Cowper Phipps Coles, an English naval officer, born in 1819, died at sea, Sept. 7, 1870. He entered the navy.in 1831, and served with distinction on various stations, and particularly in the naval attack upon Sebastopol in October, 1854. He claimed to be the inventor of the system of revolving turrets for the protection of the guns in naval warfare. He says that the idea was suggested to him during the Crimean war, and that in 1855 he sent to the British admiralty drawings for an armored vessel of light draught, "the guns to be protected by a stationary hemispherical tower." No action was taken upon this suggestion. In March, 1859, he sent in other drawings in which this tower, or shield, was placed upon a turn-table, thus rendering it a revolving turret. In 1860 appeared in " Blackwood's Magazine" an article on this subject, with a drawing of such a turret, with the mechanism for turning it by hand. But the invention had been previously set forth by John Ericsson in a memorial to Napoleon III. (1854), and still earlier by Theodore R. Timby, an American inventor, who made a small model of a revolving turret in 1838, filed a caveat in the patent office in 1841, and publicly exhibited a large model in 1843. (See Iron-clad Ships.) After the success of the experiment of the Monitor in 1862, however, Coles put forth a statement in which he says: " My plans were so exactly similar to that of the Monitor, that I think it will be apparent that this invention is of English origin, and I claim it." In 1864 the British government had a man-of-war, the Royal Sovereign, altered into a "shield" ship under the direction of Capt. Coles, and subsequently constructed several other turreted vessels.

One of these was the Captain, an iron vessel, which foundered off Cape Finisterre, and of 540 persons on board only 17 were saved. Among those lost was Capt. Coles, who was a passenger.