But whatever may have been the conservative official view, the lessons of the armour-clads in the Crimean War were not thrown away, and many naval designers were attempting to solve the problem of the best means of applying those lessons to the altered conditions of modern naval warfare. Guns were invented, more powerful than any wooden ship could hope to withstand, and it was admitted to be impossible to place as many of them on a ship as of the ordinary weapons. The turret and the broadside systems had already been suggested, and both had their enthusiastic advocates. The report presented by a Royal Commission appointed in 1858 to consider the relative strength of the British and French navies, first compared the state of the navies of the two powers before the Crimean War with that prevailing afterwards. In 1850 the line-of-battle ships of both countries were sailers, as were nearly all the frigates. The steam fleet of England at the time of the Crimean War was superior to that of France, which at one time had only one screw line-of-battle ship, the _Austerlitz_, available for the Baltic; but after the war the French lost little time in converting several of their sailing ships into steamships. A return accompanying this report shows that although the British had five steam line-of-battle ships for every four possessed by France, including those completed or still under construction, the French had forty-six steam frigates to thirty-four possessed by this country. The report contained one significant item, viz., that four iron-plated ships were being built by France, and these, “appearing so ominously, had completely changed the situation.”[35] The French naval architect, Dupuy de Lôme, was responsible for this innovation, and the four vessels were a testimony to his genius. The first of the quartette to be launched was the _Gloire_. Originally designed as a 90-gun battleship, she took the water as a 60-gun armoured frigate. She was of 5,650 tons displacement, and her three sisters were slightly smaller. Her armour was of iron, 4½ to 4¾ inches thick. She was not, as is sometimes asserted, armoured all over, but was plated her whole length along the water-line and for some little distance above it, and her central battery was also protected by a belt extending above the water-line belt. The engines worked up to about 4,200 h.p. indicated.