Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.

THE STORY OF THE
SUBMARINE

Courtesy of the Electric Boat Company.

U. S. Submarine M-1.

THE STORY OF
THE SUBMARINE

BY
FARNHAM BISHOP
Author of “Panama, Past and Present,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
AND DRAWINGS

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1916

Copyright, 1916, by
The Century Co.
Published, February, 1916

To
MY MOTHER

PREFACE

This book has been written for the nontechnical reader—for the man or boy who is interested in submarines and torpedoes, and would like to know something about the men who invented these things and how they came to do it. Much has been omitted that I should have liked to have put in, for this is a small book and the story of the submarine is much longer than most people realize. It is perhaps astonishing to think of the launching of an underseaboat in the year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, or George Washington watching his submarine attack the British fleet in 1776. But are these things as astonishing as the thought of European soldiers wearing steel helmets and fighting with crossbows and catapults in 1916?

The chapter on “A Trip in a Modern Submarine” is purely imaginative. There is no such boat in our submarine flotilla as the X-4. We ought to have plenty of big, fast, sea-going submarines, with plenty of big, fast sea-planes and battle-cruisers, so that if an invading army ever starts for this country we can meet it and smash it while it is cooped up on transports somewhere in mid-ocean. There, and not in shallow, off-shore waters, cumbered with nets and mines, is the true battlefield of the submarine.

The last part of this book has a broken-off and fragmentary appearance. This is almost unavoidable at a time when writing history is like trying to make a statue of a moving-picture. I have tried to do justice to both sides in the present war.

I wish to express my thanks to those whose kindness and courtesy have made it possible for me to write this book. To Mr. Kelby, Librarian of the New York Historical Society, I am indebted for much information about Bushnell’s Turtle, and to Mrs. Daniel Whitney, of Germantown, Pa., a descendant of Ezra Lee, for the portrait of her intrepid ancestor. Both the Electric Boat Company and Mr. Simon Lake have supplied me most generously with information and pictures. The Bureau of Construction, United States Navy, E. P. Dutton & Company, publishers of Mr. Alan H. Burgoyne’s “Submarine Navigation Past and Present”; the American Magazine, Flying, International Marine Engineering, the Scientific American, and the New York Sun have cheerfully given permission for the reproduction of many pictures of which they hold the copyright. Albert Frank & Company have given the cut of the advertisement of the last sailing of the Lusitania. Special thanks are due to Mr. A. Russell Bond, Associate Editor of the Scientific American, for expert advice and suggestion.

Some well-known pictures of submarines are herein credited for the first time to the man who made them: Captain Francis M. Barber, U. S. N. (retired). This officer published a little pink-backed pamphlet on submarine boats—the first book devoted exclusively to this subject—in 1875.

“The last time I heard of that pink pamphlet,” writes Captain Barber from Washington, “was when I was Naval Attache at Berlin in 1898. Admiral von Tirpitz was then head of the Torpedo Bureau in the Navy Department, and he was good enough to say that it was the foundation of his studies—and look what we have now in the terrible German production.”

Farnham Bishop.

New York,
January, 1916.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

THE STORY OF THE SUBMARINE

CHAPTER I
IN THE BEGINNING

If you had been in London in the year 1624, and had gone to the theater to see “The Staple of News,” a new and very dull comedy by Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson, you would have heard, in act III, scene i, the following dialogue about submarines:

Thomas

They write hear one Cornelius’ son
Hath made the Hollanders an invisible eel
To swim the haven at Dunkirk and sink all
The shipping there.

Pennyboy

But how is’t done?

Grabal

I’ll show you, sir,
It is an automa, runs under water
With a snug nose, and has a nimble tail
Made like an auger, with which tail she wriggles
Betwixt the costs of a ship and sinks it straight.

Pennyboy

Whence have you this news?

Fitton

From a right hand I assure you.
The eel-boats here, that lie before Queen-hythe
Came out of Holland.

Pennyboy

A most brave device
To murder their flat bottoms.

The idea of submarine navigation is much older than 1624. Crude diving bells, and primitive leather diving helmets, with bladders to keep the upper end of the air tube afloat on the surface of the water, were used as early as the fourteenth century. William Bourne, an Englishman who published a book on “Inventions or Devices” in 1578, suggested the military value of a boat that could be sailed just below the surface of the water, with a hollow mast for a ventilator. John Napier, Laird of Merchiston, the great Scotch mathematician who invented logarithms, wrote in 1596 about his proposed “Devices of sailing under the water, with divers other devices and stratagems for the burning of enemies.”

But the first man actually to build and navigate a submarine was a Dutchman: the learned Doctor Cornelius Van Drebel.[1] He was “a native of Alkmaar, a very fair and handsome man, and of very gentle manners.” Both his pleasing personality and his knowledge of science—which caused many to suspect him of being a magician—made the Netherlander an honored guest at the court of his most pedantic Majesty, King James I of England.

Van Drebel was walking along the banks of the Thames, one pleasant evening in the year 1620, when he “noticed some sailors dragging behind their barques baskets full of fish; he saw that the barques were weighed down in the water, but that they rose a little when the baskets allowed the ropes which held them to slacken a little. The idea occurred to him that a ship could be held under water by a somewhat similar method and could be propelled by oars and poles.”[2]

Cornelius Van Drebel.

Reproduced from “Submarine Navigation, Past and Present” by Alan H. Burgoyne, by permission of E. P. Dutton & Company.

Lodged by the king in Eltham Palace, and supplied with funds from the royal treasury, Van Drebel designed and built three submarine boats, between 1620 and 1624. They were simply large wooden rowboats, decked over and made water-tight by a covering of thick, well-greased leather. Harsdoffer, a chronicler of the period, declared that

“King James himself journeyed in one of them on the Thames. There were on this occasion twelve rowers besides the passengers, and the vessel during several hours was kept at a depth of twelve to fifteen feet below the surface.”

Another contemporary historian, Cornelius Van der Wonde, of Van Drebel’s home town, said of him:

“He built a ship in which one could row and navigate under water from Westminster to Greenwich, the distance of two Dutch miles; even five or six miles or as far as one pleased. In this boat a person could see under the surface of the water and without candle-light, as much as he needed to read in the Bible or any other book. Not long ago this remarkable ship was yet to be seen lying in the Thames or London river.”

The glow of phosphorescent bodies, suggested by the monk Mersenne for illuminating the interior of a submarine, later in the seventeenth century and actually so used by Bushnell in the eighteenth, might have furnished sufficient light for Bible- and compass-reading on this voyage. But how did King James—the first and last monarch to venture on an underwater voyage—the other passengers, and the twelve rowers get enough air?

“That deservedly Famous Mechanician and Chymist, Cornelius Drebell ... conceived, that ’tis not only the whole body of the air but a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speake) or spirituous part that makes it fit for respiration ... so that (for aught I could gather) besides the Mechanicall contrivance of his vessel he had a Chymicall liquor, which he accounted the chief secret of his Submarine Navigation. For when from time to time he perceived that the finer and purer part of the air was consumed or over-clogged by the respiration and steames of those that went in his ship, he would, by unstopping a vessel full of liquor speedily restore to the troubled air such a proportion of vital parts as would make it again for a good while fit for Respiration.”[3]

Did Van Drebel anticipate by one hundred and fifty years the discovery of oxygen: the life-giving “Quintessence” of air? Even if he did, it is incredible that he should have found a liquid, utterly unknown to modern chemistry, capable of giving off that gas so freely that a few gallons would restore the oxygen to a confined body of air as fast as fifteen or twenty men could consume it by breathing. Perhaps his “Chymicall liquor” instead of producing oxygen directly, increased the proportion of it in the atmosphere by absorbing the carbonic acid gas.

The Abbé de Hautefeullie, who wrote in 1680 on “Methods of breathing under water,” made the following shrewd guess at the nature of the apparatus:

“Drebel’s secret was probably the machine which I had imagined, consisting of a bellows with two valves and two tubes resting on the surface of the water, the one bringing down air and the other sending it back. By speaking of a volatile essence which restored the nitrous parts consumed by respiration, Drebel evidently wished to disguise his invention and prevent others from finding out its real nature.”

Courtesy of the Scientific American.

The Rotterdam Boat.

It is a very great pity that we know no more about these earliest submarines. Cornelius Van Drebel died in 1634, at the age of sixty-two, without leaving any written notes or oral descriptions. We must not think too hardly of this inventor of three centuries ago, unguarded by patent laws, for making a mystery of his discoveries. He had to be a showman as well as a scientist, or his noble patrons would have lost all interest in his “ingenious machines,” and mystery is half of the showman’s game. Besides his “eel-boats,” Van Drebel is said to have invented a wonderful globe with which he imitated perpetual motion and illustrated the course of the sun, moon, and stars; an incubator, a refrigerator, “Virginals that played of themselves,” and other marvels too numerous to mention. Half scientist, half charlatan, wholly medieval in appearance, with his long furred gown and long, fair beard, Cornelius Van Drebel marches picturesquely at the head of the procession of inventors who have made possible the modern submarine.

Eighteen years after Van Drebel’s death, a Frenchman named Le Son built a submarine at Rotterdam. This craft, which is usually referred to as the Rotterdam Boat, was 72 feet long, 12 feet high, and of 8 foot beam. It was built of wood, with sharply tapering ends, and had a superstructure whose sloping sides were designed to deflect cannon balls that might be fired at the boat while traveling on the surface, while iron-shod legs protected the hull when resting on the sea bottom. A single paddle-wheel amidships was to propel the boat,—just how, the inventor never revealed. Like so many other submarines, the Rotterdam Boat was built primarily to be used against the British fleet. But it failed to interest either the Dutch or French minister of marine, and never went into action.

The earliest known contemporary picture of a submarine vessel appeared in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” in 1747. It showed a cross section of an underwater boat built and navigated on the Thames by one Symons. This was a decked-over row-boat, propelled by four pairs of oars working in water-tight joints of greased leather. To submerge his vessel, Symons admitted water into a number of large leather bottles, placed inside the hull with their open mouth passing through holes in the bottom. When he wished to rise, he would squeeze out the water with a lever and bind up the neck of each emptied bottle with string. This ingenious device was not original with Mr. Symons, but was invented by a Frenchman named Borelli in 1680.

