportunity to develop this innovative design into a truly remarkable weapon.

Several years after Norton had begun developing his hollow-base bullet, French weapons experts began working on a similar design. Eventually, three French army officers would share the credit for what would become the minié bullet: Captain Henri-Gustave Delvigne, Colonel Louis-Etienne de Thouvenin, and Captain Claude-Etienne Minié.

Delvigne led the way when he designed a muzzleloading rifle to fire a new type of bullet. In 1826, Delvigne built a unique rifle barrel with an independent gunpowder chamber at its breech. This chamber was separated from the rest of the barrel by a strong lip, beyond which the powder could pass, but not the bullet. In the earliest models, after the chamber was filled with gunpowder, Delvigne rammed a standard soft, round lead ball down the barrel and pounded it against the lip with the ramrod until it flattened just enough to grip the rifling grooves. He soon discovered, however, that the pounding disfigured the ball and greatly reduced its accuracy, so he designed an elongated, cylindrical bullet with a flat base that would expand more evenly under the ramrod blows. In 1840, Delvigne even received a patent for an explosive bullet of this general design. (Imagine pounding that down a rifle barrel!) In time, Delvigne's design proved unsuitable for general military use; the powder chamber quickly became clogged, and the bullet still ended up too deformed for accurate flight.

In 1828, Thouvenin modified and improved upon Delvigne's gun design. He replaced the lip and powder chamber inside the barrel with a hard metal post that screwed into the gun's breech. After loading, the flat base of the elongated, cylindrical lead bullet rested upon the post in a position to be easily and uniformly forced into the rifling grooves when compressed by the ramrod. The Thouvenin design was a moderate improvement over Delvigne's, and the French army selected it for trials in 1846. The gun and bullet combination was still not practical for widespread military use; the rifle breech was very difficult to clean, and the metal post was prone to breaking.

Delvigne's developments inspired Minié, who had served with the French Chasseurs in several African campaigns, to do further work toward making an efficient, effective bullet. In 1849, he came up with one that more closely resembled Norton's than Delvigne's. Like Norton's bullet, Minié's had a hollow cylindrical base and a rounded conical nose. Minié also incorporated a plug in the bullet's hollow base to assist expansion, just as Greener had done to Norton's design. Instead of a wooden plug, however, Minié used an iron cup, which in effect served the same purpose as Thouvenin's metal post. The explosion of the gunpowder would drive the iron cup forward and expand the bullet's base to fit the rifling grooves snugly.

By this point in the story, it should not be surprising to learn that the French army never adopted the new bullet. It took the British army to use it in their new 1851 Enfield rifles, paying Minié 20,000 pounds for his patent. The army also had to pay Greener 1,000 pounds, after he won a patent infringement lawsuit over the bullet's plug design. The bullet as it would be used by the soldiers in blue and gray was now virtually complete. It had also acquired the name that stuck among English-speaking troops-minnie ball, even though the captain's French surname was properly pronounced min-YAY and his innovation was not a ball but a cone-shaped bullet.

In the early 1850s, James H. Burton, a master armorer at the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, gave the minié bullet the form it would take into the Civil War. By lengthening the bullet slightly and thinning the walls of its hollow base, Burton was able to dispense with the iron plug. The base of the improved bullet expanded just as well as Minié's but was much easier and cheaper to mass-produce. By the mid-1850s, the fully evolved minié bullet made it possible to build an infantry weapon as easy to load as the old smoothbore musket but with the accuracy and range of a rifle. The term rifle-musket reflected the weapon's lethal combination of attributes.

U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, adopted the rifle-musket and minié bullet for the U.S. Army in 1855. An improved version of the rifle-musket-the 1861 model built by the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts-became the principal infantry weapon of Northern soldiers in the Civil War.

Hundreds of thousands of Union troops carried the 1861 Springfield onto the battlefields of the Civil War, and untold numbers of Confederates captured the weapon and used it themselves. Between 1861 and 1865, the Springfield armory manufactured nearly 800,000 of the guns; private contractors built 880,000 more; and slightly modified 1863 and 1864 models accounted for an additional 500,000. That put the total number of minié-bullet-firing Springfield rifle-muskets at more than 2 million.

