Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  With Reverend Devotion, and at Yale, Bushnell studied religion—as did just about everyone else—but discovered his real interests were in mathematics, geometry, and the sciences. He spent a good deal of time in the Yale library, which had grown fourfold from the one thousand volumes spirited away from Saybrook, part of which was the most comprehensive collection of scientific texts in the colonies.

  Although Bushnell had not previously exhibited any particular flair for invention, as relations with England deteriorated, he began to focus on underwater explosions, an interest that moved quickly from the theoretical to the practical. Tales of students and teachers frightened by loud reports in the night followed Bushnell during his stay. He learned quickly that keeping the charge dry was not difficult; the principle problem was detonation. Bushnell solved the problem by removing the flintlock from a musket and, using a spring mechanism, converting it to a time fuse. After Lexington and Concord, David Bushnell resolved to design a vessel to deliver his underwater charge; his ambition was no less than to cripple the British fleet. In late 1775, he demonstrated his newly designed mine for a group of dignitaries, including Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull, and was given financing to build a boat to deliver it.

  While Bushnell must have been thinking of an underwater craft for a while—if not, why go to so much trouble to ignite gunpowder underwater—just when he got the idea is not certain. But the where is almost certainly the Yale library. While there is no record of the specific volumes Bushnell pored over, it seems unlikely that a man who boasted of the long hours he spent studying there would not have received both inspiration and practical suggestions from the very texts that bore most on his interest and later work. And, although The Gentleman’s Magazine was not part of the Yale collection, it was the most popular magazine in colonial America, especially in New England, and back issues would have been readily available to anyone who took a bit of time to seek them out.

  Whatever Papin’s illustration depicted, Bushnell’s design shared a number of features with it: approximate dimensions, top opening, and outboard weaponry, in this case an auger that could drill into an enemy hull, allowing a mine—which Bushnell dubbed a “torpedo”—also mounted outside the hull, to then be attached.* Bushnell eschewed Papin’s square and cylindrical design, however. He called his craft the Turtle, and in a 1787 letter to Thomas Jefferson, he described how he came up with the name. “The external shape of the submarine vessel bore some resemblance to two upper tortoise shells of equal size, joined together; the place of entrance into the vessel being represented by the opening made by the swell of the shells, as at the head of the animal.” For that opening, Bushnell wrote, “Above the upper edge of this iron band there was a brass crown or cover, resembling a hat with its crown and brim, which shut watertight up on the iron band.”1 Each half shell was to be crafted from a single hollowed-out oak log, bound at the waist with a copper band, and tarred along the seam. Three small windows were cut into the brass conning tower but vision would be clouded at best underneath the surface.

  Bushnell’s Turtle. All depictions of the craft came decades later. Bushnell also left no drawings.

  Although the Turtle was designed to travel awash—only the conning tower visible—and with its hatch and windows open, it could also run partially and even fully submerged, at least for short distances. When the vessel was just under the surface, fresh air could be taken in by two snorkels that snapped shut when it moved deeper. Below snorkel depth, breathable air for the Turtle’s single operator would be exhausted after thirty minutes. Bushnell’s plan, therefore, was to have the Turtle submerge only to avoid detection while maneuvering to and then underneath a British warship to plant the mine.

  For lateral power, the Turtle was propelled by a hand crank connected to an Archimedes screw with a supplemental vertical screw to aid in submerging and surfacing. A rudder with a long tiller extension was positioned behind the operator. “At the bottom opposite to the entrance,” Bushnell wrote, “was a fixed quantity of lead ballast. An aperture at the bottom, with its valve, was designed to admit water for the purpose of descending; and two brass forcing pumps served to eject the water within, when necessary for ascending.”

  The man charged with operating the Turtle, “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.” One commentator noted, “He must have been as busy as a cathedral organist on Easter morning.”2

  As crude as the device appeared, it contained many innovations, such as a barometric device to measure depth, that would be carried forward to more sophisticated craft.

  In September 1776, after months of experimenting and testing in Connecticut, Bushnell was ready. But the mission did not get off to an auspicious start. As the moment arrived to launch the new secret weapon, Bushnell’s brother, who had trained to pilot the Turtle, developed a high fever. An infantry sergeant, Ezra Lee, volunteered, as he later put it, “to learn the ways and mystery of this new machine.”

  In complete secrecy, the Turtle was transported from Long Island Sound to the southwest edge of New York Harbor to prepare for its first assault. There would be no small measures. Bushnell intended no less than to have Lee attack and sink the sixty-four-gun HMS Eagle, flagship of Admiral Richard Howe.

  Lee described his mission: “The Whale boats towed me as nigh the ships as they dare go, and then they cast me off. I soon found that I was too early in the tide, as it carried me down to the transports. I, however, hove about, and rowed for 5 glasses [2.5 hours], by the ship’s bells, before the tide slackened so that I could get alongside the man of war, which lay above the transports.”†3

  It was near dawn before Lee managed to maneuver his vessel to the Eagle. “When I rowed under the stern of the ship, 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.”

