How Ironclads Made Ended the Age of Sail - HMS Warrior's Evolution

TL;DR

France's La Gloire forced Britain to build HMS Warrior, the first all-iron ocean-going warship, making wooden warships instantly obsolete.

Key Points

• 1.The screw propeller (proven in 1845 when HMS Rattler beat paddle-wheeler Alecto in a tug-of-war) replaced paddle wheels, finally allowing broadside guns and armor on steam-powered warships simultaneously.
• 2.French officer Paixhans' explosive shell guns, adopted fleet-wide by the 1830s, exposed wooden hulls as fatally vulnerable and made armored steam warships a strategic necessity.
• 3.France's La Gloire, launched November 24, 1859 — a 5,360-ton wooden-hulled ironclad carrying 36 rifled guns with 4.7-inch armor — rendered Britain's 200+ wooden warships obsolete overnight.
• 4.HMS Warrior, launched 1861, answered La Gloire with an all-wrought-iron hull, 9,284 tonnes displacement, 4.5-inch armor backed by 18 inches of teak, and a top speed of ~17.5 knots under combined sail and steam.
• 5.The March 9, 1862 duel between CSS Virginia and USS Monitor at Hampton Roads — shells bouncing off both ships for three hours — confirmed globally that wooden warships were finished.
• 6.By 1870s wooden ships of the line had vanished; Warrior's design seeded the pre-Dreadnought standard adopted by all major navies until HMS Dreadnought redefined naval warfare in 1906.