Submarine navigation was a century and a half old before it claimed its first victim. J. Day, an English mechanic, rebuilt a small boat so that he was able to submerge it in thirty feet of water, with himself on board, and remain there for twenty-four hours with no ill effect. At the end of this time, Day rose to the surface, absolutely certain of his ability to repeat the experiment at any depth. But how could he turn this to practical account?

Symons’s Submarine.

It was an age of betting, when gentlemen could always be found to risk money on any wager, however fantastic. Day found a financial backer in a Mr. Blake, who advanced him the money to buy a fifty-ton sloop and fit it with a strong water-tight compartment amidships. Ten tons of ballast were placed in the hold and twenty more hung outside the hull by four iron rods passing through the passenger’s compartment. When the rest of the boat was filled with water, it would sink to the bottom, to rise again when the man inside released the twenty tons of outer ballast.

Shut in the water-tight compartment of this boat, Day sank to the bottom of Plymouth Harbor, at 2 P.M., Tuesday, June 28, 1774, to decide a bet that he could remain twelve hours at a depth of twenty-two fathoms (132 feet). When, at the expiration of this time, the submarine failed to reappear, Mr. Blake called on the captain of a near-by frigate for help. Bluejackets from the warship and workmen from the dockyard were set to work immediately to grapple for the sunken craft and raise her to the surface, but to no avail. The great pressure of water at that depth—150 feet is the limit of safety for many modern submarines—must have crushed in the walls of the water-tight compartment without giving Day time enough to release the outer ballast and rise to safety.

CHAPTER II
DAVID BUSHNELL’S “TURTLE”

In the first week of September, 1776, the American army defending New York still held Manhattan Island, but nothing more. Hastily improvised, badly equipped, and worse disciplined, it had been easily defeated by a superior invading force of British regulars and German mercenaries in the battle of Long Island. Brooklyn had fallen; from Montauk Point to the East River, all was the enemy’s country. Staten Island, too, was an armed and hostile land. After the fall of the forts on both sides of the Narrows, the British fleet had entered the Upper Bay, and even landed marines and infantry on Governor’s Island. Grimly guarding the crowded transports, the ship-of-the-line Asia and the frigate Eagle lay a little above Staten Island, with their broadsides trained on the doomed city.

In the mouth of the North River, not a biscuit-toss from the Battery, floated the brass conning-tower of an American submarine.

It was the only submarine in the world and its inventor called it the Turtle. He called it that because it looked like one: a turtle floating with its tail down and a conning-tower for a head. It has also been compared to a modern soldier’s canteen with an extra-large mouthpiece, or a hardshell clam wearing a silk hat. It was deeper than it was long and not much longer than it was broad. It had no periscope, torpedo tubes, or cage of white mice. But the Turtle was a submarine, for all that.

Its inventor was a Connecticut Yankee, Mr. David Bushnell, later Captain Bushnell of the corps of sappers and miners and in the opinion of his Excellency General Washington “a man of great mechanical powers, fertile in invention and master of execution.” Bushnell was born in Saybrook and educated at Yale, where he graduated with the class of 1775. During his four years as an undergraduate, he spent most of his spare time solving the problem of exploding gunpowder under water. A water-tight case would keep his powder dry, but how could he get a spark inside to explode it? Percussion caps had not yet been invented, but Bushnell took the flintlock from a musket and had it snapped by clockwork that could be wound up and set for any desired length of time.

The Submarine of 1776.
(As described by its operator.)

“The first experiment I made,” wrote Bushnell in a letter to Thomas Jefferson when the latter was American minister to France in 1789, “was with about 2 ounces of powder, which I exploded 4 feet under water, to prove to some of the first personages in Connecticut that powder would take fire under water.

“The second experiment was made with 2 lb. of powder enclosed in a wooden bottle and fixed under a hogshead, with a 2-inch oak plank between the hogshead and the powder. The hogshead was loaded with stones as deep as it could swim; a wooden pipe, descending through the lower head of the hogshead and through the plank into the bottle, was primed with powder. A match put to the priming exploded the powder, which produced a very great effect, rending the plank into pieces, demolishing the hogshead, and casting the stones and the ruins of the hogshead, with a body of water, many feet into the air, to the astonishment of the spectators. This experiment was likewise made for the satisfaction of the gentlemen above mentioned.”

Governor Trumbull of Connecticut was among the “first personages” present at these experiments, which so impressed him and his council that they appropriated enough money for Bushnell to build the Turtle. The Nutmeg State was thus the first “world-power” to have a submarine in its navy.[4]

The hull of the Turtle was not made of copper, as is sometimes stated, but was “built of oak, in the strongest manner possible, corked and tarred.”[5] The conning-tower was of brass and also served as a hatch-cover. The hatchway was barely big enough for the one man who made up the entire crew to squeeze through. Once inside, the operator could screw the cover down tight, and look out through “three round doors, one directly in front and one on each side, large enough to put the hand through. When open they admitted fresh air.” On top of the conning-tower were two air-pipes “so constructed that they shut themselves whenever the water rose near their tops, so that no water could enter through them and opened themselves immediately after they rose above the water.

“The vessel was chiefly ballasted with lead fixed to its bottom; when this was not sufficient a quantity was placed within, more or less according to the weight of the operator; its ballast made it so stiff that there was no danger of oversetting. The vessel, with all its appendages and the operator, was of sufficient weight to settle it very low in the water. About 200 lb. of lead at the bottom for ballast could be let down 40 or 50 feet below the vessel; this enabled the operator to rise instantly to the surface of the water in case of accident.”

The operator sat on an oaken brace that kept the two sides of the boat from being crushed in by the water-pressure, and did things with his hands and feet. He must have been as busy as a cathedral organist on Easter morning. With one foot he opened a brass valve that let water into the ballast tanks, with the other he worked a force pump to drive it out. When he had reached an approximate equilibrium, he could move the submarine up or down, or hold it at any desired depth, by cranking a small vertical-acting propellor placed just forward of the conning-tower on the deck above. Before him was the crank of another propellor, or rather tractor, for it drew, not pushed, the vessel forward. Behind him was the rudder, which the operator controlled with a long curved tiller stuck under one arm.

The Best-known Picture of Bushnell’s Turtle.
Drawn by Lieutenant F. M. Barber, U. S. N., in 1875.

Bushnell, in his letter to Jefferson, calls each of these propellors “an oar, formed upon the principle of the screw,” and the best-known picture of the Turtle shows a bearded gentleman in nineteenth-century clothes boring his way through the water with two big gimlets. But Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Connecticut Line, who did the actual operating, described the submarine’s forward propellor (he makes no mention of the other) as having two wooden blades or “oars, of about 12 inches in length and 4 or 5 in width, shaped like the arms of a windmill.” Except in size, this device must have looked very much like the wooden-bladed tractor of a modern aeroplane.

“These oars,” noted Judge Griswold on the letter before forwarding it to General Humphrey, “were fixed on the end of a shaft like windmill arms projected out forward, and turned at right angles with the course of the machine; and upon the same principles that wind-mill arms are turned by the wind, these oars, when put in motion as the writer describes, draw the machine slowly after it. This moving power is small, and every attendant circumstance must coöperate with it to answer the purpose—calm waters and no current.”

“With hard labor,” said Lee, “the machine might be impelled at the rate of ‘3 nots’ an hour for a short time.”

Sergeant Lee volunteered “to learn the ways and mystery of this new machine” because the original operator, Bushnell’s brother, “was taken sick in the campaign of 1776 at New York before he had an opportunity to make use of his skill, and never recovered his health sufficiently afterwards.” While Lee was still struggling with the “mystery” in practice trips on Long Island Sound, the British fleet entered New York Harbor. The submarine was at once hurried to New Rochelle, carted overland to the Hudson, and towed down to the city.

At slack tide on the first calm night after his arrival, Lee screwed down the conning-tower of the Turtle above his head and set out to attack the British fleet.[6] Two whaleboats towed him as near as they dared and then cast off. Running awash, with not more than six or seven inches of the conning-tower exposed, the submarine crept, silent and unseen, down the bay and up under the towering stern of his Britannic Majesty’s 64-gun frigate Eagle.

“When I rowed under the stern of the ship,” wrote Sergeant Lee in after years, “I could see the men on deck and hear them talk. I then shut down all the doors, sunk down and came under the bottom of the ship.”

Up through the top of the submarine ran a long sharp gimlet, not for boring a hole through the bottom of a ship, but to be screwed into the wooden hull and left there, to serve as an anchor for a mine. Tied to the screw and carried on the after-deck of the Turtle was an egg-shaped “magazine,” made of two hollowed-out pieces of oak and containing one hundred and fifty pounds of gunpowder, with a clockwork time-fuse that would begin to run as soon as the operator cast off the magazine after making fast the screw. Everything seemed ready for Sergeant Lee to anticipate Lieutenant Commander Von Weddigen by one hundred and thirty-eight years.

But no matter how hard the strong-wristed sergeant turned the handle, he could not drive the screw into the frigate’s hull. The Eagle was copper-sheathed![7]

“I pulled along to try another place,” said Lee, “but deviated a little to one side and immediately rose with great velocity and came above the surface 2 or 3 feet, between the ship and the daylight, then sunk again like a porpoise. I hove about to try again, but on further thought I gave out, knowing that as soon as it was light the ships’ boats would be rowing in all directions, and I thought the best generalship was to retreat as fast as I could, as I had 4 miles to go before passing Governor’s Island. So I jogg’d on as fast as I could.”

To enable him to steer a course when submerged, Lee had before him a compass, most ingeniously illuminated with phosphorescent pieces of rotten wood. But for some reason this proved to be of no use.

Another Idea of Bushnell’s Turtle.

“I was obliged to rise up every few minutes to see that I sailed in the right direction, and for this purpose keeping the machine on the surface of the water and the doors open. I was much afraid of getting aground on the island, as the tide of the flood set on the north point.

“While on my passage up to the city, my course, owing to the above circumstances, was very crooked and zig-zag, and the enemy’s attention was drawn towards me from Governor’s Island. When I was abreast of the fort on the island, 3 or 400 men got upon the parapet to observe me; at length a number came down to the shore, shoved off a 12 oar’d barge with 5 or 6 sitters and pulled for me. I eyed them, and when they had got within 50 or 60 yards of me I let loose the magazine in hopes that if they should take me they would likewise pick up the magazine, and then we should all be blown up together. But as kind Providence would have it, they took fright and returned to the island to my infinite joy. I then weathered the island, and our people seeing me, came off with a whaleboat and towed me in. The magazine, after getting a little past the island, went off with a tremendous explosion, throwing up large bodies of water to an immense height.”

