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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: _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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.