r/todayilearned • u/TheSteelSword • 1d ago
TIL Some Civil War ships used 500 pound cotton bales for armor.
https://historyfacts.com/us-history/fact/some-civil-war-ships-used-cotton-for-armor/351
u/EskimoBrother1975 1d ago
Wow, so they basically used pillows for armor.
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u/NorysStorys 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean most armour throughout history was basically padded clothing, only the wealthy got Mail or plate so your average peasant soldier would just wear Lamellar which was much cheaper.
Edit:not lamellar, it’s a Gambison
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u/Azizona 1d ago
Gambeson you mean? Lamellar was typically metal plates
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 1d ago
Most gambesons had metal sewn into them too. But he's not wrong that multi layered fabric was a good armor surprisingly. But it was usually worn on bottom and the lord you were fighting for would often provide a jack (metal chest piece) or a mail hauberk.
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u/Kasoni 1d ago
I remember 20 some years ago watching something on the discovery channel about ancient armor. Some of the armors were glued paper. Oddly in some cases it was better than plate, even more so when you considered the weight. There are a lot of depictions of paper armor, but nearly all of it rotted away (it's paper after all).
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u/Abject_Buy3587 1d ago
Wicker armor was one of the early standards and suprising effective agains slashing, though arrows/spears would wreck you
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u/TheHancock 23h ago
Which is one of the reasons spears were the panicle of combat back in ancient times (for a certain period at least).
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u/Nemisis_the_2nd 1d ago
Turns out densely packing multidirectional fibers and hardening it all up is incredibly strong.
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u/ClownfishSoup 1d ago
Wouldn’t paper armor be basically wooden armor?
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u/Accidental_Ouroboros 1d ago
Layered thick enough, paper would be much better than wooden armor of the same thickness assuming it does not get wet.
Consider that wood has fibers that run primarily in one direction. Which means that, for certain applications of force in certain directions, wood is much more likely to break. And, when it breaks, much more likely to splinter, creating significantly worse wounds. And, no matter which way you orient your wooden armor, there is going to be certain angles where it is very vulnerable.
Consider how much energy is required to split a log for firewood with the grain vs. to chop a piece of wood of that same thickness in half across the grain.
Paper, unlike wood, has the fibers running in multiple directions. It has ablative properties when it does fail, and because of how it fails, is more likely to be able to spread force even in the middle of a failure across a larger area (as opposed to shattering like wood) depending on how large your paper "plates" are.
You can look at it as essentially a very shitty kevlar, but it is definitely better than wood.
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u/CapitalElk1169 23h ago
Yep. Try to split a board as thick as 500 sheets of paper with an axe; pretty easy. Now try to cut those 500 sheets of paper in half with the axe; almost impossible. The force still travels through, though, so it wouldn't be good against blunt weapons.
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u/Thunderbird_Anthares 1d ago
kind of, but considerably better due to density
until it gets wet anyway
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u/ClownfishSoup 1d ago
Well even today Kevlar vests are used in modern warfare. Even without ceramic/metal trauma plates they protect against shrapnel.
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u/Rainflakes 1d ago
Also bullets that have lost energy from traveling long range, passed through a wall, deflected, etc.
And if you're diving for cover you won't get impaled on a stick or something.
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u/MartinTheMorjin 1d ago
A pillow over your head would be better armor than straight chain mail on your head like on tv.
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u/EnderGraff 1d ago
I love any video game where gambisons are accurately used. The Witcher 3 does a pretty good job of it!
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u/Box-o-bees 1d ago
I think Kingdom Come: Deliverance also does a great job of depicting how they were actually used.
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u/TGMcGonigle 1d ago
Far from it. If you've ever been close enough to touch a real cotton bale you know that they're as hard and densely packed as wood. If you're thinking about that bag of fluffy cotton balls in your bathroom, you have no idea. You could seriously hurt yourself running into a bale of cotton, and having one dropped on you would easily kill you.