A few days afterwards, the British forces landed on Manhattan Island at what is now the foot of East Thirty-fourth Street, and Washington’s army hastily withdrew to the Harlem Heights, above One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. A British frigate sailed up the Hudson and anchored off Bloomingdale, or between Seventy-second and One Hundred and Tenth Streets, in the same waters where our Atlantic fleet lies whenever it comes to town. Here Sergeant Lee in the Turtle made two more attempts. But the first time he was discovered by the watch, and when he approached again, submerged, the phosphorus-painted cork that served as an indicator in his crude but ingenious depth-gage, got caught and deceived him so that he dived completely under the warship without touching her. Shortly after this, the frigate came up the river, overhauled the sloop on which the Turtle was being transported, and sent it to the bottom, submarine and all.

Ezra Lee.
Born at Lyme, Conn., Jan. 21, 1749,
Died at Lyme, Conn., Oct. 29, 1821.

From original painting in possession of his descendant, Mrs. Daniel Whitney, 5117 Pulaski Avenue, Germantown, Pa.

“Though I afterwards recovered the vessel,” Bushnell wrote to Jefferson, “I found it impossible at that time to prosecute the design any further. I had been in a bad state of health from the beginning of my undertaking, and was now very unwell; the situation of public affairs was such that I despaired of obtaining the public attention and the assistance necessary. I was unable to support myself and the persons I must have employed had I proceeded. Besides, I found it absolutely necessary that the operators should acquire more skill in the management of the vessel before I could expect success, which would have taken up some time, and no small additional expense. I therefore gave over the pursuit for that time and waited for a more favorable opportunity, which never arrived.

“In the year 1777 I made an attempt from a whaleboat against the Cerberus frigate, then lying at anchor between Connecticut River and New London, by drawing a machine against her side by means of a line. The machine was loaded with powder, to be exploded by a gun-lock, which was to be unpinioned by an apparatus to be turned by being brought alongside of the frigate. This machine fell in with a schooner at anchor astern of the frigate, and concealed from my sight. By some means or other it was fired, and demolished the schooner and three men, and blew the only one left alive overboard, who was taken up very much hurt.[8]

“After this I fixed several kegs under water, charged with powder, to explode upon touching anything as they floated along with the tide. I set them afloat in the Delaware, above the English shipping at Philadelphia, in December, 1777. I was unacquainted with the river, and obliged to depend upon a gentleman very imperfectly acquainted with that part of it, as I afterwards found. We went as near the shipping as we durst venture; I believe the darkness of the night greatly deceived him, as it did me. We set them adrift to fall with the ebb upon the shipping. Had we been within sixty rods I believe they must have fallen in with them immediately, as I designed; but, as I afterwards found, they were set adrift much too far distant, and did not arrive until, after being detained some time by frost, they advanced in the day-time in a dispersed situation and under great disadvantages. One of them blew up a boat with several persons in it who imprudently handled it too freely, and thus gave the British the alarm which brought on the battle of the kegs.”

The agitated redcoats lined the banks and blazed away at every bit of drifting wreckage in the river, as described by a sarcastic Revolutionary poet in “The Battle of the Kegs.”

Gallants attend, and hear a friend
Troll forth harmonious ditty,
Strange things I’ll tell that once befell
In Philadelphia city.

’Twas early day, as poets say,
Just as the sun was rising,
A soldier stood on a log of wood
And saw a thing surprising.

As in amaze he stood to gaze,
The truth can’t be denied, sir,
He spied a score of kegs or more
Come floating down the tide, sir.

* * * * *

These kegs, I’m told, the rebels hold
Packed up like pickled herring,
And they’re coming down to attack the town,
In this new way of ferrying.

* * * * *

Therefore prepare for bloody war,
The kegs must all be routed,
Or surely we despised shall be
And British valor doubted.

The royal band now ready stand
All ranged in dread array, sir,
With stomach stout to see it out
And make a bloody day, sir.

The cannon roar from shore to shore,
The small arms make a rattle,
Since wars began, I’m sure no man
E’er saw so strange a battle.

The kegs, ’tis said, though strongly made,
Of rebel staves and hoops, sir,
Could not oppose their powerful foes,
The conquering British troops, sir.

David Bushnell was later captured by the British, who failed to recognize him and soon released him as a harmless civilian. After the Revolution he went to France, and then to Georgia, where disgusted with the Government’s neglect of himself and his invention he changed his name to “Dr. Bush.” He was eighty-four years old when he died in 1826. His identity was then revealed in his will.

Bushnell found the submarine boat a useless plaything and made it a formidable weapon. To him it owes the propellor, the conning-tower, and the first suggestion of the torpedo. The Turtle was not only the first American submarine but the forerunner of the undersea destroyer of to-day.

“I thought and still think that it was an effort of genius,” declared George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, “but that too many things were necessary to be combined to expect much against an enemy who are always on guard.”

CHAPTER III
ROBERT FULTON’S “NAUTILUS”

Robert Fulton was probably the first American who ever went to Paris for the purpose of selling war-supplies to the French government. Unlike his compatriots of to-day, he found anything but a ready market. For three years, beginning in 1797, Fulton tried constantly but vainly to interest the Directory in his plans for a submarine. Though a commission appointed to examine his designs reported favorably, the minister of marine would have nothing to do with them. Fulton built a beautiful little model submarine of mahogany and exhibited it, but with no results. He made an equally fruitless attempt to sell his invention to Holland, then called the Batavian Republic. Nobody seemed to have the slightest belief or interest in submarines.

But Fulton was a persistent man or he would never have got his name into the history books. He stayed in Paris, where his friend Joel Barlow was American minister, and supported himself by inventing and exhibiting what he called “the pictures”: the first moving pictures the world had ever seen. These were panoramas, where the picture was not thrown on the screen by a lantern but painted on it, and the long roll of painted canvas was unrolled like a film between two large spools on opposite sides of the stage. Very few people remember that Robert Fulton invented the panorama, though only a generation ago the great panorama of the battle of Gettysburg drew and thrilled as large audiences as a film like “The Birth of a Nation” does to-day. Fulton painted his own panoramas himself, for he was an artist before he was an engineer. He made three of them and had to build a separate little theater to show each one in. The Parisians were so well pleased with this novelty that they made up a song about the panoramas, and the street where the most popular of the three was shown is still called “La Rue Fulton.” The picture that won the inventor this honor was a panorama of the burning of Moscow—not the burning of the city to drive out Napoleon, for that came a dozen years later, but an earlier conflagration, some time in the eighteenth century.

Napoleon overthrew the Directory and became First Consul and absolute ruler of France in 1800. He appointed three expert naval engineers to examine Fulton’s plans, and on their approval, Napoleon advanced him 10,000 francs to build a submarine.

Construction was begun at once and the boat was finished in May, 1801. She was a remarkably modern-looking craft, and a great improvement on everything that had gone before. She was the first submarine to have a fish-shaped, metal hull. It was built of copper plating on iron ribs, and was 21 feet 3 inches long and 6 feet 5 inches in diameter at the thickest point, which was well forward. A heavy keel gave stability and immediately above it were the water-ballast tanks for submerging the vessel. Two men propelled the boat when beneath the surface by turning a hand-winch geared to the shaft of a two-bladed, metal propellor. (Fulton called the propellor a “fly,” and got the idea of it from the little windmill-shaped device placed in the throat of an old-fashioned fireplace to be revolved by the hot air passing up the chimney and used to turn the roasting-spit in many a French kitchen for centuries past.) The third member of the crew stood in the dome-shaped conning-tower and steered, while Fulton himself controlled the pumps, valves, and the diving-planes or horizontal rudders that steered the submarine up and down. Instead of forcing his boat under with a vertical-acting screw, like Bushnell and Nordenfelt (see pages 16 and 62), Fulton, like Holland, made her dive bow-foremost by depressing her nose with the diving-planes and shoving her under by driving her ahead. Fulton was also the first to give a submarine separate means of propulsion for above and below the surface. Just as a modern undersea boat uses oil-engines whenever it can and saves its storage batteries for use when submerged, Fulton spared the strength of his screw by rigging the Nautilus with a mast and sail. By pulling a rope from inside the vessel, the sail could be shut up like a fan, and the hinged mast lowered and stowed away in a groove on deck. Later a jib was added to the mainsail, and the two combined gave the Nautilus a surface speed of two knots an hour. She is the only submarine on record that could go faster below the water than above it, for her two-man-power propellor bettered this by half a knot.

The Nautilus, Invented by Robert Fulton.

A-B, Hull; C-D, Keel; E-E, Pumps; F, Conning Tower; G, Bulkhead; H, Propellor; I, Vertical Rudder; L, Horizontal Rudder (diving-plane); M, Pivot attaching horizontal to vertical rudder; N, Gear controlling horizontal rudder; O, “Horn of the Nautilus;” P, Torpedo; Q, Hull of vessel attacked; X, Anchor; Y, Mast and sail for use on surface.

Her method of attack was the same as the Turtle’s. Up through the top of the conning-tower projected what Fulton called the “Horn of the Nautilus.” This was an eyeleted spike, to be driven into the bottom of a hostile ship and left there. From a windlass carried in a water-tight forward compartment of the submarine, a thin, strong tow-rope ran through the eyehole in the spike to the trigger of a flintlock inside a copper case nearly full of gunpowder, which was not carried on deck, as on the Turtle, but towed some distance astern. As soon as this powder-case came to a full stop against the spike, the tow-rope would pull the trigger.

Robert Fulton felt the lack of a distinctive name for such an under-water charge of explosives, till he thought of its likeness to the electric ray, that storage battery of a fish that gives a most unpleasant shock to any one touching it. So he took the first half of this creature’s scientific name: Torpedo electricus. Fulton had a knack for picking good names. He called his submarine the Nautilus because it had a sail which it opened and folded away even as the beautiful shellfish of that name was supposed to furl and unfurl its large, sail-like membrane.