The Springfield rifle-musket was a .58-caliber percussion weapon that weighed nearly 10 pounds and cost about $15. It was 58 inches long with a 40-inch barrel, and came with an 18-inch bayonet. On the negative side, bullets exited the Springfield's barrel at the relatively slow speed of only 950 feet per second (about the same as a modern .22-caliber rifle), but the gun's deadly accuracy at long ranges outweighed that shortcoming. Armed with a Springfield, a competent shooter could hit a 27-inch bull's-eye at 500 yards, the best performance to date for a standard-issue infantry weapon. A trained marksman could consistently hit a 4-inch target at 200 yards and a 6-by-6-foot target at 500 yards. At 1,000 yards, he could even hit an 8-by-8-foot target half of the time. That did not mean that the average Civil War soldier could hit anything at the more extreme distances, but improving the old smoothbore's 75-yard range by 125 yards dramatically increased the effectiveness of even the most inept infantryman.

On the Confederate side, the Enfield rifle-musket was perhaps the most common of a wide assortment of firearms. It was widely considered to be the equal of the Springfield. The Confederacy purchased about 400,000 of these 1853 model .577-caliber weapons from private manufacturers in England. (The Union imported a similar number for its troops.)

Studies done by weapons analysts from the U.S. Department of Defense 100 years after the Civil War proved that the rifle-musket was three times more deadly than the most lethal infantry weapon to that point in history. Taking into account factors such as range, accuracy, rate of fire, and battlefield mobility, the researchers awarded the rifle-musket a lethality index of 154. Its next closest competitor was the smoothbore flintlock musket, with an index of 47. That was followed by the flintlock rifle, with an index of only 36.

The deadly effectiveness of the rifle-musket loaded with a minié bullet was largely to blame for the Civil War's appalling casualty rates. During the nearly 10,500 skirmishes and battles of the war, more than 110,000 Union soldiers and 94,000 Confederates were killed, and an additional 275,000 and 194,000, respectively, were wounded. Rifle bullets, primarily the minié bullet, caused 90 percent of all these casualties. Artillery projectiles accounted for less than 9 percent, and swords and bayonets, less than 1 percent. Considering all this evidence, it is no exaggeration to conclude that the rifle-musket and minié bullet greatly affected the overall course of the Civil War and foreshadowed 20th-century warfare.

The rifle-musket and minié bullet revolutionized warfare by drastically altering the tactical balance between an attacking army and a defending one. Frontal assaults by infantry on a waiting enemy suddenly became suicidal. During the Napoleonic era, attacking infantry could safely approach to within 100 yards of an enemy line with little danger of being shot down. During the Civil War, however, because of the rifle-musket's accuracy at long ranges, stationary defenders could load and fire quickly and hit their attackers. Since advancing infantrymen could not easily stop to take aim in return, their losses were much heavier than the defenders'.

The combination of the rifle-musket and minié bullet also made the bayonet nearly obsolete. In earlier years, the bayonet was often the most decisive infantry assault weapon, because the smoothbore flintlock musket's short range allowed attackers to approach close enough for hand-to-hand fighting. In the Civil War, however, firepower almost always decided an assault's outcome before charging troops came within stabbing distance. In fact, very few Civil War surgeons reported bayonet wounds. During Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant's bloody campaign against Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the summer of 1864, for example, Union medical directors recorded only 37 bayonet wounds. Of the several hundred thousand wounded men treated in Union hospitals over the course of the war, surgeons noted only 922 bayonet wounds!

As they had done to the bayonet, the rifle-musket and minié bullet also reduced the effectiveness of field artillery. In the early 1800s, Napoleon often placed the artillery forward in his battle lines, even during advances, to provide direct fire in support of the infantry. During the Civil War, however, it was too easy to shoot down an exposed cannon crew operating in the front lines. The artillery was forced to seek protection in the rear, a position from which it was more difficult to hit enemy targets without endangering friendly troops in the front.

The cavalry was similarly ousted from its former role by the rifle-musket and minié ball. Napoleon often used his cavalry as a surprise offensive weapon, sending his horsemen on charges to trample infantrymen armed with smoothbore flintlock muskets. But the Civil War soldier armed with a rifle-musket and minié bullets could hit a man at 100 to 200 yards; a horse and rider made an even more inviting target. Consequently, the colorful cavalry charges of the Napoleonic era became all but obsolete. In fact, as the war continued, more and more cavalrymen fought as mounted infantry, using their horses for mobility and then dismounting to fight on foot. In effect, they became the forebears of today's mechanized infantry.

