He claimed to have come to the idea “walking on the banks of the Thames [when] he noticed some fishing-boats dragging baskets of fish, and whilst a strain was on the towing-line, the boat was more immersed in water than when it was slack.” He decided that there was “no reason to doubt that a boat could be kept partially under water by means of oars or poles, provided she was weighted down with ballast.”
Drebbel then, the story went, built two boats. “The larger had twelve oars, and the hull was made of wood, strengthened inside with iron bands and covered over with tightly stretched hide soaked in grease in order to keep out the water when submerged. The oars passed through holes in the sides, and leather joints were used to make them water-tight.”2
There are many reports of this vessel regularly navigating up and down the river under the water, some of the sojourns going as far as London. Other accounts had passengers aboard and “some authorities even go so far as to say that, as the savant was a personal friend of James I, he persuaded that monarch to overcome his constitutional timidity, and go for a trip under water in the Thames.” (This last assertion was not taken seriously. That James, by then hugely fat, would venture into a closed vessel that would submerge in the Thames would have evoked chuckles or worse.)
The most famous account of the Drebbel submarine was published by Ben Jonson in his immensely popular play The Staple of News. In Act III, Scene 1, his characters have the following exchange:
THOMAS: They write here, one Cornelius-Son
Hath made the Hollanders an invisible eel
To swim the haven at Dunkirk and sink all
The shipping there.
P. JUNIOR: But how is’t done?
CYMBAL: I’ll show you, sir. It’s an automa, runs under water,
With a smug 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.
P. JUNIOR: A most brave device
To murder their flat bottoms.
But Jonson had never actually seen Drebbel’s boat cruise underwater, nor had any other of those who extolled the new invention. There were, in fact, no first person accounts, except those issued by Drebbel himself. And Jonson had hardly wished to be taken seriously. The Staple of News was a lacerating send-up of dishonest news agents and the credulity of their customers. In the passage immediately following, for example, a character discusses a plan to launch a surprise attack on an enemy by fitting the invaders’ horses with cork shoes. When asked, “Is’t true?” the speaker replied, “As true as the rest.” Moreover, Jonson had long since considered Drebbel a fraud and lampooned him mercilessly. As far back as 1609, in a relationship “characterized over many years by relentless public ridicule from Jonson’s side,” Jonson had also dismissed the perpetual motion machine as a laughable humbug.3
An early depiction of Drebbel’s “design.” Drebbel himself left no drawings.
Nonetheless, Jonson’s description began to circulate as a true account, confirmation of other assertions that not only had Drebbel built an underwater boat, but that a few sprinkled drops of his “quintessence of air” had allowed the crew to breathe air “as fresh and as pure as if they were on the top of a mountain,” and that he had lit the interior without candles.4 In 1623, Francis Bacon, another non-witness, doubtless influenced by all the hoopla, decided to immortalize the Drebbel submarine in New Atlantis, his utopian vision of a just and prosperous society ruled according to the principles of natural science. As this society was also governed by scientists, Bacon’s unfinished work became required reading for anyone of scientific bent coming of age in the seventeenth century.
As the decades passed, others, including the polymath Robert Boyle, who was not born until 1627, the year New Atlantis was published, made specific scientific reference to Drebbel’s invention, stating categorically that the vessel “went under water perfectly, and was rowed at a depth of twelve or fifteen feet for several hours.” In fact, Boyle undertook his landmark “Experiments On Air,” largely as a result of his belief in Drebbel’s achievement. Boyle would become so obsessed with the Drebbel submarine that he sought out the Hollander’s daughter and son-in-law, who, even as late as 1662, were trying to find ways to make money from the elder Drebbel’s “terrible destroying invention.”
That Drebbel’s legend thrived, and that it would captivate as brilliant a scientific mind as Robert Boyle, is largely due to the mass of propaganda that was thrown up around him. In a nineteenth-century publication by the British Museum with the alluring title, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First, Comprising Translations of the Journals of the Two Dukes of Württemberg in 1592 and l6l0; Both Illustrative of Shakespeare, the editor did admit, “The accounts we have of that ‘deservedly famous mechanician and chymist,’ as the Hon. Robert Boyle calls Cornelius Drebbel, are confused and inexact.” But that did not prevent chroniclers from waxing rapturously of Drebbel’s alleged achievements. This extraordinary testament made its way across Europe and deserves to be read in full:
Other epithets have been bestowed upon Drebbel, as alchemist, empiric, magician, and professor of the black art. But, however extravagant and improbable some of the following descriptions may appear . . . Cornelius Drebbel is entitled, we think, to hold a respectable position among the ingenious inventors and mechanicians of the early part of the seventeenth century. . . . 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 candlelight, 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. Aided by some instruments of his own manufacture, Drebbel could make it rain, lighten, and thunder, at every time of the year, so that you would have sworn it came in a natural way from heaven. By means of other instruments he could, in the midst of summer, so much refrigerate the atmosphere of certain places, that you would have thought yourself in the very midst of winter. This experiment he did once at his Majesty’s request, in the great Hall of Westminster; and although a hot summer day had been chosen by the King, it became so cold in the Hall that James and his followers took to their heels in hasty flight. With a certain instrument he could draw an incredible quantity of water out of a well or river. By his peculiar ingenuity he could at all times of the year, even in the midst of winter, hatch chickens and ducklings without the aid of hens or ducks.†
So comprehensive was Drebbellian lore that whether the Drebbel submarine was ever launched, or even if it existed, the details of its construction, disseminated almost certainly by Drebbel and his friends at Court, have inspired replicas to be built for numerous museums, one, not surprisingly in Alkmaar, and even for a television documentary.