On her first trial on the Seine at Paris, in May, 1801, the Nautilus remained submerged for twenty minutes with Fulton and one other man on board, and a lighted candle for them to navigate by. This consumed too much air, however, so a small glass window was placed in the conning-tower, and gave light enough instead. Four men were then able to remain under for an hour. After that, Fulton made the first compressed-air tank, a copper globe containing a cubic foot of compressed air, by drawing on which the submarine’s crew could stay under for six hours. This was in the harbor of Brest, where the Nautilus had been taken overland. A trial attack was made on an old bulk, which was successfully blown up. The submarine also proved its ability either to furl its sails and dive quickly out of sight, or to cruise for a considerable distance on the surface. Once it sailed for seventy miles down the English Channel.

Fulton had planned a submarine campaign for scaring the British navy and merchant marine out of the narrow seas and so bringing Great Britain to her knees, more than a century before the German emperor proclaimed his famous “war zone” around the British Isles. In one of his letters to the Directory, the American inventor declared that:

“The enormous commerce of England, no less than its monstrous Government, depends upon its military marine. Should some vessels of war be destroyed by means so novel, so hidden, and so incalculable, the confidence of the seamen will vanish and the fleet will be rendered useless from the moment of the first terror.”

To a friend in America, Fulton wrote from Paris on November 20, 1798:

“I would ask any one if all the American difficulties during this war are not owing to the naval systems of Europe and a licensed robbery on the ocean? How then is America to prevent this? Certainly not by attempting to build a fleet to cope with the fleets of Europe, but if possible by rendering the European fleets useless.”

Fulton began his campaign by an attack on two brigs, the nearest vessels of the English blockading fleet. But whenever the Nautilus left port for this purpose, both brigs promptly stood out to sea and remained there till the submarine went home. Unknown to Fulton, his actions were being closely watched by the English secret service, whose spies were always able to send a timely warning to the British fleet. During the day time, when the Nautilus was about, the warships were kept under full sail, with lookouts in the crosstrees watching with telescopes for the first glimpse of its sail or conning-tower. At night, the frigates and ships-of-the-line were guarded by picket-boats rowing round and round them, just as modern dreadnoughts are guarded by destroyers.

Disappointed by the lack of results, the French naval authorities refused either to let Fulton build a larger and more efficient submarine, or to grant commissions in the navy to him and his crew. He wanted some assurance that in case they were captured they would not be hanged by the British, who then as now denounced submarine warfare by others as little better than piracy. To guarantee their own safety, Fulton proposed that the French government threaten to retaliate by hanging an equal number of English prisoners, but it was pointed out to him that this would only lead to further executions by the British, who had many more French prisoners of war than there were captive Englishmen in France.

Napoleon had lost faith in the submarine, nor could Fulton interest him in a steamboat which he now built and operated on the Seine, till it was sunk by the weight of the machinery breaking the hull in two. So Fulton quit France and crossed over to England, where Mr. Pitt, the prime minister, was very much interested in his inventions.

Fulton succeeded in planting one of his torpedoes under an old empty Danish brig, the Dorothea, in Deal Harbor, in front of Walmer Castle, Pitt’s own residence, on October 15, 1805. The prime minister had had to hurry back to London, but there were many naval officers present, and one of them declared loudly that he would be quite unconcerned if he were sitting at dinner at that moment in the cabin of the Dorothea. Ten minutes later the clockwork ran out and the torpedo exploded, breaking the brig in two amidships and hurling the fragments high in the air. The success of this experiment was not entirely pleasing to the heads of the British navy. Their opinion was voiced by Admiral Lord St. Vincent, who declared that:

“Pitt was the greatest fool that ever existed, to encourage a mode of war which they who command the seas did not want and which if successful would deprive them of it.”

Destruction of the Dorothea.

From a woodcut by Robert Fulton.

Six days after the destruction of the Dorothea, the sea-power of France was broken by Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar. Napoleon now gave up all hope of gaining the few hours’ control of the Channel that would have enabled him to invade England, and broke up the camp of his Grand Army that had waited so long at Boulogne. With this danger gone, England was no longer interested in submarines and torpedoes. So Fulton returned to America, to build the Clairmont and win his place in history. But to him, steam navigation was far less important than submarine warfare. In the letter to his old friend Joel Barlow, dated New York, August 22, 1807, in which he described the first voyage of the Clairmont up the Hudson, Fulton said:

“However, I will not admit that it is half so important as the torpedo system of defense or attack, for out of this will grow the liberty of the seas—an object of infinite importance to the welfare of America and every civilized country. But thousands of witnesses have now seen the steamboat in rapid movement and they believe; but they have not seen a ship of war destroyed by a torpedo, and they do not believe. We cannot expect people in general to have knowledge of physics or power to reason from cause to effect, but in case we have war and the enemy’s ships come into our waters, if the government will give me reasonable means of action, I will soon convince the world that we have surer and cheaper modes of defense than they are aware of.”

Fulton had been having his troubles with the navy department. Soon after his return to this country he had made his usual demonstration of torpedoing a small anchored vessel, but it was not until 1810 that he was given the opportunity to make a test attack on a United States warship. But stout old Commodore Rogers, who had been entrusted with the defense of the brig Argus, under which Fulton was to plant a torpedo, anchored the vessel in shallow water, stretched a tight wall of spars and netting all round her, and successfully defied the inventor to blow her up. Even a modern destroyer or submarine would be puzzled to get past this defense. Though compelled to admit his failure, Fulton pointed out that “a system then in its infancy, which compelled a hostile vessel to guard herself by such extraordinary means, could not fail of becoming a most important mode of warfare.”

It was a great triumph for conservatism—the same spirit of conservatism that threatens to send our navy into its next war with no battle-cruisers, too few scouts and sea-planes, and the slowest dreadnoughts in the world. Though Fulton published a wonderful little book on “Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions” in New York in 1810, the United States navy made no use of it in the War of 1812. A privateer submarine from Connecticut made three dives under the British battleship Ramillies off New London, but failed to attach a torpedo for the old reason: copper sheathing. Further attacks were prevented by the captain of the Ramillies, who gave notice that he had had a number of American prisoners placed on board as hostages. Fulton himself was hard at work superintending the building both of the Demologos, the first steam-propelled battleship, and the Mute, a large armored submarine that was to carry a silent engine and a crew of eighty men, when he died in 1815.

CHAPTER IV
SUBMARINES IN THE CIVIL WAR

The most powerful battleship in the world, half a century ago, was the U.S.S. New Ironsides. She was a wooden-hulled, ship-rigged steamer of 3486 tons displacement—about one tenth the size of a modern superdreadnought—her sides plated with four inches of iron armor, and carrying twenty heavy guns. On the night of October 5, 1863, the New Ironsides was on blockade duty off Charleston Harbor, when Ensign Howard, the officer of the deck, saw something approaching that looked like a floating plank. He hailed it, and was answered by a rifle ball that stretched him, mortally wounded, on the deck. An instant later came the flash and roar of a tremendous explosion, a column of water shot high into the air alongside, and the New Ironsides was shaken violently from stem to stern.

The Confederate submarine David had crept up and driven a spar-torpedo against Goliath’s armor.

But except for a few splintered timbers, a flooded engine-room, and a marine’s broken leg, no damage had been done. As the Confederate craft was too close and too low in the water for the broadside guns to bear, the crew of the ironclad lined the rail and poured volley after volley of musketry into their dimly seen adversary till she drifted away into the night. Her crew of seven men had dived overboard at the moment of impact, and were all picked up by different vessels of the blockading fleet, except the engineer and one other, who swam back to the David, started her engine again, and brought her safely home to Charleston.

Views of a Confederate David.

From Scharf’s History of the Confederate States Navy.

The David was a cigar-shaped steam launch, fifty-four feet long and six feet broad at the thickest point. Projecting from her bow was a fifteen-foot spar, with a torpedo charged with sixty pounds of gunpowder at the end of it. This was exploded by the heat given off by certain chemicals, after they were shaken up together by the impact of the torpedo against the enemy’s ship. The David, steaming at her full speed of seven knots an hour, struck squarely against the New Ironsides at the water-line and rebounded to a distance of seven or eight feet before this clumsy detonator could do its work. When the explosion came, the intervening body of water prevented it from doing any great damage.

The David was not a true submarine but a surface torpedo boat, that could be submerged till only the funnel and a small pilot-house were exposed. A number of other Davids were built and operated by the Confederate States navy, but the first of them was the only one to accomplish anything.

C. S. S. Hundley.

The Only Submarine to sink a Hostile Warship before the Outbreak of the Present War.

The one real submarine possessed by the Confederacy was not a David, though she is usually so called. This was the C.S.S. Hundley, a hand-power “diving-boat” not unlike Fulton’s Nautilus, but very much clumsier and harder to manage. She had ballast tanks and a pair of diving-planes for steering her up and down, and she was designed to attack an enemy’s ship by swimming under it, towing a torpedo that would explode on striking her opponent’s keel.

The Hundley was built at Mobile, Alabama, by the firm of Hundley and McKlintock, named for the senior partner, and brought to Charleston on a flatcar. There she was manned by a crew of nine volunteers, eight of whom sat in a row and turned the cranks on the propellor-shaft, while the ninth man steered. There was no conning-tower and the forward hatchway had to be left open for the helmsman to look out of while running on the surface. On the Hundley’s first practice cruise, the wash from the paddle-wheels of a passing steamer poured suddenly down the open hatchway. Only the steersman and commanding officer, Lieutenant Payne, had time to save himself before the submarine sank, drowning the rest of her crew.

The boat was raised and Payne took her out with a new crew. This time a sudden squall sank her before they could close the hatches, and Payne escaped, with two of his men. He tried a third time, only to be capsized off Fort Sumter, with the loss of four of his crew. On the fourth trip, the hatches were closed, the tanks filled, and an attempt was made to navigate beneath the surface. But the Hundley dived too suddenly, stuck her nose deep into the muddy bottom, and stayed there till her entire crew were suffocated. On the fifth trial she became entangled in the cable of an anchored vessel, with the same result.