Unfortunately, it took most Civil War generals too long to realize that some critical tactics they had learned at West Point or from military manuals were obsolete, particularly the frontal assault. Generals on both sides continued to send their men on these suicidal attacks. In Pickett's Charge alone, almost 6,000 Rebels were killed or wounded as they advanced uphill over a mile of open ground toward entrenched Union positions at Gettysburg. The equations and formulas of warfare had been changed completely, mostly by a simple firearm and bullet: the rifle-musket and minié ball.

This article was written by Allan W. Howey and originally published in the October 1999 issue of Civil War Times Magazine.

For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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Facts, information and articles about the Minié Ball, a Civil War bullet Minie Ball summary: The Minié ball, or Minie ball, is a type of bullet used extensively in the American Civil War. The muzzle-loading rifle bullet was named after its co-developer, Claude-Étienne Minié. Although the Minié ball was conical in shape, it was commonly [...]

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The army ambulance corps was a way of transporting injured soldiers to medics in the field.
Many men feared entering the medic's tent because medical practitioners in the field during the Civil War were unfamiliar with, germ theory, antiseptic  medical practices, advanced equipment, and organized hospitalization systems were virtually unknown.
http://library.mtsu.edu/tps/sets/Primary_Source_Set--Civil_War_Medical_Care.pdf

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The Union military looked into the use of hot air balloons for reconnaissance purposes during the civil war.  There was a push for the balloons by a man named Thaddeus Lowe, who eventually established the Balloon Corps in the army.

The main purposes of the balloons included evaluation of the landscape, detection of confederate troops, and scouting of different battle tactics.  This new technology allowed the Union to get an upper hand in some battles and it forced the Confederates to spend money of camouflage.

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The Gatling gun was the first easily usable, and reliable machine gun to be designed and put into use; and it got its first taste of action during the Civil War.

What is truly amazing is the fact that the basic design of the Gatling gun is still used in modern military forces. So what is that design?

It consists of six to ten rotating gun barrels, each of which has its own firing mechanism. The barrels are turned by a hand crank (modern guns use an electric motor), and as cartridges are fed into the gun, each barrel automatically loads, fires, and ejects its cartridge in succession.

Since the barrels fire one at a time, time is allowed for each barrel to cool before it fires again. This overcame a major failing of machine gun designs up to that time, as most guns tended to overheat and expand due to continuous firing.

This resistance to overheating, as well as the gun's simplicity of design and ease of use were key to the good impression the weapon made during its first test. Not to mention the fact that it could fire 150-200 rounds per minute...

The new machine gun was first designed in 1861, but was not ready for testing until July of 1862, when it was test fired at Indianapolis. The test was done as a demonstration for local military officers, and political officials.

After the test, a report was sent to the Governor of Indiana by a number of men he had asked to investigate the new gun. In the report, the Governor was advised to purchase some guns for further testing in the battlefield. The following reasons were given for the recommendation:

" The barrels are so arranged as to fire independently of each other, so that an injury to one does not affect the others. There are no complicated parts, and the common soldier can keep it in order as readily as he can his musket. It is so substantial as to endure without injury the same usage as an ordinary field-piece. The discharge can be made with all desirable accuracy as rapidly as one hundred and fifty times per minute, and may be continued for hours without danger, as we think, from overheating. Two men are sufficient to work the gun, and two horses can carry it over the field with the rapidity of cavalry."

After more successful testing, the gun was finally patented in November of 1862. The new weapon was soon called the Gatling gun, after its inventor Richard Gatling; but it would be several years before the true value of the invention was realized.

Richard Gatling (left) was no novice inventor. In fact, by 1861 he was already independently wealthy thanks to his genius for invention.

He got started young. As a boy, Richard Gatling got to work with his dad as he was perfecting the invention of a cotton seed planter, and a machine for thinning young cotton plants. In his mid-teens, Gatling worked in the county clerks office; but by the time he was twenty, he had gone into business for himself.

