The first aircraft carrier

I was wondering recently when someone came up with the idea of putting a plane on a boat to attack the enemy.   Obviously by World War II this warfaring technology had been developed to be the dominant mode of seaborne attack, but somebody had to come up with the idea in the first place.

It turns out that the first idea was to put a single plane on a boat.  And they just recovered the first of these boats from the Thames River near London.


World's first aircraft carrier restored after it was found rusting by the Thames - and it's just 58 FEET long

The second idea was to build a ship with a flat top to land planes on. The first example of this was the HMS Argus.


That information satisfied my curiosical inauiry,.