In the latter half of the 19th century, ships began to transition from wood to iron and many engineers thought the time was ripe to experiment new forms. John Elder, a Scottish shipbuilder, advocated that making a ship wider in the beam would allow it to carry heavier and more powerful guns. Such a design would also have a shallower draft and only a moderate increase in power would be required to match the speed of a normal ship. The concept greatly interested Andrei Alexandrovich Popov, a rear admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy, but he took the idea to the extreme resulting in one of the most curious looking ships ever built.