The Admiralty’s official position at the time was to give submarine development ‘no encouragement’. He became the first designer to successfully unite three new pieces of technology – the electric motor, the electric battery, and the internal combustion engine – to create the first recognisably modern submarine. The real breakthrough, and the birth of the modern submarine, came courtesy of John Phillip Holland, towards the end of the 19th century. Though the Hunley did not survive the attack, war beneath the waves had definitely begun. The oar-propelled CSS Hunley attacked the Housatonic with an explosive device on the end of a spar that was attached to its nose. The most significant achievement was the destruction of the USS Housatonic in 1864, the first submarine victory. Several prototypes were built – by both sides – but these depended primarily on improvements to established technology rather than anything radically new. The Union had retained control of the US Navy, and its blockade of the South meant that the Confederacy was bound to search for ways to break it: the submarine was one of these. Then, the American Civil War (1861-1865) provided a major stimulus, particularly on the Confederate side. Submarine warfare did not develop further for 50 years. Although it made a number of attacks on Royal Navy ships, they could always see the Nautilus coming and easily evaded it.įailure meant Fulton’s dismissal, and the Royal Navy, with the world’s largest fleet, breathed a sigh of relief. It was driven by a hand-cranked propeller underwater, and by a sail when on the surface. This submarine had a number of successful test dives, reaching a depth of 25ft and an underwater speed of 4 knots. The attack failed, as Ezra Lee, the boat’s pilot, was unable to attach its armament, a 150lb-keg of gunpowder, to the enemy ship’s hull.Īnother American, Robert Fulton, attracted the attention of Napoleon in 1800 with his Nautilus. The Turtle became the first submarine to attack a ship, probably the HMS Eagle, in New York harbour in 1776. This one-man boat was driven by hand-cranked propellers, one to provide vertical movement and another to provide horizontal drive. Water was pumped in and out of the skin of the boat to change its ballast, thus enabling the boat to sink and rise. The American War of Independence provided further impetus in the form of David Bushnell’s Turtle. Once launched, though, it was unable to move. This, in effect, was a semi-submerged battering-ram designed to approach an enemy warship unnoticed and punch a hole in its side. As early as the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652- 1654), Louis de Son had built his 72ft-long ‘Rotterdam Boat’. It was not long before the military possibilities of a submerged boat began to be realised. In 1863, the Plongeur (‘Diver’), which was powered by engines run on compressed air, became the first submarine that did not rely on human propulsion for momentum. Despite these early concepts and the Drebbel I prototype, it was more than 200 years before the French Navy launched the first true precursor of the modern submarine. Early designs for submarines, henceforth, generally adopted a porpoise-like form. He suggested that a submarine should be built of copper and be cylindrical in shape to better withstand increasing pressure at depth. In 1636, a French priest, Marin Mersenne, added another piece to the jigsaw. Built for James I by Dutch engineer Cornelius van Drebbel and tested on the River Thames around 1620, it was essentially an enclosed rowboat. An artist’s reconstruction of what was probably the world’s first working Submarine. This would have forced the boat under as forward momentum was applied, like the angled plane of a modern submarine. Basically an enclosed rowboat manned by 12 oarsmen, it probably had a sloping foredeck. His boat, Drebbel I, is probably the first working submarine. The Dutchman Cornelius van Drebbel achieved this around 1620. The next step forward, conceptually, was to add some form of propulsion. The Alexander legend and Bourne’s principle related more to the diving bell than a boat. The exact process for doing this is not made clear, and contemporary materials and techniques precluded effective experiment. If you contract the volume of the ship, it will sink if you expand its volume, it will float upward. In this work, Bourne describes the principle of making a boat sink and rise again by changing the volume of the ship. It reappears with the publication in 1578 of Inventions or Devises by William Bourne, an English gunner turned innkeeper and mathematician. The submarine concept was thereafter consigned to the backwaters of history for some 1,800 years. The legendary origins of the submarine stretch back to 332 BC with a tale about Alexander the Great being lowered into the sea in a glass barrel to study fish.
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