His first solo invention was a propulsion screw for steam powered ships. Unfortunately, when he went to Washington D.C. to patent his design, he found that an almost identical design had been patent just a few short months earlier.

Throughout the rest of his life, Gatling would go on to invent a wheat planting drill (1839), a double-action hemp break (1850), a steam tractor (1857), a steam powered ram and a new gunmetal alloy during the war years, and a motorized tractor many years later.

He also received patents for improvements on his own inventions as well as improvements to bicycles, toilets, and many more...

All of these things contributed to Gatling's great success, but the invention he is most remembered for is, of course, the Gatling gun. So what was his inspiration to invent this machine gun? Well if he is to be believed, he was largely motivated by humanitarian concerns.

In later years, Gatling would claim that he invented his machine gun in the hope that it would end war, or at the very least, make war less costly...

Seems kind of backward, but he had his idea reasoned out. He felt that such an effective killing machine would make war too horrible, and wars would no longer happen. Failing that, he thought that the guns would at least mean that not as many men would be needed in the army, thereby lowering the cost of war. Here is something he wrote to a friend of his concerning his reasoning:

" I witnessed almost daily the departure of troops to the front and the return of the wounded, sick, and dead. The most of the latter lost their lives, not in battle, but by sickness and exposure incident to the service. It occurred to me if I could invent a machine--a gun-- which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished. I thought over the subject and finally this idea took practical form in the invention of the Gatling Gun."

Interesting note: Despite spending the entire war trying to get Union officials to adopt the single greatest advance in battlefield weaponry of that era, Richard Gatling was suspected of being a supporter of the Confederacy. Even as he was corresponding with Abraham Lincoln about his invention, the Union Army was investigating him.

This investigation was based on the suspicion that Gatling was an active and dangerous Southern sympathizer. Although this investigation never led to anything, it does add an interesting twist to the story...

Perhaps, if Union officials had spent more time investigating the invention rather than the inventor, they would have realized the enormous potential of this innovative new gun.

Not all Union officials were blind to the value of this new gun. After seeing the weapon fired, General Horatio Wright wrote a report which recommend the Army test it further. In his report he included the following statement:

" I have examined ... the invention known as the 'Gatling gun' and it seems to me to possess much merit."

Despite such endorsements, and many successful tests, the Union Army never adopted the gun.

A couple Union officers bought a few the guns privately, so the guns did see very limited action during the war. The most notable purchase was by General Benjamin F. Butler, who bought twelve guns at $1,000 each. Two of those guns were used at Petersburg in 1864 to defend against Confederate attacks, and the guns worked quite well.

Other than that instance, the new weapon saw very little battlefield use during the Civil War. Finally, after further testing, the U.S. Army approved the weapon for purchase in 1866. The officer who oversaw the decisive test included the following sentence in his report:

" The moral effect of the Gatling gun would be very great in repelling an assault, as there is not a second of time for the assailants to advance between the discharges."

It only took the Army officials five years to catch on to the advantages of the machine gun, the beauty of government bureaucracy, right?

Although Gatling's original gun has been obsolete for many years, there is a modern version that still uses the rotating barrels design. The only difference is the new gun fires about 4000 rounds per minute rather than 200...

Here is cool video showing a modern Gatling gun in action. I'm sure Richard Gatling would be proud.

American Civil War Story-Home Civil War Inventions

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The Gatling gun was the first easily usable, and reliable machine gun to be designed and put into use; and it got its first taste of action during the Civil War. What is truly amazing is the fact that the basic design of the Gatling gun is still used in modern military forces.

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http://www.nps.gov/wicr/learn/education/upload/medical-tools-for-teachers.pdf

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Both the North and the South recognized the importance of armor-cladding their ships. The first battle between two ironclad ships was the USS Monitor vs. the CSS Virginia in 1862.