By this time the submarine’s victims numbered thirty-five, and the Confederates had nicknamed her the “Peripatetic Coffin.” But at the sixth call for volunteers, they still came forward. It was decided to risk no more lives on practice trips but to attack at once. In spite of the protests of Mr. Hundley, the designer of the craft, her latest and last commander, Lieutenant Dixon of the 21st South Carolina Infantry, was ordered by General Beauregard to use the vessel as a surface torpedo-boat, submerged to the hatch-coaming and with the hatches open. A spar-torpedo, to be exploded by pulling a trigger with a light line running back into the boat, was mounted on the bow. Thus armed, and manned by Lieutenant Dixon, Captain Carlson, and five enlisted men of their regiment, the little Hundley put out over Charleston bar on the night of February 17, 1864, to attack some vessel of the blockading fleet. This proved to be the U.S.S. Housatonic, a fine new thirteen-gun corvette of 1264 tons. What followed is best described by Admiral David Porter in his “Naval History of the Civil War.”

“At about 8.45 P.M., the officer of the deck on board the unfortunate vessel discovered something about 100 yards away, moving along the water. It came directly towards the ship, and within two minutes of the time it was first sighted was alongside. The cable was slipped, the engines backed, and all hands called to quarters. But it was too late—the torpedo struck the Housatonic just forward of the mainmast, on the starboard side, on a line with the magazine. The man who steered her (the Hundley) knew where the vital spots of the steamer were and he did his work well. When the explosion took place the ship trembled all over as if by the shock of an earthquake, and seemed to be lifted out of the water, and then sank stern-foremost, heeling to port as she went down.”

The Hundley was not seen after the explosion, and it was supposed that she had backed away and escaped. But when peace came, and Charleston Harbor was being cleared of the wrecks with which war had clogged it, the divers sent down to inspect the Housatonic found the Hundley lying beside her. Sucked in by the rush of the water through the hole her torpedo had made, she had been caught and dragged down by her own victim. All the Hundley’s crew were found dead within her. So perished the first and last submarine to sink a hostile warship, before the outbreak of the present war. A smaller underwater boat of the same type was privately built at New Orleans at the beginning of the war, lost on her trial trip, and not brought up again till after peace was declared.

The North had a hand-power submarine, that was built at the Georgetown Navy Yard in 1862. It was designed by a Frenchman, whose name is now forgotten but who might have been a contemporary of Cornelius Van Drebel. Except that its hull was of steel instead of wood and greased leather, this first submarine of the United States navy was no better than an eel-boat of the seventeenth century. It was propelled by eight pairs of oars, with hinged blades that folded up like a book on the return stroke. The boat was thirty-five feet long and six in diameter, and was rowed by sixteen men. It was submerged by flooding ballast tanks. There was an oxygen tank and an apparatus for purifying the used air by blowing it over lime. A spar-torpedo was to be run out on rollers in the bow.

Ten thousand dollars was paid to the inventor of this medieval leftover, and he prudently left the country before he could be called on to operate it, though he had been promised a reward of five thousand dollars for every Confederate ironclad he succeeded in blowing up. Like the first Monitor, this nameless submarine was lost in a storm off Cape Hatteras, while being towed by a steamer.

After the loss of the Housatonic, the North built two semi-submersible steam torpedo-boats on the same idea as the David, but larger and faster. Both were armed with spar-torpedoes and fitted with ballast tanks to sink them very low in the water when they attacked. The smaller of the two, the Stromboli, could be submerged till only her pilot-house, smoke-stack, and one ventilator showed above the water. The other boat was called the Spuyten Duyvil. She could be sunk till her deck, which was covered with three inches of iron armor, was level with the water, but she bristled with masts, funnels, conning-towers, ventilators, and other excrescences that sprouted out of her hull at the most unexpected places. Neither of these craft was ever used in action.

CHAPTER V
THE WHITEHEAD TORPEDO

How best to float a charge of explosives against the hull of an enemy’s ship and there explode it is the great problem of torpedo warfare. The spar-torpedo, that did such effective work in the Civil War, was little more than a can of gunpowder on the end of a stick. This stick or spar was mounted usually on the bow of a steam-launch, either partially submerged, like the David, or boldly running on the surface over log-booms and through a hail of bullets and grapeshot, as when Lieutenant Cushing sank the Confederate ironclad Albemarle. Once alongside, the spar-torpedo was run out to its full length, raised, depressed, and finally fired by pulling different ropes. So small was the chance of success and so great the danger to the launch’s crew that naval officers and inventors all the world over sought constantly for some surer and safer way.

Early in the sixties, an Austrian artillery officer attached to the coast defenses conceived the idea of sending out the launch without a crew. He made some drawings of a big toy boat, to be driven by steam or hot air or even by clockwork, and steered from the shore by long ropes. As it would have no crew, this boat could carry the explosives in its hull, and the spars which were to project from it in all directions would carry no torpedoes themselves but would serve to explode the boat’s cargo of guncotton by firing a pistol into it, as soon as one of the spars came into contact with the target. Before he could carry out his ideas any further, this officer died and his plans were turned over to Captain Lupuis of the Austrian navy. Lupuis experimented diligently with surface torpedoes till 1864, but found that he would have to discover some better steering-device than ropes from the shore and some other motive-power than steam or clockwork. So he consulted with Mr. Whitehead, the English manager of a firm of engine manufacturers at the seaport of Fiume.

Whitehead gave the torpedo a fish-shaped hull, so that it could run beneath instead of on the surface. For motive-power he used compressed air, which proved much superior to either steam or clockwork. And by improving its rudders, he enabled the little craft to keep its course without the aid of guide-ropes from the shore. The chief defect of the first Whitehead torpedoes, which were finished and tried in 1866, was that they kept bobbing to the surface, or else they would dive too deep and pass harmlessly under the target. To correct this defect, Whitehead invented by 1868 what he called the “balance chamber.” Then, as now, each torpedo was divided into a number of separate compartments or chambers, and in one of these the inventor placed a most ingenious device for keeping the torpedo at a uniform depth. The contents of the balance-chamber was Whitehead’s great secret, and it was not revealed to the public for twenty years.

The automobile or, as it was then called, the “submarine locomotive” torpedo was now a practicable, though by no means perfected, weapon, and the Austrian naval authorities gave it a thorough trial at Fiume in 1868. Whitehead rigged up a crude ejecting tube on the bow of a gunboat, and successfully discharged two of his torpedoes at a yacht. The Austrian government promptly adopted the weapon, but could not obtain a monopoly of it, for Whitehead was a patriotic Englishman. The British admiralty invited him to England two years later, and after careful trials of its own, induced the English government to buy Whitehead’s secret and manufacturing rights for $45,000. Other nations soon added “Whiteheads” to their navies, and in 1873 there was built in Norway a large, fast steam launch for the express purpose of carrying torpedoes and discharging them at an enemy. Every one began to build larger and swifter launches, till they evolved the torpedo-boat and the destroyer of to-day.

The torpedo itself has undergone a similar development in size and efficiency. The difference between the Whiteheads of forty-five years ago and those of to-day is strikingly shown in the following table:

The length of a large modern torpedo, it will be observed, is only three inches less than that of Fulton’s famous submarine boat of 1801. A Whitehead torpedo is really a small automatic submarine, steered and controlled by the most ingenious and sensitive machinery, as surely as if it were manned by a crew of Lilliputian seamen.

Projecting from the head is the “striker,” a rod which, when the torpedo runs into anything hard, is driven back in against a detonator or “percussion-cap” of fulminate of mercury. Just as the hammer of a toy “cap-pistol” explodes a paper cap, so the sudden shock of the in-driven striker explodes the fulminate, which is instantly expanded to more than two thousand times its former size. This, in turn, gives a severe blow to the surrounding “primer” of dry guncotton. The primer is exploded, and by its own expansion sets off the main charge of several hundred pounds of wet guncotton.

The reason for this is that though wet guncotton is safe to handle because a very great shock is required to make it explode, dry guncotton is much less so, while a shell or torpedo filled with fulminate of mercury would be more dangerous to its owners than to their enemies, because the slightest jar might set it off prematurely. Every precaution is taken to prevent a torpedo’s exploding too soon and damaging the vessel from which it is fired.

When the torpedo is shot out of the tube, by compressed air, like a pea from a pea-shooter, the striker is held fast by the “jammer”: a small propellor-shaped collar, whose blades begin to revolve as soon as they strike the water, till the collar has unscrewed itself and dropped off after the torpedo has traveled about forty feet. A copper pin that runs through the striker-rod is not removed but must be broken short off by a blow of considerable violence, such as would be given by running into a ship’s hull. As a third safeguard, there is a strong safety-catch, that must be released by hand, just before the torpedo is placed in the tube.

The explosive charge of two or three hundred pounds of wet guncotton is called the “war-head.” In peace and for target-practice it is replaced by a dummy head of thick steel. The usual target is the space between two buoys moored a ship’s length or less apart. At the end of a practice run, the torpedo rises to the surface, where it can be recovered and used again. This is distinctly worth while, for a modern torpedo costs more than seven thousand dollars.

Back of the war-head is the air-chamber, that contains the motive-power of this miniature submarine. The air is either packed into it by powerful pumps, on shore or shipboard, or else drawn from one of the storage flasks of compressed air, a number of which are carried on every submarine. The air-chamber of a modern torpedo is charged at a pressure of from 2000 to 2500 pounds per square inch. As the torpedo leaves the tube, a lever on its back is struck and knocked over by a little projecting piece of metal, and the starting-valve of the air-chamber is opened. But if the compressed air were allowed to reach and start the engines at once, they would begin to revolve the propellors while they were still in the air inside the tube. This would cause the screws to “race,” or spin round too rapidly and perhaps break off. So there is a “delaying-valve,” which keeps the air away from the engines till another valve-lever is swung over by the impact of the water against a little metal flap.

As the compressed air rushes through the pipe from the chamber to the engine-room, it passes through a “reducing-valve,” which keeps it from spurting at the start and lagging at the finish. By supplying the air to the engines at a reduced but uniform pressure, this device enables the torpedo to maintain the same speed throughout the run. At the same time the compressed air is heated by a small jet of burning oil, with a consequent increase in pressure, power, and speed, estimated at 30 per cent. All these devices are kept not in the air-chamber itself but in the next compartment, the balance-chamber.