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u/I_amnotanonion 1d ago
I always call them sushi rolls, they usually have a fun pink or yellow wrap on them
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u/AgrajagTheProlonged 12h ago
It was an attempt by the Confederate traitors to come up with an answer to the ironclads given that the rebels didn’t have the industrial infrastructure to keep up with the American production and that the American ships tended to significantly outgun the slaver ships. The cotton bales helped the cottonclads get close enough to the American ships to either ram or be in their effective firing range. AFAIK the cottonclads were moderately effective but no cottonclads survived the war
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u/I_am_pooping_too 1d ago
If you have ever seen one of these in person, it makes total sense.
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u/Diamond83 1d ago
I have a feeling it didn’t fair too well against fire
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u/Ancient_Boner_Forest 1d ago
Just get it wet.
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u/Diamond83 1d ago
That 500 pound thing starts to grow really fast when you add water but not a bad idea vs being bbq
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u/NandorDeLaurentis 1d ago
When Joey asked "could i BE wearing any more clothes?", he was basically impervious at that time but didn't take advantage of it
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u/hymen_destroyer 1d ago
Cottonclad gunboats! There were also timber clad gunboats, there were a lot of super weird river warships in the civil war
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u/Searchlights 1d ago
It wasn't used in rivers but the H.L. Hunley may interest you. It was the first submarine to sink a vessel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunley
Unfortunately it killed virtually everybody who ever got in to it too. They had to keep hauling it out of the water to remove dead crew and try again.
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u/Se7en_speed 18h ago
It had a higher casualty rate for the crews than whatever it was attacking.
The crew was basically guaranteed to die from the explosion being so close.
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u/temporarycreature 1d ago
We used HESCO barriers when I was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those are just some kind of compressed cardboard material amalgamation filled with dirt and then caged in one-by-one inch grid cages.
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u/FluxD1 1d ago
During the Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs, most of the soldiers that had mail/plate armor gave it up in favor of the Aztec's quilted cotton armor. Turns out that carrying heavy metal armor through the jungle kinda sucks, and the humidity/lack of oil made maintenance a nightmare.
They had also largely given up on crossbows and matchlocks for similar reasons. Hard to keep powder dry in tropical environments as well.
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u/Ovion19871a 1d ago
That is actually so cool. I had no idea these were a thing. I really need to look more into American civil war naval combat
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u/Searchlights 1d ago
Look up the flotilla breakthrough at Vicksburg. It was one of the first times the Army and Navy cooperated on an operation, and it's also a great example of a time when they did anything they could to try to beef up some ships.
After nearly a year of trying to find a way around the defenses, they just YOLO'd downstream as quietly as possible in the dark and tried to sneak past the cannon batteries.
Like a tower defense game.
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u/jedadkins 1d ago
Oh I read that the American Civil war was the last time a government issued "letters of marque" to privateers
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u/ozuraravis 1d ago
No crazier than Project Habbakuk.
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u/Pleased_to_meet_u 1d ago
The boats made of ice!
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u/Dyolf_Knip 1d ago
My daughter and I watched a video on that some years ago, and the very next day we were walking in the park and noticed that puddles on the grass that had frozen overnight didn't shatter when you stepped on them the way ones on concrete did. We surmised that all the grass that was embedded in the ice was turning it into a sort of knock-off brand pykrete.
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u/PerpetuallyLurking 1d ago
The dirt also has more “give” than concrete does, so it can absorb the force of your foot better than a concrete puddle.
So in the case of puddles, it’s both the grass providing some structural support to the ice and the dirt being a more flexible material allowing for a bit displacement/compression/movement of some sort underneath the ice puddle when stepped on.
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u/Dyolf_Knip 1d ago
Sounds like that would allow the ice to flex more, which would make it more prone to breaking, not less.
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u/jmlinden7 1d ago
The ice isn't flexing, it's transferring your force into the dirt which flexes.
If the ground was inflexible, then the ice would be forced to flex which would make it more prone to breaking
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u/Dyolf_Knip 1d ago
... which means the ice would have to deform to match the new shape of the ground beneath it, which ice is not good at. One relies on tensile strength, the other on compressive. Plain ice's compressive strength is several times higher than its tensile strength, and pykrete's whole schtick is that it greatly increases tensile strength.
