The long road to a working submarine
The idea of moving underwater is old, but a reliable military submarine only appeared in the early twentieth century. The earlier attempts show what the problems were: how to supply air, how to control depth, how to see, and above all how to move. Almost every early boat was powered by human muscle, and the crews worked in cramped, poorly ventilated conditions. This article covers the period up to about 1900. The submarine as a weapon of twentieth-century warfare is a separate story.
Drebbel and the Thames
The earliest widely cited submersible is credited to the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel, who is said to have demonstrated a rowed boat beneath the surface of the River Thames in the early 1620s, during the reign of King James I. The boat is described as being made of wood covered in greased leather, with oars passing through watertight seals. Accounts come from writers of the time and later, and details, including the depth reached and the length of the dive, are uncertain. It is best treated as a probable early experiment of which few reliable facts survive.
David Bushnell and the Turtle
The first submersible known to have been used in war was the Turtle, built by the American inventor David Bushnell and used in 1776 during the American War of Independence. It was a small, egg-shaped, one-man craft, operated by hand-turned propellers, with ballast tanks that were flooded to dive and emptied with a pump. Its purpose was to approach a British warship and attach an explosive charge to the hull.
In September 1776 the Turtle was used against the British flagship HMS Eagle in New York harbour, with Sergeant Ezra Lee as the operator. The attempt did not succeed. By the usual account, Lee could not fix the charge to the hull, and the explosive was released and went off harmlessly. Later attempts against shipping also failed. The Turtle is therefore significant as a concept and as an early example of a military submersible rather than for any success in combat.
Robert Fulton’s Nautilus
Robert Fulton, who later became famous for steamboats, also worked on submarines. In France around 1800 he built a boat called Nautilus for the French government. It had a hand-cranked propeller, a sail for surface travel, and a compressed-air supply that allowed it to stay down for some time. Trials in 1800 and 1801 showed that it could dive and move underwater, but the French authorities lost interest, and neither France nor Britain took the design further. Fulton turned to other work, including the steamboats described in the article on the early steamboat pioneers.
Wilhelm Bauer and the Brandtaucher
In 1850, the Bavarian inventor Wilhelm Bauer built the Brandtaucher in Kiel for use against a Danish blockade during the First Schleswig War. On its first trial, it sank in the harbour. Bauer and his two crewmen are reported to have escaped from the vessel after it had settled on the seabed, which is regarded as an early example of an escape from a submerged submarine. The boat was recovered much later and is now displayed in a museum in Germany. Bauer went on to design further craft and worked in several countries.
The Civil War and the Hunley
The best-known pre-1900 submarine is the H. L. Hunley, a Confederate boat built in Mobile, Alabama, and tested in Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Civil War. It was a long, narrow vessel about 40 feet in length, powered by a crew turning a hand crank. It sank twice in trials, killing the crews, and Horace Hunley himself, the boat’s financier, was among those lost in October 1863.
On 17 February 1864, the Hunley attacked the Union sloop-of-war USS Housatonic, which was blockading Charleston, with an explosive charge carried on a spar at the bow. The Housatonic sank, and the Hunley is therefore regarded as the first submarine to sink an enemy warship. It did not survive: the vessel was lost shortly afterward with all eight crew. Its fate remained unexplained for well over a century. The wreck was located in 1995, and it was raised in 2000 and taken to a conservation laboratory in South Carolina. Study of the vessel and its remains has been a major project in maritime archaeology, though the cause of its loss is still debated. The boat is displayed and cared for as part of a public heritage programme, along the lines of other maritime museums.
The attack took place during a blockade by the Union navy, in which ironclad warships played a growing part, and the Hunley’s attempt formed part of the Confederate search for unconventional means of breaking it.
Steam, electricity and the end of the experimental era
Later in the nineteenth century, inventors tried other forms of power. In Britain, the Reverend George Garrett built the Resurgam, a steam-powered submarine, in 1879, and it was lost under tow in 1880. In Spain, Isaac Peral launched an electrically driven submarine in 1888, which carried out trials, although the Spanish navy did not adopt it. Electric batteries, which allowed an engine to run without air, would become an important feature of later designs. Torpedoes, developed in the 1860s and later, gave submarines a weapon that suited them far better than a charge fixed by hand.
What these craft tell us
The early submarines mostly failed as weapons. They were slow, short-ranged and hard to control. However, they established the basic problems that later engineers solved: buoyancy control, air supply, power that does not need air, and a practical weapon. By about 1900 the pieces were coming together, with the internal combustion engine, the electric battery, the periscope and the self-propelled torpedo. The history of the first navy-ready boats belongs to the twentieth century and is told in the companion article on military submarines.