and the experience of its crew aboard one of the first ironclads. this is about 50 minutes. >> i've got to say i was so excited when our next speaker contacted me and wanted to be a part of what we're doing today. and david mendel has been a friend of the "uss monitor" for quite some time. and i'm so pleased that his book has been reissued with a brand-new name, right up here. we have it in the gift shop. i've got to admit i was an english literature nerd. and so the fact that he used so much melville and hawthorne in his book just made me so happy.

well, david mendel is a historian and engineer. we're not sure when he sleeps either. he is also director of mit's program on technology and science and interdisciplinary department. see an expert on human machine relationships in broad technical, social, and historical context. now for years he has been combining engineering and historical research into the evolution of humans' relationships to machines. his book "digital apollo, human and machine and space flight" examines computers, and automation in the apollo moon landings. his first book aboard the "uss monitor" now reissued as "iron coffin" was awarded the sally hacker prize by the society for the history of technology.

before coming to mit, he worked as a research engineer in the deep submergence laboratory where he is now a visiting investigator. maybe we'll find out what he is investigating. he has conducted all kinds of research there and worked on -- operated on autonomous underwater vehicles for exploring the deepest parts of the ocean and even developed the control system and pilot interface for the woods hole jason vehicle. so the man has done a little bit of everything. monitor, apollo, bronze age shipwrecks, he does it all. today he is going to be telling us about our favorite ironclad. and i just noticed he has a degree in literature. i knew i liked him. and an electrical engineering from yale university, his doctorate in the history of technology from mit. so without further ado, david

mendel. [ applause ] >> thank you. when anna invited me on the program, you know, i asked her if i should give a talk. she said how about an interpretive dance. so i'll now start my interpretive dance. no. just kidding. actually, funny that she mentioned all the various things i've been involved in over the years. they actually are all connected. i'll try 20 show you that in the talk. the title of the talk is the title of the reissued book as anna mentioned. you might call the unofficial title confessions of a monitor nerd, because i want to talk a little bit about the book was originally published in the year 2000. and i want to talk a little bit about what that history looked like when i first started working on it, and then what has happened in the last ten years, which is what the new parts of the book are just a little bit about, and a lot of what has happened with the monitor in the last ten years has been right

here by people in this room. so i started working on this project in 1992. and it was not by coincidence, and i'll come back to this right after the end of the first gulf war. and there was a lot of talk about push button warfare and robotic warfare and remote controlled warfare. and i was taking a class with pauline mayer and merit ross smith, who is here with me in the audience who was any thesis adviser and one of the two people the book is dedicated on early industrial american technology. and started looking at the monitor story. and at that time, 20 years ago now, it seemed like a story that everybody knew everything about. first fight between ironclads, monitor and merrimac, monitor and virginia, however you want to talk about it, best known story in naval history, most famous battle, john erickson, the hero, you have heard it all.

and i began looking a little bit at the document saying what is interesting here about technology? and this is a typical representation of the battle, actually a very good one. another more traditional one is the one on the u.s. postal service stamp from 1995. and the battle is almost always described as the fight between ironclads. it is a battle between machines. and many of these famous presentations are notable for the complete lack of people. very much a mechanical warfare. this is, again, this is actually from erickson's contributions to the centennial exhibition, but one of the sort of iconic drawings of the ship. very geometric, very clean, very lacking in human dimensions as it is john erickson's imagination.

that is how the story has come down. i got interested in other parts of the story. and, you know, in a funny way, thinking about it in the last couple of weeks, the last really major scholarly statement on the monitor i think i had been 1933 when james finney baxter wrote his classic "the intruction of the ironclad warfare." brodie in 1941 -- actually forgetting -- "power in the age of steam," i think. and there had been interesting forays through the '70s. jim delgado who is around today had written some nice stuff. bill still had written a couple of pieces on the captains and the builders of the monitor. a lot of teasers, but very little kind of reevaluation of

what was this ship, what did it mean in the history of technology, in the field of the history of technology, which i'm notionally in, there had been almost nothing. and that was a field that kind of had merged in the end -- after world war ii and the cold war to think about, technology and culture. and it seemed like there was time for a reevaluation. i dived into the library and looked around. and sort of took this dusty old topic all by myself. and began to look at what might be said that was new. now this photograph, which i'm sure is familiar to all of you and is the cover of the book tells a lot about what might be new. all of the existing literature on the monitor would show you the officers of the monitor. okay. there they are, as an illustration. interestingly, i did a survey. and of the literature on the monitor that existed at that time in 1992, there was never

more than a sentence or two, maybe i think in one there was a paragraph about the monitor's summer up the james river in 1862. there is the battle, maybe a little bit about the refit in september in washington, and then the sinking in the end of december. 90% of the monitor's operational life simply did not exist in literature. so i began looking gee, what is going on there. this picture is taken in july of 1862 in the middle of that summer. and i'll quote gust of theus fox. he came on board the monitor. he was the first person to come on after the battle of hampton roads. he said well, gentlemen, you don't look as though you've just come through the greatest naval battle on record. you might say the same thing about this photograph. these men are not looking all that happy. they're not looking all that shevelled, if that's a word. they are hastily contriving.