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Railroads had a major impact during the Civil War as they helped generals to move their soldiers, supplies, and armaments; making it faster to attack. The life of soldier included a lot of traveling as they were constantly moving to where they were most needed during the war. Soldiers suffered a lot, they starved for days and their clothes weren't at the best condition.
http://www.nps.gov/anti/learn/education/upload/Letters%20and%20Diaries%20of%20Soldiers%20and%20Civilians.pdf

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Mines and torpedoes were mostly used by the Confederates towards the end of the Civil War to damage or destroy the Union surface ships and submarines.
http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/8-unusual-civil-war-weapons

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Torpedo: Torpedo,, cigar-shaped, self-propelled underwater missile, launched from a submarine, surface vessel, or airplane and designed for exploding upon contact with the hulls of surface vessels and submarines. A modern torpedo contains intricate devices to control its depth and direction according to a

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Realizing how tremendously vulnerable wooden ships were to destruction by long range, explosive cannon fire, naval architects began to dramatically improve ships' defenses by plating them with iron or steel.  This casing made shells bounce off the ship, allowing ironclads to survive repeated direct hits

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For centuries before the Civil War, large naval battles had not changed dramatically. Conflicts in the "Age of Sail" were fought by wooden, sail-driven ships carrying as many cannon as possible, which would generally pummel each other until one of them became so damaged that it could not keep up the fight. In the decade before the Civil War, however, major developments in naval technology - particularly in propulsion and artillery - forever changed the face of naval warfare. In the words of one historian, a British captain who fought the Spanish Armada in 1588 "would have been more at home in the typical war-ship of 1840, than the average captain of 1840 could have been...in the advanced [ship]types of the Civil War."

Steam

The first of these changes was the introduction of the steam power. Steam engines had existed before the nineteenth century, but Robert Fulton built the first steam-powered warship in 1815 for the US Navy. By burning coal, paddlewheel or propeller-driven steam ships achieved an unprecedented freedom of movement. Unlike sailing ships, whose movement relied heavily on the wind's power and direction, "steamers" could more easily return upriver after transporting goods to port or continue a journey with weak or averse winds.

Steam warships were slow to catch on, but by the late 1850s, all new warships built by the Navy featured steam engines. The significance of the steam was not necessarily obvious to outside observers - at least at first. The engines did not make the ships dramatically faster, and many steam ships continued to use sails preserve fuel on long trips. These ships looked and functioned much like ships from the age of sail except for the tell-tale smokestack rising above their decks. Nevertheless, because of their flexibility, steamers served as blockade runners, transports, and cruisers - and in virtually every role that could be found for them during the war. They also paved the way for other major developments in warship design.

Improved Artillery

Major artillery developments caused further change to warships. In the 1850s, several innovations in cannon construction enabled the military to build bigger, more accurate, and longer-ranged guns. One such change was conceived by John Dahlgren, a naval officer who developed a technique for reinforcing the breach of a cannon to better withstand the extra gunpowder needed to fire larger shells at greater distances. Furthermore, although both Union and Confederate navies continued to use smoothbore cannon, rifled cannon (which featured grooves on the inside of the barrel to impart a spin on the projectile) became increasingly common in the 1850s and 1860s. These weapons were significantly more accurate than their smoothbore predecessors, and when combined with the long range of newer naval guns, meant that naval battles could be fought at much greater distances.

These innovations were amplified by the widespread adoption of explosive shells, which had been developed in the 1820s. Several types of cannon shot existed in the centuries before the Civil War, but virtually all of them were designed to cripple a ship or kill her crew. Shells, however, contained a fuse timed to detonate after hitting the ship, meaning that a single shell could blow a sizeable hole in a wooden ship and send her to the bottom.

Ironclads

The developments in artillery and propulsion led to another key innovation: the ironclad. Realizing how tremendously vulnerable wooden ships were to destruction by long range, explosive cannon fire, naval architects began to dramatically improve ships' defenses by plating them with iron or steel. This casing made shells bounce off the ship, allowing ironclads to survive repeated direct hits. Ironclads were extremely heavy, so powerful steam engines took the place of sails, which were weaker and vulnerable to enemy fire.

The first ironclads were built in Europe just before the Civil War, but neither North nor South possessed any of their own when the war began. Both sides began building or converting ironclads of various shapes and sizes. Some ironclads were simply normal steam ships covered with metal plates (called casemate ironclads), while the Union built a number of "Monitor" class gunboats that sat low in the water and utilized a revolving armored gun turret. Gunboats intended to sail on Western rivers typically had shallower drafts than their ocean-going counterparts, which were designed to be more stable in heavy seas. Union and Confederate ironclads first met in battle in March 1862 at the Battle of Hampton Roads - the world's first naval engagement between ironclad warships.