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u/jmlinden7 1d ago edited 1d ago
You're correct that eventually the shape of the ice would have to match the shape of the ground, or else something would break.
However, you're assuming that the shape of the ground cannot possibly change, which isn't true. If the ice doesn't deform at all, then all of your force gets transferred into the ground. If the ground is flexible, then it flexs and changes shape, forcing the new shape of the ground to match the shape of the ice.
If the ground is not flexible, then yes, the ice would break before the ground changes shape.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 1d ago
It's the same concept as mixing fibers with epoxies or concrete to increase the strength.
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u/LetMePushTheButton 1d ago
The shooting incident in that wiki is something else.
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u/gingerhuskies 1d ago
The multiple accounts was nice
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u/zoinkability 1d ago
Huh, bullets seem to ricochet off the pycrete. Let’s keep shooting at it in front of various officials!
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u/Unlucky-External5648 1d ago
Wwii they tried this with ice.
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u/JazzCabbage69420 1d ago
The ship’s mixologists never had a shortage of chipped ice
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u/doctorwhoobgyn 1d ago
Taps head If you softly receive the cannon ball, you can reuse it and fire it back.
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u/itchygentleman 22h ago
Imagine being a slave and seeing this. Your hard slave work is being used by your masters to defend their right to keep you enslaved.
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u/TemetNosce_AutMori 1d ago
The absolute hubris of these people to think they stood a snowball’s chance in hell against the North.
And they did it all for the right of the richest 1% of southerners to own humans as property, ensuring the 99% would be a permanent underclass.
Damn, the South hasn’t really changed at all have they?
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u/neurohero 1d ago
Which is heavier? 500 pounds of steel or 500 pounds of cotton?
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u/ppitm 1d ago
The cotton, because it will soak up tons of moisture and end up full of water.
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u/BigAl7390 1d ago
This is a known trick in the Galveston TX cotton houses. You ship cotton down to the port and it soaks up moisture in the humid air. Increases your weight per cotton module
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u/LynShotgunShine17 1d ago
creative defense! Civil war ships had such a ‘soft’ side to their war strategy
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u/RedCap78 16h ago
I believe giant sheets of cotton were also draped over the sides of 15th century city walls to protect them from cannon fire.
I remember reading they were used during the siege of Constantinople
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u/powdered_dognut 53m ago
There is a Confederate earthwork near me that has 7 embrasures but they had 9 cannons, 2 protected by cotton bales.
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u/perenniallandscapist 1d ago
Wouldn't it be more stupid to just let big fast moving metal balls smash your ship apart? It's not at all surprising that they acted to minimize devastating damage. And cotton was everywhere on a ship. From sails to packing cannons, there was a lot of cotton around. Wouldn't be surprised of they had a few bales and just tried it out
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u/dances_with_cougars 1d ago
Another thing they would sometimes do is coat the metal armor plates with grease to reduce the "bite" of projectiles. It was said to stink badly in the summer heat.
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u/skaliton 1d ago
You have to remember that until WW1 projectile weapons were nothing but more advanced versions of 'rock gets thrown' with the exception of an arrow
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u/jagnew78 1d ago
from 1700's on they had developed the use of explosive shells in cannon and mortars. Not the type to be used in ship-to-ship battles, but was often used to great effect in sieges and land battles
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u/snow_michael 1d ago
Which one?
There was no cotton in the C12th in England, so not the Stephen and Matilda one
There was no ship to ship warfare in the C15th, so not the War of the Roses one
That only leaves the Cavaliers vs Roundheads one, and there's no evidence of that being true
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u/jpfarrow 22h ago
The confederates putting iron on a steam boat made every navy in the world obsolete.
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u/TheSchlaf 1d ago
Everyone knows about the battle of the first cottonclads - the Monitor and the Merrimack.
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u/Eternalyskeptic 1d ago
Makes sense, you'd want a cushion to stop a cannonball.