Here is the famous little machine, once a close-kept secret but now known to all the world, that holds the torpedo at any desired depth. Think of a push-button, working in a tube open to the sea, with the water pressure pushing the button in and a spiral spring inside shoving it out. This push-button—called a “hydrostatic valve”—is connected by a system of levers with the two diving-planes or horizontal rudders that steer the torpedo up or down. By turning a screw, the spring can be adjusted to exert a force equal to the pressure of the water at any given depth. If the torpedo dives too deep, the increased water-pressure forces in the valve, moves the levers, raises the diving-planes, and steers the torpedo towards the surface. As the water pressure grows less, the spring forces out the valve, depresses the diving-planes, and brings the miniature submarine down to its proper depth again. When his torpedoes grew too big to be controlled by the comparatively feeble force exerted by the hydrostatic valve, Whitehead invented the “servo-motor”: an auxiliary, compressed-air engine, less than five inches long, sensitive enough to respond to the slightest movement of the valve levers but strong enough to steer the largest torpedo, exactly as the steam steering-gear moves the huge rudder of an ocean liner.

There is also a heavy pendulum, swinging fore and aft and attached to the diving-planes, that checks any sudden up-or-down movement of the torpedo by inclining the planes and restoring the horizontal position.

Next comes the engine-room, with its three-cylinder motor, capable of developing from thirty-five to fifty-five horse-power. The exhaust air from the engine passes out through the stern in a constant stream of bubbles, leaving a broad white streak on the surface of the water as the torpedo speeds to its mark.

The aftermost compartment is called the buoyancy chamber. Besides adding to the floatability of the torpedo, this space also holds the engine shaft and the gear attaching it to the twin propellors. The first Whiteheads were single-screw boats. But the revolution of the propellor in one direction set up a reaction that caused the torpedo itself to partially revolve or heel over in the other, disturbing its rudders and swerving it from its course. This reaction is neutralized by using two propellers, one revolving to the right, the other to the left. Instead of being placed side by side, as on a steamer, they are mounted one behind the other, with the shaft of one revolving inside the hollow shaft of the other, and in the opposite direction.

Long after they could be depended on to keep a proper depth, the Whiteheads and other self-propelled torpedoes were liable to swing suddenly to port or starboard, or even turn completely round. During the war between Chile and Peru, in 1879, the Peruvian ironclad Huascar discharged an automobile torpedo that went halfway to the target, changed its mind, and was coming back to blow up its owners when an officer swam out to meet it and succeeded in turning it aside, for the torpedoes of that time were slow and small as well as erratic.

Nowadays a torpedo is kept on a straight course by a gyroscope placed in the buoyancy chamber. Nearly every boy knows the gyroscopic top, like a little flywheel, that you can spin on the edge of a tumbler. The upper part of this toy is a heavy little metal wheel, and if you try to push it over while it is spinning, it resists and pushes back, as if it were alive. A similar wheel, weighing about two pounds, is placed in the buoyancy chamber of a Whitehead. When the torpedo starts, it releases either a powerful spring or an auxiliary compressed air engine that sets the gyroscope to spinning at more than two thousand revolutions a minute. It revolves vertically, in the fore-and-aft line of the torpedo, and is mounted on a pivoted stand. If the torpedo deviates from its straight course, the gyroscope does not, and the consequent change in their relative positions brings the flywheel into contact with a lever running to the servo-motor that controls the two vertical rudders, which soon set the torpedo right again.

Cross-section of a Whitehead Torpedo.
Redrawn from the Illustrated London News.

A, Striker which, when driven in, fires the charge; B, Safety pin, which is removed just before the torpedo is discharged; C, Detonating charge; D, Explosive-head, or war-head; filled with guncotton; E, Primer charge of dry guncotton in cylinder; F, Balance chamber; G, Starting pin; H, Buoyancy chamber; I, Propellor shaft; J, Vertical rudder; K, Twin screws; L, Horizontal rudder; M, Gyroscope controlling torpedo’s course; N, Engines propelling machinery; O, Pendulum acting on the horizontal rudder which controls the depth of submergence; P, Hydrostatic valve; Q, Air-chamber, filled with compressed air; provides motive-power for the engines; R, “Jammer” or release propellor.

Thus guided and driven, a modern torpedo speeds swiftly and surely to its target, there to blow itself into a thousand pieces, with a force sufficient to sink a ship a thousand times its size.

The Whitehead is used by every navy in the world except the German, which has its own torpedo: the “Schwartzkopf.” This, however, is practically identical with the Whitehead, except that its hull is made of bronze instead of steel and its war-head is charged with trinitrotuluol, or T.N.T., a much more powerful explosive than guncotton.

After the Russo-Japanese War, when several Russian battleships kept afloat although they had been struck by Japanese torpedoes, many naval experts declared that an exploding war-head spent most of its energy in throwing a great column of water up into the air, instead of blowing in the side of the ship. So Commander Davis of the United States navy invented his “gun-torpedo.” This is like a Whitehead in every respect except that instead of a charge of guncotton it carries in its head a short eight-inch cannon loaded with an armor-piercing shell and a small charge of powder. In this type of torpedo, the impact of the striker against the target serves to fire the gun. The shell then passes easily through the thin side of the ship below the armor-belt and through any protecting coal-bunkers and bulkheads it may encounter, till it reaches the ship’s vitals, where it is exploded by the delayed action of an adjustable time-fuse. What would happen if it burst in a magazine or boiler-room is best left to the imagination. Several Davis gun-torpedoes have been built and used against targets with very satisfactory results, but they have not yet been used in actual warfare.

Courtesy of the Electric Boat Company.

Davis Gun-Torpedo after discharge, showing eight-inch gun forward of air-flask.

Mr. Edward F. Chandler, M.E., one of the foremost torpedo-experts in America, is dissatisfied with the compressed-air driven gyroscope, both because it does not begin to revolve till after the torpedo has been launched and perhaps deflected from its true course, and because it cannot be made to spin continuously throughout the long run of a modern torpedo. He proposes to remove the compressed-air servo-motors, both for this purpose and for controlling the horizontal rudders by the hydrostatic valve, and replace them with an electrical-driven gyroscope and depth-gear. The increased efficiency of the latter would enable him to get rid of the heavy, uncertain pendulum, thus allowing for the weight of the storage batteries. Mr. Chandler declares that his electrically-controlled torpedo can be lowered over the side of a small boat, headed in any desired direction, and started, without any launching-tube.[9]

Courtesy of the Electric Boat Company.

Effect of Davis Gun-Torpedo on a specially-constructed target.

Though the automobile torpedo has been brought to so high a state of perfection, the original idea of steering from the shore has not been abandoned. The Brennan and Sims-Edison controllable torpedoes were driven and steered by electricity, receiving the current through wires trailed astern and carrying little masts and flags above the surface to guide the operator on shore. But these also served as a warning to the enemy and gave him too good a chance either to avoid the torpedo or destroy it with machine-gun fire. Then, too, the trailing wires reduced its speed and were always liable to get tangled in the propellors. Controllable torpedoes of this type were abandoned before the outbreak of the present war and will probably never be used in action.

A new and more promising sort of controllable torpedo was immediately suggested by the invention of wireless telegraphy. Many inventors have been working to perfect such a weapon, and a young American engineer, Mr. John Hays Hammond, Jr., seems to have succeeded. From his wireless station on shore, Mr. Hammond can make a small, crewless electric launch run hither and yon as he pleases about the harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The commander and many of the officers of the United States coast artillery corps have carefully inspected and tested this craft, which promises to be the forerunner of a new and most formidable species of coast defense torpedo.

CHAPTER VI
FREAKS AND FAILURES

During the half-century following the death of Fulton, scarcely a year went by without the designing or launching of a new man-power submarine. Some of these boats, notably those of the Bavarian Wilhelm Bauer, were surprisingly good, others were most amazingly bad, but none of them led to anything better. Inventor after inventor wasted his substance discovering what Van Drebel, Bushnell, and Fulton had known before him, only to die and have the same facts painfully rediscovered by some one on the other side of the earth.

A striking example of this lack of progress is Halstead’s Intelligent Whale. Built for the United States navy at New York, in the winter of 1864–5, this craft is no more modern and much less efficient than Fulton’s Nautilus of 1801. The Intelligent Whale is a fat, cigar-shaped, iron vessel propelled by a screw cranked by manpower and submerged by dropping two heavy anchors to the bottom and then warping the boat down to any desired depth. A diver can then emerge from a door in the submarine’s bottom, to place a mine under a hostile ship. It was not until 1872 that the Intelligent Whale was sent on a trial trip in Newark Bay. Manned by an utterly inexperienced and very nervous crew, the clumsy submarine got entirely out of control and had to be hauled up by a cable that had been thoughtfully attached to her before she went down. Fortunately no lives had been lost, but the wildest stories were told and printed, till the imaginary death-roll ran up to forty-nine. The Intelligent Whale was hauled up on dry land and can still be seen on exhibition at the corner of Third Street and Perry Avenue in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Lack of motive-power was the reason why man-sized submarines lagged behind their little automatic brethren, the Whitehead torpedoes. Compressed air was just the thing for a spurt, but when two Frenchmen, Captain Bourgois and M. Brun, built the Plongeur, a steel submarine 146 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, at Rochefort in 1863, and fitted it with an eighty-horse-power, compressed-air engine, they discovered that the storage-flasks emptied themselves too quickly to permit a voyage of any length.

The Plongeur also proved that while you can sink a boat to the bottom by filling her ballast-tanks or make her rise to the surface by emptying them, you cannot make her float suspended between two bodies of water except by holding her there by some mechanical means. Without anything of the kind, the Plongeur kept bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. Once her inventors navigated her horizontally for some distance, only to find that she had been sliding on her stomach along the soft muddy bottom of a canal. Better results were obtained after the Plongeur was fitted with a crude pair of diving-planes. But the inefficiency of her compressed-air engine caused her to be condemned and turned into a water tank.

The Intelligent Whale.

Drawn by Lieutenant F. M. Barber, U. S. N., in 1875.

Electricity was first applied in 1861 by another Frenchman, named Olivier Riou. This is the ideal motive-power for underwater boats, and it was at this time that Jules Verne described the ideal submarine in his immortal story of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” But before we can have a Nautilus like Captain Nemo’s we must discover an electric storage battery of unheard-of lightness and capacity.

Le Plongeur.