With the battle of Hampton Roads, naval warfare changed forever. The ironclads could defeat wooden warships with relative ease, and brushed aside all but the heaviest (or the luckiest) artillery rounds. Apart from piercing the sturdy armor, an artillerist fighting an ironclad could only hope to hit a smokestack or shoot through an open gunport. Even then, it was unlikely the shot would do significant damage. So powerful were the ironclads that they upset an ancient axiom of naval warfare that forts were stronger than ships. Traditionally, forts afforded protection from enemy fire, a stable shooting platform for gunners, and the ability to mount powerful guns that were too large or heavy for ships. These factors remained true, but the new ironclads also had defense from enemy fire. Because they could withstand more time near a fort, groups of ironclads were able to rush past forts to enter harbors, or even - on several occasions - defeat forts in artillery duels.

Rams

As it became clear that most cannon fire could not reliably stop ironclads, the Union and Confederate navies increasingly invested in alternative strategies. One of the responses to this problem was not really an innovation at all, but a return to the dawn of naval warfare. The ram was used as the principle weapon on ancient Mediterranean warships, but had gone out of style as larger sailing-ships carrying cannon replaced oar-driven galleys. Steam engines, however, granted more maneuverability than sails, and when used in combination with heavy armor, could allow a ship to get close enough to ram and sink another ship (even an ironclad). Nevertheless, successfully ramming another ship was a difficult task that could sometimes damage the ramming vessel itself; rams once again drifted into obsolescence in the decades after the war.

Torpedos

In the South, where iron was scarce and the ability to make powerful steam engines was virtually nonexistent, Confederates were also forced to seek other methods of protecting their ports from an increasingly armored Union fleet. One solution was to deploy "torpedoes" - submerged explosives (which would be called sea mines today) that could detonate under enemy ships. Torpedoes therefore had the advantage of being able to attack an ironclad below the waterline, where its hull was most vulnerable.

When torpedoes proved successful, the Confederacy designed the first "torpedo boats," which carried mines on long spars in front of the ship. The boats sat low in the water so that they were harder to see, and presented a smaller target to cannon fire. On multiple occasions, torpedo boats (which were quickly adopted by the Union) were able to sail up to anchored ships and detonate torpedoes against the vessels' hulls.

Submarines

Southerners took the concept of low-profile torpedo boats one step further with the development of several submarines. The first-ever submarine to destroy an enemy ship was the H.L. Hunley, which sank USS Housatonic near Charleston in February 1864. The Hunley was essentially a submerged torpedo boat that had been plagued by bad luck and technical problems since its creation - losing almost two full crews in training exercises. Her career was short-lived; the sub sank with all hands almost immediately after the attack, and no other submarines were able to achieve any notable success during the war.

These interrelated innovations in naval technology - along with other notable developments such as the first warship to use a revolving gun turret in combat (the USS Monitor) and the US Navy's first aircraft carrier (a barge for launching observation balloons) - mark the Civil War as the beginning of a new era in naval warfare. The technology of the Civil War became the new standard among world powers, and the heavily armored, steam-powered battleships (soon to be known as "dreadnaughts") served as key tools for projecting national power and played a dominant role in the diplomacy between the world's "Great Powers" in the years of frenzied imperialism leading up to World War I. It was almost a century before further innovations, such as the dramatic improvements to ship-borne aircraft, caused the US Navy to once again majorly reorient the designs and missions of its ships. Other Civil War-era innovations - like steel armor and submarines- are still central components of modern naval warfare.

Additional Resources:
Naval Historical Center Symonds, Craig L., The Civil War at Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. McPherson, James M., War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Mahan, Alfred T., From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907

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For centuries before the Civil War, large naval battles had not changed dramatically. Conflicts in the "Age of Sail" were fought by wooden, sail-driven ships carrying as many cannon as possible, which would generally pummel each other until one of them became so damaged that it could not keep up the fight.

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https://www.loc.gov/resource/mmorse.012001/?sp=154

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Invented to solve the problem of loading reliability and firing sustained bursts. http://www.history.com/topics/gatling-gun

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https://www.loc.gov/item/91795085/
Invented in 1844 by Samuel Morse
15,000 miles of telegraph cable was laid only for military purpose.

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