One description, by BBC History, had the craft “based on a rowing boat with raised and meeting sides, covered in greased leather, with a watertight hatch in the middle, a rudder and four oars. Under the rowers’ seats were large pigskin bladders, connected by pipes to the outside. Rope was used to tie off the empty bladders. In order to dive, the rope was untied and the bladders filled. To surface the crew squashed the bladders flat, squeezing out the water.”5 There is no direct evidence that any of this is true.
An article in Scientific American in 1909 added flourishes that even Drebbel had not considered. “It was provided with boring tools, working in stuffing boxes in the side of the vessel, by which the enemy’s ships could be perforated, and with long poles carrying torpedoes at their ends.”6
The most curious aspect of the Drebbel submarine, however, is not whether it was simply an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a guileless king by an ambitious mountebank, but that, real or not, it helped spark genuine innovation by a series of inventors that resulted in vessels that could do everything Drebbel claimed to do and more.
The progression began in 1648, when Bishop John Wilkins published his most famous work, Mathematical Magick, a two-volume treatise on physics and mechanical devices, meant to explain how existing machines operate and expound on the feasibility of those considered futuristic. A dozen years later, inspired by Bacon’s New Atlantis, Wilkins would help found the Royal Society, an organization that, with members such as Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Edmond Halley, might have been the most impressive array of scientific brilliance the world has ever known.
In the sections of Mathematical Magick that were devoted to predictions of technological advances, Wilkins described at length Drebbel’s vessel, which he called the “Ark,” and for the first time discussed the potential uses of an undersea craft, in peace and in war:
A man may go to any part of the world invisibly without being discovered or prevented in his journey. Man will be safe from the violence of tempests which never move the Sea more than five or six Paces deep; they are safe from Pirates and Robbers, from Ice and great Frosts which are such deadly foes to us in our passages towards the Poles. One is also free from the uncertainty of the tides. It may be of a very great Advantage against a Navy of Enemies, who by these means may be undermined in the Water and blown up.7
Interest in perfecting the science of underwater travel increased through the remainder of the seventeenth century, everyone using Drebbel as his model. In the 1650s, Charles, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, ordered a submarine built based on the Drebbel design, but the man who received the assignment discovered to his chagrin that Drebbel had died in 1633, leaving no records or accounts of his most famous invention. No drawing, model, or even description of the vessel seemed to exist. The project was soon abandoned. Others across Europe drew up plans for undersea craft, boasting of their prowess, but none of these were constructed either. Principles of submarine travel, these inventors discovered, were a good deal more arcane than would allow a simple closed vessel to be slapped together and successfully launched.
Some returned to more basic undertakings with better results. Edmond Halley joined the Royal Society in 1672, when, thanks to Boyle, undersea travel had become one of the more alluring scientific conundrums of the age. Although best known for the comet that bears his name, Halley’s experiments were vital to solving the formative problems of underwater navigation. Halley dropped into the water a primitive diving bell, something of a giant inverted barrel, weighted with lead along the bottom. As long as it dropped straight—thus the lead weights—air would remain trapped inside and sustain the man stationed there. Another man could even venture outside with a primitive helmet, air fed to him from the supply under the bell. To raise the device, the operator would simply remove weights on either side.
Halley’s diving bell
In 1690, Halley demonstrated his device in the Thames. It was useful for little more than staring at the river’s bottom or picking up curiosities—when light permitted—but Halley had demonstrated a relationship between air and water pressure. In some senses, Halley did not advance underwater technology any more than Christiaan Huygens’s gunpowder-filled cylinder provided a blueprint for the internal combustion engine—theoretical knowledge of air and water pressure was not new—but his design established a paradigm for more complicated vessels in which the taking on and expelling of ballast would be crucial to stability.‡
Also in 1690, a more serious effort to build a submarine boat was undertaken by Huygens’s former assistant, French mathematician, Denis Papin, again financed by the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, son of the man who had financed the 1640 attempt, and again based on the Drebbel model. Papin had been one of the first foreigners invited to join the Royal Society and was an original member of the French Académie des Sciences. At the Royal Society he had spent a good deal of time with Boyle, Hooke, and Wilkins, all of whom were actively considering the viability of submarine navigation. Still, Papin’s primary interest was steam power. He had experimented widely with devices that would convert steam pressure to thrust, in the course of which he invented the pressure cooker. He had done no work with underwater vessels, however, beyond talking about them, but the landgrave was wealthy and eager, so Papin took on the project. In 1691, he described the plan for his underwater vessel in a letter to his mentor, Huygens.
