Why shell guns did not suddenly create ironclads

The familiar argument runs from explosive shells destroying wooden ships at Sinop to the construction of ironclads. That sequence overlooks Nemesis, an iron-hulled East India Company gunboat built in 1839 and sold in 1852, before the battle. Gloire and HMS Warrior came later, after navies learned to combine technologies that already existed. Sinop belongs in the history of naval armament because it displayed the effect of shell fire, but it did not invent iron warship construction. Treating Warrior's launch after Sinop as proof of causation is the post hoc fallacy.