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 "monitor's" turret, where i came and jeff johnston invited me in there. and again, for someone who had dealt with this ship as essentially a traditional historical topic, which means documents to most historians, to be standing there on top of those big heavy rails and seeing the dents in the armor, and i don't know if you can see, it's a little bit of a blurry picture, but i certainly felt like a kid in a candy store at that point. and to just get a sense of the sheer scale of the turret, which is very hard to do from the numbers and even from the photographs, which now the

museum is really good at giving you that sense. and also just how heavy and mechanical and sort of imposing that environment was and how really it's quite an intimidating kind of site. and this was without the guns in there. and to imagine actually the guns in there was -- you could understand why people like keeler reacted the way that they did. one of the things that struck me most, though, in the past ten years about the monitor was the work that they've done here in the museum with children. and in what is now the monitor and pop culture gallery, a few years ago was basically full of children's art about the "monitor"" versus the "merrimack" battle. and it was just amazing to see how this ship which still speaks to me after i wrote a book about b. it ten years ago and clearly speaks to all the people here in this room still in different ways speaks to children who are

learning about it. and you found in these images everything from -- some kids just drew sailing boats, didn't want to deal with it at all. other kids drew, you know, fiery representations of the battle. one was sort of like jackson pollack, just scribbly mess, but the title said "war is messy." and this one i actually published in the book from a young man named austin duch sto who lives here in virginia, just a very, very beautiful simple rendering of the ship where in a sense he really captured ericsson's original idea, which is very, very clean lines, not very complicated, very, very geometric. and the kind of very modern, modern in the capital m sense, in the sense of modernist sense of the ship, which is i think one of the things that made it so striking to people. you would not have been surprised if the monitor was built in the 1920s and not in the 1860s. that's almost how people thought

of it. lastly, i want to talk just a little bit about all the things that have gone on. and there's been a lot of war in the last 20 years, since the first gulf war. and a lot of those same questions that came around the "monitor" were raised. this is of course not from them but from before. this is from world war ii. late world war ii. and it's an advertisement from general electric depicting the air war over europe, which was a pretty brutal and in some ways very monitor-like experience for the crews aboard the b-17s. and you can see the introduction of electronics and electronic technology, the idea is without it everybody's flying all around and it's a big mess and there are these messy people in there. add the electronics and everything's clean and the sun is shining and you have this bright new horizon. very much the idea that john ericsson had about what he called his new system of naval attack. very much the reaction that i'll come to when you i close that nathaniel hawthorne had about

the battle. and here you see it again in its new form in world war ii. and of course in the last ten years the original book, i talked a little bit about unmanned aircraft now in development. but they've of course been used a great deal in the last ten years, particularly really the last 15. this particular one, predator, and then the armed version, which is called reaper. and all the different technologies about it. you see this all the time on the news, and i've had students now do dissertations about it, about what does it mean that these people are fighting in afghanistan and killing our enemies from air-conditioned, darkened trailers in las vegas? and how do they feel about it? and what do they say about it? and what is their reaction to it? one of my students who just finished his dissertation last summer was an air force fighter pilot, and he went in and did an anthropological study of these remote systems. and none of them actually said what samuel dana green said, but they said very many things that

are very, very similar to that. and a few summers ago the air force held a symposium which i was invited to give the keynote for, called the future operator. who are we going to be, they asked themselves. because pilots are no longer the social -- who have always been the social backbone of the air force have suddenly -- they're changing into something and we don't know how our entire social structure will be organized. and this was about 30 350 -- basically mid-career lieutenants and above. many of them fighter pilots, bomber pilots. spent three days debating exactly this issue that had been raised in the 1860s surrounding the with the monitor." and i opened with that talk. so i'll close then with nathaniel hawthorne's really prophetic response. he actually did visit the

"monitor." he came down. his college roommate. hawthorne had two college roommates. one of them was franklin pierce, who became president of the united states. and the other guy was someone named horatio bridge, which with a name like that you have to go into the navy, right? and he was the head paymaster of the navy. so he was keeler's boss. and hawthorne had a rough time just personally during the war, and a friend said why don't you go down and visit the battlefields? that'll make you feel better. and he went to find his friend bridge in washington. the two of them came and visited the "monitor" soon after the battle. and actually, interestingly, neither hawthorne nor keeler mentions the other, but they had so many similar reactions to the ship that i feel like they had a conversation. and this was one of keeler's reactions. "there must come up a race of enginemen and smoke-blackened cannoneers." so a whole different kind of