There was a great revival of French interest in electric submarines after Admiral Aube, who was a lifelong submarine “fan,” became minister of marine in 1886. In spite of much ridicule and opposition, he authorized the construction of a small experimental vessel of this type called the Gymnote. She was a wild little thing that did everything short of turning somersaults when she dived, but she was enough of a success to be followed by a larger craft named, after the great engineer who had designed her predecessor, the Gustave Zédé.

“The history of the Gustave Zédé shows how much in earnest the French were in the matter of submarines. When she was first launched she was a failure in almost every respect, and it was only after some years, during which many alterations and improvements were carried out, that she became a serviceable craft. At first nothing would induce the Gustave Zédé to quit the surface, and when at last she did plunge she did it so effectually that she went down to the bottom in 10 fathoms of water at an angle of 30 degrees. The committee of engineers were on board at the time, and it speaks well for their patriotism that they did not as a result of their unpleasant experience condemn the Gustave Zédé and advise the government to spend no more money on submarine craft.”[10]

Twenty-nine other electric submarines were built for the French navy between 1886 and 1901. During the same period, a French gentleman named M. Goubet built and experimented with two very small electric submarines, each of which was manned by two men, who sat back to back on a sort of settee stuffed with machinery. Little or big, all these French boats had the same fatal defect: lack of power. Their storage batteries, called on to propel them above, as well as below, the surface, became exhausted after a few hours’ cruising. They were as useless for practical naval warfare as an electric run-about would be to haul guns or carry supplies in Flanders.

But if compressed-air and electricity were too quickly exhausted, gasoline or petroleum was even less practicable for submarine navigation. To set an oil-engine, that derives its power from the explosion of a mixture of oil-vapor and air, at work in a small closed space like the interior of a submarine, would soon make it uninhabitable. While Mr. Holland was puzzling how to overcome this difficulty, in the middle eighties, a Swedish inventor named Nordenfeldt was building submarines to be run by steam-power.

Mr. Nordenfeldt, who is remembered to-day as the inventor of the famous gun that bears his name, had taken up the idea of an English clergyman named Garett, who in 1878 had built a submarine called the Resurgam, or “I Shall Rise.” Garett’s second boat, built a year later, had a steam-engine. When the vessel was submerged, the smoke-stack was closed by a sliding panel, the furnace doors were shut tight, and the engine run by the steam given off by a big tank full of bottled-up hot water. Nordenfeldt improved this system till his hot-water tanks gave off enough steam to propel his boat beneath the surface for a distance of fourteen miles.

He also rediscovered and patented Bushnell’s device for submerging a boat by pushing it straight down and holding it under with a vertical propellor. His first submarine had two of these, placed in sponsons or projections on either side of the center of the hull. The Nordenfeldt boats, with their cigar-shaped hulls and projecting smoke-stacks, looked like larger editions of the Civil War Davids, and like them, could be submerged by taking in water-ballast till only a strip of deck with the funnel and conning-tower projected above the surface. Then the vertical propellors would begin to revolve and force the boat straight down on an even keel. Mr. Nordenfeldt insisted with great earnestness that this was the only safe and proper way to submerge a submarine. If you tried to steer it downward with any kind of driving-planes, he declared, then the boat was liable to keep on descending, before you could pull its head up, till it either struck the bottom or was crushed in by the pressure of too great a depth of water. There was a great deal of truth in this, but Mr. Nordenfeldt failed to realize that if one of his vertical propellors pushed only a little harder than the other, then the keel of his own submarine was going to be anything but even.

Steam Submarine Nordenfeldt II, at Constantinople, 1887. Observe vertical-acting propellors on deck.

Reproduced from “Submarine Navigation, Past and Present” by Alan H. Burgoyne, by permission of E. P. Dutton & Company.

The first Nordenfeldt boat was launched in 1886 and bought by Greece, after a fairly successful trial in the Bay of Salamis. Two larger and more powerful submarines: Nordenfeldt II and III, were promptly ordered by Greece’s naval rival Turkey. Each of these was 125 feet long, or nearly twice the length of the Greek boat, and each carried its two vertical propellors on deck, one forward and the other aft. Both boats were shipped in sections to Constantinople in 1887, but only Nordenfeldt II was put together and tried. She was one of the first submarines to be armed with a bow torpedo-tube for discharging Whiteheads, and as a surface torpedo-boat, she was a distinct success. But when they tried to navigate her under water there was a circus.

No sooner did one of the crew take two steps forward in the engine-room than down went the bow. The hot water in the boilers and the cold water in the ballast-tanks ran downhill, increasing the slant still further. English engineers, Turkish sailors, monkey-wrenches, hot ashes, Whitehead torpedoes, and other movables came tumbling after, till the submarine was nearly standing on her head, with everything inside packed into the bow like toys in the toe of a Christmas stocking. The little vertical propellors pushed and pulled and the crew clawed their way aft, till suddenly up came her head, down went her tail, and everything went gurgling and clattering down to the other end. Nordenfeldt II was a perpetual see-saw, and no mortal power could keep her on an even keel. Once they succeeded in steadying her long enough to fire a torpedo. Where it went to, no man can tell, but the sudden lightening of the bow and the recoil of the discharge made the submarine rear up and sit down so hard that she began to sink stern-foremost. The water was blown out of her ballast tanks by steam-pressure, and the main engine started full speed ahead, till she shot up to the surface like a flying-fish. The Turkish naval authorities, watching the trials from the shores of the Golden Horn, were so impressed by these antics that they bought the boat. But it was impossible to keep a crew on her, for every native engineer or seaman who was sent on board prudently deserted on the first dark night. So the Nordenfeldt II rusted away till she fell to pieces, long before the Allied fleets began the forcing of the Dardanelles.

Fantastic though their performances seem to us to-day, these submarines represent the best work of some of the most capable inventors and naval engineers of the nineteenth century. With them deserve to be mentioned the boats of the Russian Drzewiecki and the Spaniard Peral. Failures though they were, they taught the world many valuable lessons about the laws controlling the actions of submerged bodies.

Bauer’s Submarine Concert, Cronstadt Harbor, 1855. See [footnote], page [120]

An original drawing by the author, Alan H. Burgoyne; reproduced from “Submarine Navigation, Past and Present,” by permission of E. P. Dutton & Company.

But many of the underwater craft invented between 1850 and 1900 can be classified only as freaks. Most of them, fortunately, were designed but never built, and those that were launched miraculously refrained from drowning any of their crews. There were submarines armed with steam-driven gimlets: the

“nimble tail,
Made like an auger, with which tail she wriggles,
Betwixt the ribs of a ship and sinks it straight,”

that Ben Jonson playfully ascribed to Van Drebel. Dr. Lacomme, in 1869, proposed a submarine railroad from Calais to Dover, with tracks laid on the bottom of the Channel and cars that could cast off their wheels and rise to the surface in case of accident. Lieutenant André Constantin designed, during the siege of Paris, a boat to be submerged by drawing in pistons working in large cylinders open to the water. A vessel was actually built on this principle in England in 1888, and submerged in Tilbury Docks, where the soft mud at the bottom choked the cylinders so that the pistons could not be driven out again and the boat was brought up with considerable difficulty. Two particularly delirious inventors claimed that their submarines could also be used as dirigible balloons. Boucher’s underwater boat of 1886 was to have gills like a fish, so that it need never rise to the surface for air, and was further adorned with spring-buffers on the bottom, oars, a propellor under the center of the keel, and a movable tail for sculling the vessel forward. There were submarines with paddle-wheels, submarines with fins, and submarines with wings. A Venezuelan dentist, Señor Lacavalerier, invented a double-hulled, cigar-shaped boat, whose outer hull was threaded like a screw, and by revolving round the fixed inner hull, bored its way through the water. But he had been anticipated and outdone by Apostoloff, a Russian, who not only designed a submarine on the same principle but intended it to carry a large cabin suspended on davits above the surface of the water, and declared that his vessel would cross the Atlantic at an average speed of 111 knots an hour.

Apostoloff’s Proposed Submarine.

An original drawing by the author, Alan H. Burgoyne; reproduced from “Submarine Navigation, Past and Present,” by permission of E. P. Dutton & Company.

As late as 1898 the Spanish government, neglecting the promising little electric boat built ten years before by Señor Peral, was experimenting with two highly impossible submarines, one of which was to be propelled by a huge clock-spring, while the other was perfectly round. Needless to say, neither the sphere nor the toy boat ever encountered the American fleet.

At the same time, the United States government declined to accept the war services of the already practicable boats of the two American inventors who were about to usher in the present era of submarine warfare: Simon Lake and John P. Holland.

CHAPTER VII
JOHN P. HOLLAND

When the Merrimac rammed the Cumberland, burned the Congress, and was fought to a standstill next day by the little Monitor, all the world realized that there had been a revolution in naval warfare. The age of the wooden warship was gone forever, the day of the ironclad had come. And a twenty-year-old Irish school-teacher began to wonder what would be the next revolution; what new craft might be invented that would dethrone the ironclad. This young Irishman’s name was John P. Holland, and he decided to devote his life to the perfection of the submarine.

Like Robert Fulton, Admiral Von Tirpitz, and the Frenchman who built the Rotterdam Boat in 1652, Holland relied on submarines to break the power of the British fleet. Though born a British subject, in the little village of Liscannor, County Clare in the year 1842, he had seen too many of his fellow countrymen starved to death or driven into exile not to hate the stupid tyranny that characterized England’s rule of Ireland in those bitter, far-off days. He longed for the day of Ireland’s independence, and that day seemed to be brought much nearer by the American Civil War. Not only had many thousand brave Irish-Americans become trained veterans but Great Britain and the United States had been brought to the verge of war by the sinking of American ships by the Alabama and other British-built, Confederate commerce-destroyers. When that Anglo-American war broke out, there would be an army ready to come over and free Ireland—if only the troublesome British navy could be put out of the way. And already the English were launching ironclad after ironclad to replace their now useless steam-frigates and ships-of-the-line. It is no use trying to outbuild or outfight the British navy above water, and John P. Holland realized this in 1862, as several kings and emperors have, before or since.

The Holland No. 1. Designed to carry a torpedo and fix it to the bottom of a ship, on the general principle of Bushnell’s Turtle.

Drawn by Lieutenant F. M. Barber, U. S. N., in 1875.

