What is "floating battery"

Floating \Float"ing\, a.

1. Buoyed upon or in a fluid; a, the floating timbers of a wreck; floating motes in the air.

2. Free or lose from the usual attachment; as, the floating ribs in man and some other animals.

3. Not funded; not fixed, invested, or determined; as, floating capital; a floating debt. Trade was at an end. Floating capital had been withdrawn in great masses from the island. --Macaulay. Floating anchor (Naut.), a drag or sea anchor; drag sail. Floating battery (Mil.), a battery erected on rafts or the hulls of ships, chiefly for the defense of a coast or the bombardment of a place. Floating bridge.

   1. A bridge consisting of rafts or timber, with a floor of plank, supported wholly by the water; a bateau bridge. See Bateau.

   2. (Mil.) A kind of double bridge, the upper one projecting beyond the lower one, and capable of being moved forward by pulleys; -- used for carrying troops over narrow moats in attacking the outworks of a fort.

   3. A kind of ferryboat which is guided and impelled by means of chains which are anchored on each side of a stream, and pass over wheels on the vessel, the wheels being driven by stream power.

   4. The landing platform of a ferry dock. Floating cartilage (Med.), a cartilage which moves freely in the cavity of a joint, and often interferes with the functions of the latter. Floating dam.

      1. An anchored dam.

      2. A caisson used as a gate for a dry dock.

         Floating derrick, a derrick on a float for river and harbor use, in raising vessels, moving stone for harbor improvements, etc.

         Floating dock. (Naut.) See under Dock.

         Floating harbor, a breakwater of cages or booms, anchored and fastened together, and used as a protection to ships riding at anchor to leeward.
         --Knight.

         Floating heart (Bot.), a small aquatic plant ( Limnanthemum lacunosum) whose heart-shaped leaves float on the water of American ponds.

         Floating island, a dish for dessert, consisting of custard with floating masses of whipped cream or white of eggs.

         Floating kidney. (Med.) See Wandering kidney, under Wandering.

         Floating light, a light shown at the masthead of a vessel moored over sunken rocks, shoals, etc., to warn mariners of danger; a light-ship; also, a light erected on a buoy or floating stage.

         Floating liver. (Med.) See Wandering liver, under Wandering.

         Floating pier, a landing stage or pier which rises and falls with the tide.

         Floating ribs (Anat.), the lower or posterior ribs which are not connected with the others in front; in man they are the last two pairs.

         Floating screed (Plastering), a strip of plastering first laid on, to serve as a guide for the thickness of the coat.

         Floating threads (Weaving), threads which span several other threads without being interwoven with them, in a woven fabric.

A floating battery is a kind of armed watercraft, often improvised or experimental, which carries a heavy armament but has few other qualities as a warship.

An early appearance was during the Great Siege of Gibraltar, and its invention and usage is attributed to Spanish lieutenant general Antonio Barceló.

A purpose-built floating battery was Flådebatteri No. 1, designed by Chief Engineer Henrik Gerner in 1787; it was 47 m long, 13 m wide and armed with 24 guns, and was used during the 1801 battle of Copenhagen under command of Peter Willemoes. The British made limited use of floating batteries during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with the two-vessel Musquito and Firm-class floating batteries, and some individual vessels.

The most notable floating batteries were built or designed in the 19th century, and are related to the development of the first steam warship and the ironclad warship.

Demologos, the first steam-propelled warship, was a floating battery designed for the protection of New York Harbor in the War of 1812.

In the 1850s, the British and French navies deployed iron-armoured floating batteries as a supplement to the wooden steam battlefleet in the Crimean War. The role of the battery was to assist unarmoured mortar and gunboats bombarding shore fortifications. The French used their batteries in 1855 against the defenses at Kinburn on the Black Sea, where they were effective against Russian shore defences. The British planned to use theirs in the Baltic Sea against Kronstadt, and may have been influential in causing the Russians to sue for peace. However, Kronstadt was widely regarded as the most heavily fortified naval arsenal in the world throughout most of the 19th-century, continually upgrading its combined defences to meet new changes in technology. Even as the British armoured-batteries were readied against Kronstadt in early 1856, the Russians had already constructed newer networks of outlying forts, mortar batteries of their own, and submarine mines against which the British had no system for removing under fire.

Floating batteries were popularly implemented by both the Union and the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The first was the Confederate Floating Battery of Charleston Harbor, which took an active part in the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861. Experimental ironclad vessels that proved too cumbersome or were underpowered were often converted into floating batteries and posted for river and coastal waterway control. Here too, Civil War batteries and even ironclads such as the famed monitors, were acutely vulnerable to mines protected in turn by forts. As a result, the combined defences of Charleston, South Carolina, for example, were never overwhelmed by the Union navy.