they are sitting on the covering of the skylights to create a dignified picture. they have thrown their uniforms on, as you can see they're all sort of in different states of array because of the photographer coming on board that day. they are on watch, in hostile territory. you can see the binoculars in the binocular case here. some of the other shots actually have an enlisted man standing on the tarp, keeping watch. they have carefully arranged the photograph, as all these photographs from this period were to show the dents in the armor made by the merrimac. they're very, very proud of that. it's not a coincidence that it's right there. and they're hot and keeler here is sun burnt. they have been exposed to the sun, literally baking inside the bowels of the iron monster,ed a as they said. up on the james river, supporting mcclellan's at this time failing peninsula campaign. and it's been a very rough time. two of these gentlemen have particular reason to look ornery

because they have less than six months to live. they died in the sinking. george frederickson and i'm forgetting the name of this gentleman. i'm sure somebody here will remember. and samuel dana green, the first lieutenant, is looking particularly unhappy. and the full weight of the ambiguity of the outcome of the encounter with the merrimac was then falling on green's shoulders. and it would plague him for at least -- well, not at least -- exactly another 20 years or so. and so this picture i have it up in sort of -- it blows up very well. i blew it up from the national archive. it's in my office at mit. and captures a lot of the clues that there is maybe a lot more going on here than the traditional heroic story. then you have captain jennifers sitting by himself next to an empty chair. he was of course not the captain who was in the famous battle, but was assigned -- actually there were a couple of captains

between him and when he took over. he was the captain for the summer, most of the summer of 1862. interestingly, in may of 1862, he wrote an extremely good and very honest account of the strengths and weaknesses of the monitor before gideon wells, the commander of the secretary. he really nailed it on the head in a whole bunch of different ways. another part of that story, the famous story is erickson the great inventor thrust this invention, radical invention on the navy, and the old fogies, that's a phrase you see all the time in erickson's writing and all throughout, the old fogies in the navy didn't want ironclad technology. you look at the debates that were going on on paper. the old fogies were mostly erickson's friends. they were the older gentlemen. they were the senior ranks in the navy. they actually liked erickson. the people who tended to oppose him were people like this, jennifers, young officers, highly trained in engineering, very similar with steam engineering. they called them the steam generation of officers.

in fact jennifers wasjennifers of the dahlgren who designed the monitor's guns, became the first head of the technical organizations in the navy. and this generational conflict was not the radical lone inventor versus the old fogies in the navy. there was a lot more going on there about the technology. similarly, and we saw a few of these today. this was an illustration from harpers about life inside the monitor. it looks a whole lot more spacious and comfortable. it looks as though you might as well have a gymnasium here and a beautiful galley here and the lovely ward room, which actually was pretty lovely. that's the one part of it that may be accurate, although not quite that big, and everybody enjoying a grand time below decks. looking again at the cross section, all these questions become very interesting when you start to open up and look inside this tin can and say what is

going on in there. well, one thing that was the life below decks. very simplified geometric representation here was pretty intense and pretty difficult at times, and turned out to be a major bottleneck in the combat effectiveness of not just this monitor, but all of them. same thing in the turret in different ways, the ability to fire coherently at the enemy, accuracy, we heard a little bit about that now, out of the turret and out of the pilot house. a more complicated story. i was really drawn, and i mentioned my literary background. i was drawn to keeler's letters because he was a literary type guy. this was one of his first reactions on seeing the monitor in his famous set of letters to his wife. we thought we were in no danger from shot or shell, but thought the trip in her was maybe not quite safe. i wonder whether there isn't danger enough to give us gler. one of the first thing he thinks

about when he sees this ship that comes up again and again and again among the monitor crew. after the great battle they are hailed as the great heros of the union. they saved the union, all these things that you have seen. you can see them in the great exhibits in this museum. but they would ask themselves, gee, we fought the enemy behind 8 inches of armor plate. what is so heroic about that? and look at all those poor guys who are running across the battlefields and straight into the grape shot and straight into the musket fire. what did we do that was really so heroic? well, one thing they found that they did was they survived riding around on the monitor. this is a view of actually the terror in 1898. it was one of the much, much later monitors. as the only view -- only photograph that i know of a monitor actually at sea. and you can see the decks are completely awash. and this was actually as it was designed to be. they would wash over the deck.

