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The French Navy's La Gloire ("Glory") was the first ocean-going ironclad battleship in history. Launched at the arsenal of Mourillon, Toulon, on November 24th 1859, she was developed following the Crimean War, in response to new developments in naval gun technology, especially the Paixhans guns and rifled guns, which used explosive shells with destructive power against wooden boats. She also followed the development of the ironclad floating batteries built by the British and French for the Bombardment of Russian forts during the Crimean War. She was designed by the French naval architect Dupuy de Lôme. She was built at Toulon, France. A 5,630-ton broadside battleship cut down by one deck in order to save weight, she used massive iron plates sheathed over a wooden hull structure. Her 12cm-thick protection plates resisted to experiments made by firing the strongest guns of the time (the French 50-pounder and the British 68-pounder) at full charge at a distance of 20 meters. Despite these qualities, the ship proved quite hard on the crew as any opening had been forbidden, in order to avoid piercing the protection plate: aeration was poor, and oil lamps had to be used for light. La Gloire initiated the obsolescence of traditional non-armoured wooden ships-of-the-line, and all major navies had no choice but to build ironclads of their own. The word had it that the Gloire fighting against conventional ships of the time would be comparable to "a wolf breaking havoc amongst sheep". However La Gloire was soon herself rendered obsolete by the launching in 1860 of the British HMS ''Warrior'', the world's first iron hulled warship. La Gloire had two sister ships: Invincible and Normandie, both commissioned in 1862.
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