The End
By 1874, all the money for her completion was gone, and the ship was not yet ready for launching even after the Stevens family had spent $2,000,000 (USD) on her since proposing her in 1841. McClellan estimated that she would require another $450,000 (USD) just to reach a state where she could be launched, with more necessary to fit her out after that. No more money was available from the Stevens family, Robert and Edwin Stevens both were dead, and the last hope to make something out of the project was to sell the ship. A possible sale to Prussia fell through, and there were no other potential buyers.
Most of the ship's machinery was sold in 1874 and 1875, and the ship was sold for scrap at public auction in 1881. The scrappers had to use blasting to dismantle her hull.
The Stevens Battery in many ways was far ahead of her time when proposed in 1841, and remained a revolutionary design with potential capabilities far beyond the norm for her times. But her first design proved inadequate in the face of the advance of gun technology, her second design took too long to build and never found favor with the U.S. Navy, and her third design, although modernized, came too late to salvage the project before it ran out of money. Had the Stevens Battery ever put to sea in the 1840s, 1850s, or 1860s, she might have set a new standard for the time in naval design.
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Famous quotes related to the end:
“It is seen
At the end that the kind and good are rewarded,
That the unjust one is doomed to burn forever
Around his error, sadder and wiser anyway.
Between these extremes the others muddle through
Like us....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We are, to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will have to be that, as a species, we have had an exciting term of office.”
—Desmond Morris (b. 1928)