ABSTRACT
The statement made by Commander Dahlgren was accurate, but came at a pivotal time in military ordnance development. Until the mid-1800s advancements in ordnance and fuzing system design were minimal as the weapon systems and tactics they supported went largely unchanged; however, the mid-nineteenth century’s industrial revolution resulted in advancing new manufacturing methods that were quickly applied to ordnance development. The only requirement to perfect many new ordnance designs was a large-scale testbed. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s numerous European revolutions, the Mexican-American War, and the Crimean War had little impact as the battlefields were far removed from the scientists and engineers involved in ordnance design, as well as manufacturers. The situation changed with the onset of the American Civil War, when the opportunity to develop and immediately test new ordnance designs on a massive scale was realized as the two largest armies in the world clashed on their own soil. Many technological advancements from this period are still evident in munition designs today: most notably, fuze designs focusing on reliability.