Though his friends in Cork kept laughing at him, Holland worked steadily on his plans for a submarine boat, throughout the sixties. Presently he came to America and obtained a job as school-teacher in Paterson, New Jersey. There he built and launched his first submarine in 1875. It was a sharp-pointed, little, cigar-shaped affair, only sixteen feet long and two feet in diameter amidships. This craft was designed to carry a torpedo and fix it to the bottom of a ship, on the general principle of Bushnell’s Turtle. It was divided into four compartments, with air-chambers fore and aft. Air-pipes led to where Holland sat in the middle, with his head in a respirator shaped like a diver’s helmet, and his feet working pedals that turned the propellor.

There was nothing revolutionary about this Holland No. 1. A similar underwater bicycle is said to have been invented by Alvary Templo in 1826, and Drzewiecki used one at Odessa in 1877. But Holland used his to teach himself how to build something better. Just as the Wright brothers learned how to build and fly aeroplanes by coasting down through the air from the tops of the Kitty Hawk sand-hills in their motorless “glider,” so John P. Holland found how to make and navigate submarines by diving under the surface of the Passaic River and adjacent waters, and swimming around there in his No. 1 and her successors.

The Holland No. 2 was launched in 1877 and became immediately and prophetically stuck in the mud. She had a double hull, the space between being used as a ballast-tank, whose contents leaked constantly into the interior, and she was driven intermittently by a four horse-power petroleum engine of primitive design. After a series of trials that entertained his neighbors and taught the inventor that the best place for a single horizontal rudder is the stern, Holland took the engine out of the boat and sank her under the Falls Bridge, where she lies to this day.

He then entered into negotiations with the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society organized for the purpose of setting up an Irish republic by militant methods. Though not a Fenian himself, Holland was thoroughly in sympathy with the brotherhood, and offered to show them how they could get round, or rather under, the British navy. You may have seen a once-familiar lithograph of a green-painted superdreadnought of strange design flying the Crownless Harp, and named the Irish battleship Emerald Isle. The only real Irish warships of modern times, however, were the two submarines Holland persuaded the Fenians to have him build at their expense.

Rear-Admiral Philip Hichborn, former Chief Constructor, U.S.N., said of these two boats:

“She (the earlier one) was the first submarine since Bushnell’s time employing water ballast and always retaining buoyancy, in which provision was made to insure a fixed center of gravity and a fixed absolute weight. Moreover, she was the first buoyant submarine to be steered down and up in the vertical plane by horizontal-rudder action as she was pushed forward by her motor, instead of being pushed up and down by vertical-acting mechanism.[11] Her petroleum engine, provided for motive-power and for charging her compressed-air flasks, was inefficient, and the boat therefore failed as a practical craft; but in her were demonstrated all the chief principles of successful, brain-directed, submarine navigation. In 1881, Holland turned out a larger and better boat in which he led the world far and away in the solution of submarine problems, and for a couple of years demonstrated that he could perfectly control his craft in the vertical plane. Eventually, through financial complications, she was taken to New Haven, where she now is.”

Photo by Brown Bros.

The Fenian Ram.
(Photographed by Mr. Simon Lake, in the shed at New Haven.)

Political as well as financial complications caused the internment of this submarine, which a New York reporter, with picturesque inaccuracy, called the Fenian Ram. The Irish at home were by this time thinking less of fighting for independence and more for peacefully obtaining home rule, while the arbitration and payment of the “Alabama claims” by Great Britain had removed all danger of a war between that country and the United States. Under these circumstances, many of the Fenians felt that it was wasted money for their society to spend any more of its funds on warships it could never find use for. This led to dissensions which culminated in a party of Fenians seizing the Ram and taking it to a shed on the premises of one of their members at New Haven, where it has remained ever since.

But the construction and performances of this submarine, and of several others which he soon afterwards built for himself, won Holland such a reputation that when Secretary Whitney decided in 1888 that submarines would be a good thing for the United States navy, the great Philadelphia ship-building firm of Cramps submitted two designs: Holland’s and Nordenfeldt’s, and the former won the award. But after nearly twelve months had been spent in settling preliminary details, and when a contract for building an experimental boat was just about to be awarded, there came a change of administration and the matter was dropped.

This was a great disappointment for Holland, and the next four or five years were lean ones for the inventor. He had built five boats and designed a sixth without their having brought him a cent of profit. It was not until March 3, 1893, that Congress appropriated the money for the construction of an experimental submarine, and inventors were invited to submit their designs. By this time John P. Holland had not only spent all his own money, but all he could borrow from his relatives and friends. To make matters worse, the country was then passing through a financial panic, when very few people had any money to lend or invest. And all the security Holland could offer was his faith in the future of the submarine, which at that time was a stock joke of the comic papers, together with those other two crack-brained projects, the flying-machine and the horseless carriage.

“I know I can win that competition and build that boat for the Government,” said Holland to a young lawyer whom he had met at lunch in a downtown New York restaurant, “if I can only raise the money to pay the fees and other expenses. I need exactly $347.19.”

“What do you want the nineteen cents for?” asked the other.

“To buy a certain kind of ruler I need for drawing my plans.”

“If you’ve figured it out as closely as all that,” replied the lawyer, “I’ll take a chance and lend you the money.”

He did so, receiving in exchange a large block of stock in the new-formed Holland Torpedo-boat Company. To-day his stock is worth several million dollars.

Mr. Holland won the competition and after two years’ delay his company began the construction of the Plunger. This submarine was to be propelled by steam while running on the surface and by storage-batteries when submerged. Double propulsion of this type had been first installed by a Southerner named Alstitt on a submarine he built at Mobile, Alabama, in 1863, and theoretically discussed in a book written in 1887 by Commander Hovgaard of the Danish navy. Though a great improvement on any type of single propulsion, this system had many drawbacks, the chief of which was the length of time—from fifteen to thirty minutes—that it took for the oil-burning surface engine to cool and rid itself of hot gases before it was safe to seal the funnel and dive. Though the Plunger was launched in 1897, she was never finished, for Mr. Holland foresaw her defects. He persuaded the Government to let his company pay back the money already spent on the Plunger and build an entirely new boat.

Holland No. 8 was built accordingly, but failed to work properly. Finally came the ninth and last of her line, the first of the modern submarines, the world-famous Holland.

She was a chunky little porpoise of a boat, 10 feet 7 inches deep and only 53 feet 10 inches long, and looking even shorter and thicker than she was because of the narrow, comb-like superstructure running fore and aft along the deck. But her shape and dimensions were the results of twenty-five years’ experience. Built at Mr. Lewis Nixon’s shipyards at Elizabethport, New Jersey, the Holland was launched in the early spring of 1898, between the blowing-up of the Maine and the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. But though John P. Holland repeatedly begged to be allowed to take his submarine into Santiago Harbor and torpedo Cervera’s fleet, the naval authorities at Washington were too conservative-minded to let him try.

“United States warship goes down with all hands!” the small boys (I was one of them) used to shout at this time, and then explain that it was only another dive of the “Holland submarine.” Strictly speaking, the Holland was not a United States warship till October 13, 1900, when she was formally placed in commission under the command of Lieutenant Harry H. Caldwell, who had been on her during many of the exhaustive series of trials in which the little undersea destroyer proved to even the most conservative officers of our navy that the day of the submarine had come at last.

Courtesy of the Electric Boat Company

U. S. S. Holland, in Drydock with the Russian Battleship Retvizan.

Propelled on the surface by a fifty horse-power gasoline motor, the Holland had a cruising radius of 1500 miles at a speed of seven knots an hour. Submerged, she was driven by electric storage-batteries. This effective combination of oil-engines with an electric motor is one of John P. Holland’s great discoveries, and is used in every submarine to-day. When her tanks were filled till her deck was flush with the water, and the two horizontal rudders at the stern began to steer her downwards, the Holland could dive to a depth of twenty-eight feet in five seconds. She had no periscope, for that instrument was then crude and unsatisfactory. To take aim, the captain of the Holland had to make a quick “porpoise dive,” up to the surface and down again, exposing the conning-tower for the few seconds needed to take aim and judge the distance to the target. Though by this means the Holland succeeded in getting within striking-distance of the Kearsarge and the New York without being detected, during the summer manœuvers of the Atlantic fleet off Newport in 1900, it has proved fatal to the only submarine that has tried it in actual warfare (see page [160]).

Less than half the length of the Nordenfeldt II, the Holland did not pitch or see-saw when submerged. Each of her crew of six sat on a low stool beside the machinery he was to operate, and there was no moving about when below the surface. Neither did the boat stand on her tail when a torpedo was discharged from the bow-tube, for the loss of weight was immediately compensated by admitting an equivalent amount of water into a tank. Originally the Holland had a stern torpedo-tube as well, besides a pneumatic gun for throwing eighty pounds of dynamite half a mile through the air, but these were later removed.

How the Holland impressed our naval officers at that time is best shown in the oft-quoted testimony of Admiral Dewey before the naval committee of the House of Representatives in 1900.

“Gentlemen, I saw the operation of the boat down off Mount Vernon the other day. Several members of this committee were there. I think we were all very much impressed with its performance. My aid, Lieutenant Caldwell, was on board. The boat did everything that the owners proposed to do. I said then, and I have said it since, that if they had had two of those things at Manila, I could never have held it with the squadron I had. The moral effect—to my mind, it is infinitely superior to mines or torpedoes or anything of the kind. With those craft moving under water it would wear people out. With two of those in Galveston all the navies of the world could not blockade the place.”

Photo by Brown Bros.

John P. Holland.

The Holland was purchased by the United States Government on April 11, 1900, for $150,000. She had cost her builders, exclusive of any office expenses or salaries of officers, $236,615.43. But it had been a profitable investment for the Holland Torpedo-boat Company, for on August 25, the United States navy contracted with it for the construction of six more submarines. And in the autumn of the same year, though it was not announced to the public till March 1, 1901, five other Hollands were ordered through the agency of Vickers Sons, and Maxim by the British admiralty. Soon every maritime nation was either buying Hollands or paying royalties on the inventor’s patents, and building bigger, faster, better submarines every year.

The original Holland had outlived her fighting value when she was condemned by Secretary Daniels in June, 1915, to be broken up and sold as junk. There is still room in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for that worthless and meaningless relic, the Intelligent Whale, but there was none for the Holland submarine, whose place in history is with the Clairmont and the Monitor.