In 1862 Mr. (afterwards Sir) E. J. Reed, was appointed Chief Constructor, and proceeded at once to produce the type of ship chiefly associated with his name. His ideals ran in the direction of short, handy ships of medium size, as heavily armed as possible, and with a good turn of speed. His arguments in favour of these ideals he afterwards described as follows:--[95] “The merits of ironclad ships do not consist in carrying a large proportion of weights to engine-power, or having a high speed in proportion to that power; but rather in possessing great powers of offence and defence, being comparatively short, cheap, and handy, and steaming at a high speed, not in the most economical way possible, but by means of a moderate increase of power on account of the moderate proportions adopted in order to decrease the weight and cost, and to increase the handiness.” Generally speaking, his views were very revolutionary. The greatness of Sir E. J. Reed lay in the fact that he was the first man to conceive of the ironclad as a separate and distinct entity. Previously to him the ironclad was merely an ordinary steamer with some armour plating on her. [Illustration: SIR E. J. REED. From a portrait made when he was Chief Constructor of the British Navy] His first ship was the _Bellerophon_, of 7,550 tons displacement. She embodied distinct novelties in the construction of her hull, described by her designer in the following passages:--[95] “The _Warrior_ and the earlier ironclads are constructed with deep frames, or girders, running in a longitudinal direction through the greater part of the length of the ship, combined with numerous strong transverse frames, formed of plates and angle-irons, crossing them at right angles. In fact, up to the height of the armour the ship’s framing very closely resembles in its character that of the platform or roadway of a common girder bridge, in which the principal or longitudinal strength is contributed by the continuous girders that stretch from pier to pier, and the transverse framing consists of short girders fitted between and fastened to the continuous girders. If we conceive such a platform to be curved transversely to a ship-shape form, and the under side to be covered with iron plating, we have a very fair idea of the construction of the lower part of the _Warrior_. If, instead of this arrangement, we conceive the continuous longitudinal girders to be considerably deepened, and the transverse girders to be replaced by so-called ‘bracket-frames,’ and then, after curving this to a ship-form, add iron-plating on both the upper and the under sides, we have a correspondingly good idea of the construction of the lower part of the _Bellerophon_. The _Bellerophon’s_ construction is, therefore, identical in character with the cellular system carried out in the Menai and other tubular