It was neither a submarine nor even a boat. Essentially a submersible cube, the design featured a leather tube that extended to the surface to supply air, the upper end of which was attached to a wooden float. An entrance turret was placed at the top, and other openings were configured through which explosives could be attached to an enemy’s ship without admitting water into the interior. This device was never tested, undergoing serious damage when the crane lowering it into the water snapped.
The landgrave then was said to have financed construction of a second apparatus, this one cylindrical, which Papin took beneath the surface of the river Fulda in 1692. Although the experiment was said to have been a success, “land-locked Hesse had little use for submarine boats,” and so the effort was abandoned. Never explained is why the landgrave, having undertaken expenditures for two vessels, would refuse to continue to fund the project only after it had proven successful.
Papin’s submarine . . . or pressure cooker
Whatever the reason for the termination of his contract, Papin produced a monograph detailing his findings and then never experimented with underwater boats again. His work was forgotten until 1747, when an article on the Papin submarine, complete with a drawing, appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, a popular English monthly. The drawing seems scant, unlike anything that could move underwater, or even on land. In addition to lacking any means of propulsion, the entryway on the top appears far too small to admit a person. Speculation exists that, instead of a submarine, Papin had thrown the monograph together and simply inserted one of the first renderings of his pressure cooker.
_____________
*Iatrochemical medicine would later be championed by a young physician named John Locke, who later abandoned doctoring for political theory to write Two Treatises on Government, which would provide significant philosophical underpinning for the American Revolution.
†Italics added.
‡Huygens believed that power could be generated in a cylinder, closed at one end, by an explosion that pushed a fitted tool—a piston—outward. When he tried his device, he made an odd discovery. After the explosion, the piston was sucked inward. Unaware of oxygen as an element—Drebbel’s quintessence of air notwithstanding—Huygens’s could not have realized that the explosion would burn off the gas and create a partial vacuum that would suck the piston in. Engines of that sort were later described as “atmospheric,” and dominated piston power until the discovery that compressing the fuel—by then hydrocarbon—before ignition, would result in an explosion that drove the piston outward.
CHAPTER 2
MADE IN AMERICA
More important, however, than the devices that may or may not have been fabricated—each of them even if completed a technological dead end—was the literature suggested by those putative researches that speculated on both the uses and construction of a vessel that could travel underwater and surreptitiously deliver a weapon to the hull of an enemy ship.
In Bacon’s New Atlantis, for example, the Father of the House of Solomon informs his guests that the halls contained “ordnance and instruments of war, and engines of all kinds: and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gunpowder, wildfires burning in water, and unquenchable.” Just after this passage, suggesting underwater mines, the Father continued, “We have ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas.” Robert Hooke discussed the nature of explosions in Posthumous Works; Bishop Thomas Sprat penned a dissertation on the development of saltpeter and gunpowder in History of the Royal Society; and Robert Boyle described burning and explosions in a vacuum and underwater in New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall: Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects and Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things, t
he Temperature of the Subterraneal and Submarine Regions, the Bottom of the Sea, &tc. with an Introduction to the History of Particular Qualities. Boyle also discussed in New Experiments the theory of buoyancy and displacement, which he labeled “the grand rule of Hydrostaticks,” as well as going on at some length on great achievements of Cornelis Drebbel.
As it turned out, all of these works, as well as Mathematical Magick and other source materials on underwater warfare were on the shelves of the Yale library when thirty-one year old David Bushnell enrolled in 1771.
Bushnell was born in Saybrook, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, at the mouth of the Connecticut River, a town where ships were built and sailed. Saybrook had also been the home of the Collegiate School, which had migrated west in 1718 to become Yale College. The school’s departure, and especially its thirteen-hundred-book library, had not sat well with many local residents and after a good deal of wrangling, including a “battle of the books,” joined on occasion with closed fists, only one thousand of the volumes managed to make their way to New Haven. So David Bushnell, though from a farming family, grew up in an environment where scholarship was valued and had been fought for.
Although he managed the family farm with his brother, Bushnell was more attracted to the sea and read what he could on shipbuilding. At twenty-nine, the soil could no longer hold him. He sold his share of the farm to his brother and began to study with the beneficently named Reverend John Devotion. Reverend Devotion was a Yale graduate and so, two years later, Bushnell left Saybrook to enroll in his tutor’s alma mater.
Going Deep Page 2