but it was a very strange, unusual, sometimes very comforting experience for the crew, sometimes extremely discomforting experience for the crew. keeler said you would look up and you would imagine the total weight of that water being sufficient to bury us forever. presciently of course, because that's what it did eventually. if you go into the museum display and look at the beautiful reproduction they've done of the officers' ward room, there was a skylight that would be on the deck up above. and keeler would describe lying in his bed looking up at the skylight. and the water would roll in and then roll out. and there would be fish swimming around in the skylight. it reminds you of something from jules vern's 20,000 leagues underneath the sea. it mentions the monitor in its first page. so very much a model for what later becomes a modern vision of a submarine home. again, the turret is of course the iconic picture of what the monitor was all about.

there are many other interesting novel design features worthy of note and worthy of study. but the turret, as you see again on the refrigerator that anna got in that wonderful new exhibit on pop culture monitor really was the thing that said monitor to people. here, again one of the famous pictures, very carefully lined up so that the dents from the virginia's shells are very clearly shown to the photographer. you can see the pilot house there in the background and the two guns pointing out. samuel dana greene, who commanded the gun crew had this to say about being in the turret. the effect of one shut up in a revolving drum is perplexing and it's not a simple matter to keep the bears. during the battle i would continually ask the captain how does the merrimac bear? and on the star board beam he could say or on the port quarter as the case may be. then the difficult would be to determine the direction of the star board beam or the port bear organize any other bearing. he had no idea which direction

he was pointing during the battle. now this comment by greene is often taken as a sort of aauthoritative account. in this article in the turret. we want to think than article in historical context as well. it was written for century magazine, which assembled a whole series of personal accounts that was later published in a series of volumes. they're very popular still called battles of the civil war. it was republished in 1956 in anticipation of the centennial. greene wrote this account. it was the first time he wrote his account of what happened during the battle of hampton roads. he described the confusion on board the ship. described the reasons that he broke off the battle when warden was wounded, went out to his mailbox, put it in the mail, went back to his house and shot himself in the head. 20 years after the battle. so that's why i said precisely 21 years or so, it burdened him.

in correspondence leading up to the publication of these articles, erickson, who never admitted that the battle with the monitor -- with the virginia was anything but a complete and total victory finally admitted that maybe the monitor had failed in its mission and placed the blame entirely on samuel dana greene, who by the way he also blamed for the sinking. and so the ambiguity of the outcome of the battle and the various issues and questions around the crew's roles were deeply, deeply held for people for as much as 20 years. in fact, the modern history of the monitor as we know it really emerged in the 1880s, much more than in the 1860s. most people didn't really want to talk about the civil war. it's well-known among historians, as is true for most wars, there is a period of silence after the war, and it takes a couple of decades for people to really discuss the more difficult issues. and the monitor that we know of

very much stemming from the set of articles published in century magazine in 1883 is a product of the 1880s. interestingly, after he did that, and after his suicide, there is a whole spate of correspondence from all members of the monitor crew from frank in new york who collected correspondence, all debating whether his suicide was actually related to issues around the monitor or not. many of the enlisted men on the ship in 1883 called him a coward. they said after the battle was over, we stood on the deck cursing him as a coward because he didn't pursue the merrimac. the officer, who including keeler who was a close friend of his tended to defend him more. the issue was never really closed for people. a similar set of issue around the enlisted crew. again, this photograph, which you're familiar with, very, very carefully staged to show the

dents in the armor. almost cosmically so. almost casually playing on deck and sitting there. but there is a hole through the crowd that goes right there. you can see, again, they're on the james river. they're in hostile territory. there is a lookout up here on top of the turret. most of the men look pretty hot and sun burnt also, if not blackened with coal. during that summer on the james river, the confederate sharpshooters learned pretty easily is all they had to do is take a few potshots at them and they would go inside and they would basically cook the crew all summer. the ship's logs record the temperature in the galley as getting up to 150 degrees fahrenheit during the summer. that's when the blowers were broken. when the blowers were working, it was a more comfortable 132 degrees. herman melville responded to this. he wrote a series of poems on the civil war.

