On January 30, 1975, NOAA designated the wreck of the USS Monitor, lying off the coast of North Carolina, as the Nation's first marine sanctuary. The Monitor was the prototype for a class of U.S. Civil War ironclad, turreted warships that significantly altered both naval technology and marine architecture in the nineteenth century. Designed by the Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson, the vessel contained all of the emerging innovations that revolutionized warfare at sea.