person emerges from this whole idea of an ironclad warship, fighting inside a machine. "who will hammer at their enemies under the direction of a single pair of eyes. and even heroism so deadly a grip is science laying on our noble possibilities will become a quality of very minor importance when its possessor cannot break through the iron crust and give the world a glimpse of it." and he had other great sayings like "how can an admiral condescend to go to sea nan iron pot?" issues that are very much still with us. i think it's one of the reasons that the "monitor" still appeals quite in the way it does. interestingly enough, if this is not quite the accurate picture, but behind -- this is the picture that people actually operate these remote vehicles in afghanistan. and it occurred to me yesterday as we were flying in, there are vast gymnasium-size rooms of people who just stare at the screens of the data that this comes in to and observe what's happening in villages on the other side of the earth. and one of those, the major one,

is actually about three miles from here at langley air force base. another three miles to hampton road. so it's particularly fight fitting in a way that this issue is something we're dusting here in this particular place. i'll just leave it at that, say a little bit about for any of those in the room, my nephew sam is here, who's having a great time, and just getting interested in history. one of the things that's so satisfying about it is that it doesn't change. it hasn't all been figured out before. and the "monitor" as we know it is constantly changing and evolving, very much thanks to the efforts of a lot of the people here at the museum and at the marine sanctuary. and again, maybe all graduate students feel this way but 20 years ago i certainly felt like i was the only person in the world interested in the "monitor" and the "merrimack." it felt like such an old story. and now a lot of people have become interested in it and the wreck sort of continues to evolve. so it's great to be here.

and thanks for your attention. >> happy to take questions. >> you mentioned that john ericsson's design was to avoid consideration. i wonder what you think it might have been if he this incorporated some ergonomics or some concern for the human. >> okay. well, that's a good question. i mean, we probably shouldn't say it was entirely devoid. because he did appoint the ward rooms very nicely and he had this notion that the officers would be so comfortable beneath the waves. i guess there were two points that i think he really missed. one was the details of the construction. he was right that his design was quite radical. but that design could really only hold together if it was -- and we saw a quote from the

contract in the previous talk. "perfectly engineered" or "perfectly constructed." and any new technology has a lot of bugs. he was not that interested in working through those bugs. the major change he made with the second class of monitors was to put pilot house on top of the turret. but there were a lot of other changes about ventilation and habitability and so, you know, the blowers -- the belts on the blowers were a single-point failure. if the blowers failed, the crew died. and they did fail from time to time. and the crew almost died. the "monitor" was hopelessly vulnerable to boarding. and the crew were terrified about that eventuality. all the crew of the "virginia" would have to do would be to jump on board and stuff up the ventilator holes and the story would have been over. so there were a lot of things that could have been prevented that way. gustavus fox and gideon wells and many others constantly pleaded with ericsson to pay more attention to the question

of habitability. and jeffers basically said, we had to pull off -- we had to end the battle at drury's bluff because half the crew were prostrate with heat exhaustion. same thing happened in the attacks on charleston harbor with the later "monitors." so improving the ventilation, improving the reliability of the ventilation, those were big ones. paying a little more attenti attention -- again, we saw this in the earlier talk -- to the visibility that the captain would have had and that the crew would have had. communications internally aboard the ship. there were any number of things. not rocket science in a certain way. not maybe the kind of geometric genius that he conceived of. but he is remarkable in his correspondence for how unwilling he is to acknowledge. and he says, you know -- he basically derides them and says, you know, the days of comfortable sailing ships are gone, get with the program, we're in a new world. and you know, these very professional active naval officers say i can't fight if my crew is sick, you know.

and that comes up again and again. yeah. >> in the years after the battle prior to his suicide did warden ever come out speaking in defense of green? >> yeah, that's actually a really good question. he did. in the 1870s he finally wrote -- and warden actually never wrote a formal report about the battle. nor did he make public statements about green or anything. and this upset green a great deal. and in the 1870s warden did write a letter where he said it's come to my attention that people are questioning green's heroism and basically he said i have to say he served heroically the whole time. because green said, "i didn't pursue the "merrimack," and i laid back to defend the "minnesota" because warden told me to do that when he was injured. what else could i -- he was 21 years old. and then people criticized him for that. again, you have to remember the crew were convinced they were going to go out the next day and

have a rematch. and the next day and the next day. and all right up until the "virginia's" destruction the crew is convinced they're going to fight it again. so the fact it was left as a draw didn't seem at the time to be a problem. when they find out that the virginia has been blown up in norfolk, they're not excited. they're terribly disappointed because they're dying for the chance to go out and prove themselves, that they really could beat it. and now they realize, literally this is a quote, "that day will never come." warden did defend green, but it may have been too little too late. and then a few years later -- and ericsson, there's a whole little episode where in about 1875 gideon wells begins to raise some questions. and catesby jones from the "virginia" has a few questions. so gideon