four of them were about the ironclads. this one, which some some criti think is actually among the finest poems of the civil war, has this response. beheld you in the turret. walled by adamant. where a spirit forewarning and all deriding called. man, darest thou desperate unappalled be first to look thee in an iron tower. and he ends it with "monstrous error." wondering again what the challenges are of fighting from within this very, very unusual and very modern environment. these are some of the issues that i brought up in the book the first time around. there's a lot more interesting to say about them which i'm happy to talk about in the question and answer if people like. having in the last few weeks, partly to prepare this talk and partly just because the anniversary was coming on, back to read some of the documents, they are remarkable documents about the "monitor" and how much everyone is constantly defending themselves and laying charges at

everybody else. and the secretary of the navy asked john ericsson if he will come down to fort monroe and look at the "monitor" and talk to the crew. he said i just ordered six more of these from you, i think you should come down and talk to the crew and talk to the engineers and see what needs to improve. and ericsson responds, oh, they know how to operate the machinery very well, they're competent men, they don't need any help from me. and he refuses to come down and learns relatively few of the lessons that were needed to be learned for the following six monitors. but now i want to talk a little bit about up until really about 1999, 2000, when the book was published, i knew this ship through these documents. very rich documents. and i pretty much think that i read every document relative to the "monitor" that was accessible at that period. and then began this period where i and all of us in a way began to encounter this ship in other ways and simply added to the experience of what was going on.

one of those was a really kind of distinct and remarkable pleasure that i had which was filming a documentary with the bbc in 2005 about the ship and about not so much about the wreck, mostly about the ship. and we did some research and actually managed to find keeler's great, great grandson mr. mark ewing from albuquerque, new mexico, and brought him to the naval academy museum in annapolis and walked him through his great, great grandfather's letters. he had known that he had ancestor on the "monitor" but did not know much about him. and it was really interesting. you could almost look in his eyes and see that he had that same look, kind of intense focus -- i may be missing a great, but great, great grandfather had. interestingly, keeler's son in the last year or so, i've just been doing some amateur reading

about astronomy, and keeler's son james was one of the great astronomers who laid the foundation for edwin hubble's discovery of the expanding universe. and was working right up to the 1920s. we also went to a bunch of the various sites around. these are some actors that we hired. and then the bbc put a version of the monitor in here at harrison's landing, which is the place among other things it was known as the birthplace of president william henry harrison, but also where mcclellan basically evacuated the peninsula campaign to and then from and the "monitor" stood offshore and supported it. and this was one of the real poignant moments that summer where keeler wrote a letter to his wife where he said come up on top of the turret with me and look around and i'll tell you what i see, which is -- you know, for a historian to have somebody tell you that who actually knows how to write is remarkable. and he described the incredible sense of injury and dejection in

the rain that these poor injured soldiers who were just coming from the battle of malvern hill and other battles had right on this spot where i was standing when i took this photograph, evacuated from harrison's landing. very interesting, too, that the man who now owns that -- the house there on harrison's landing, his -- he inherited it. his grandfather had owned this house, and he said my grandfather was in the civil war. i said, well, that's unusual, you don't meet too many people these days whose grandfather was in the civil war. he said, yeah, my grandfather was a drummer boy with mcclellan's army on the peninsula campaign and was evacuated here out of harrison's landing and then he survived the war and went on to new york city and made a fortune in the tugboat business in the late 19th century and when he retired and had something to do with his fortune he came back and bought the estate at harrison's landing and it's still owned by that

family. other interesting ways to experience the "monitor" which i never thought i would do was to actually get to work on the ship. i had been doing a lot of work with robotic archaeology in very deep water, mostly around ancient shipwrecks in the mediterranean and in the black sea, and in the course of that work i met and became good friends with john broadwater, who was then heading the archaeological efforts. and an instrument that i designed for the other work had to do with can you detect the parts of a shipwreck that are buried in the mud with a robot. and we tried it out on a phoenician wreck off the coast of israel, and one thing led to another and john said, well, why don't you bring it out on the "monitor." and i was not going to turn down a chance to go out and do some work on the monitor. and so we adapted it and connected it to a cable. and i'm a very, very novice, amateur diver. so i did not dive on the wreck of the "monitor." this is tana casserly who used to be with the marine sanctuary, holding the sensor head in the

turret, trying to see if we could detect with this basically an ultrasonic device, almost like prenatal ultrasound, whether the guns were still inside that turret because it was critical for the planning of the eventual recovery of the turret. and i sat with my student brian bingham. and this is jeff johnston, who's still here at the museum. looking at the data. and we would go out at 6:00 a.m. from hatteras. and all day we would come back at 6:00, 7:00 p.m. in the evening after a 12-hour day on the water for 20 minutes on the site given all the other logistics and decompression that we had to do. but we did get? good data. and it was an experimental device. so i wasn't -- we weren't confident to tell anybody they should plan around this, but there were sonar indications that suggested there were a lot of big heavy metal objects buried in the sediment in the turret. one place i never thought i would be then would be inside the