  It was time to plant the charge. The auger on the top was not meant to bore a hole through the keel but rather to be screwed in and left as an anchor for Bushnell’s “torpedo.” Attached to the shaft by a rope were two other hollowed-out, tarred sections of oak, inside of which was 150 pounds of gunpowder and the flintlock fuse, which would begin to run as soon as the auger was set and Lee cast it off.

  Lee tried to breach the hull with the drill “but found that it would not enter.” Bushnell thought he would be boring into wood, but the keel was copper-sheathed, although Lee later said he struck an iron bar holding the rudder. He tried another spot, but with no more success.

  With daylight a potentially lethal enemy, Lee decided to abort the mission and make for shore before he was discovered. But soon after he surfaced, the Turtle was spotted by a guard boat, which began to sail ominously in Lee’s direction. Lee jettisoned the mine and cranked furiously. He managed to elude his pursuers—aided when the mine exploded under the water—and, exhausted, he returned to safety several hours later.

  Many might have been discouraged by such an unpromising initiation, a few days later Ezra Lee insisted on trying again. He chose a different warship as his target, but this time his barometric depth gauge failed and he sailed completely underneath the hull. While the Turtle was being conveyed on the Hudson River to position it for a third attempt, a British frigate sank both transport and its cargo. Although Bushnell eventually retrieved his invention, he dismissed any thought of bringing it again into action. “I found it impossible at that time to prosecute the design any further,” he wrote later to Jefferson. “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.”4 His resentment for not being paid for his time and effort would fester, but he left behind a brilliant design and a unique episode in America’s struggle for freedom. “I thought and still think that it was
an effort of genius,” wrote George Washington, characterizing Bushnell as “a man of great mechanical powers, fertile in invention, and master of execution.” He added, however, “too many things were necessary to be combined to expect much against an enemy who are always on guard.”5

  After the war ended, Bushnell did not fare a good deal better than his submarine; in the postwar euphoria both he and his weapon were ignored. By the early 1790s, he was barely a footnote in the new nation’s lore. Embittered at receiving neither the acclaim nor the remuneration that he thought were his due, he sailed for Europe, intending to sell his invention to what he was certain were more scientifically enlightened governments on the Continent. His first stop was England, but he could not even gain an audience in the Admiralty. Bushnell’s lack of success in attacking the British fleet did little to dispel the prevailing feeling in Whitehall that the submarine was a gimmick rather than a warship. He then headed across the Channel. When he arrived in France, Bushnell looked up Joel Barlow, an old Yale chum and Francophile, who was a passionate advocate of free trade and freedom of the seas. Barlow thought his houseguest’s submarine a brilliant idea, a foolproof means of keeping sea lanes open, especially for a nation with a weak navy, such as France. But though he had many well-placed friends, Barlow could not get anyone interested in Bushnell’s idea.

  A dispirited Bushnell soon sailed for home, but he refused to return to New England. With Barlow’s reference, he contacted Abraham Baldwin, a congressman from Georgia and Barlow’s cousin. Georgia was then a thinly populated wilderness and Baldwin found Bushnell a post as a teacher and physician, although there is no record of Bushnell having any formal medical training. Most important, Baldwin agreed to keep Bushnell’s identity a secret, identifying him as “Dr. Bush.”

  David Bushnell died in Georgia in 1826. Only then, when his will was read, was his true identity revealed. He never knew that his visit to Joel Barlow would spark interest in what would become the next great advance in submarine research, undertaken by a man known for pioneering a very different type of marine technology.

  _____________

  *Bushnell named his explosive device after a fish of the same name, Torpedo nobiliana, an electric ray common to Atlantic waters.

  †Although Lee refers to “rowing,” there is no indication that the Turtle had oars. Likely he was using the term generically. In addition, since the rudder had to be operated by hand, it is unlikely Bushnell would have designed a craft in which the operator could not propel it forward and steer at the same time.

  CHAPTER 3

  AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

  Robert Fulton was born into a Scotch-Irish immigrant family of modest means in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in November 1765. His father, also Robert, was active in both church and community affairs, and signed the charter for only the third town library established in the Colonies. The family purchased a farm just before young Robert was born, and the boy was sent to Quaker school when he was nine, soon after his father died.

  From the first, he had been fascinated with drawing and, at seventeen, Fulton left home for Philadelphia, to try to earn his living as an artist. The war was drawing to a close and Philadelphia was vibrant with the sense of possibility. He enrolled in art school and took commissions where he could. At various times, he painted signs, produced mechanical drawings, copied sketches, and designed carriages. By age twenty, he graduated to painting miniatures, portraits, and landscapes, and was registered in the city directory.

  In 1787, the year the United States would draft its Constitution, Fulton got his big break. Benjamin Franklin, who had admired the young painter’s work, commissioned a portrait. That commission led to many others, including a miniature for Mary West, whose father had been a close friend of the elder Robert Fulton. Mary’s cousin Benjamin, an expatriate living in London, was one of the most celebrated artists in England, his patron none other than King George III. (Although the war had caused ongoing political tensions between the United States and Britain, their mutual roots ran too deep for estrangement to totally sour social relations.)

  After a debilitating pulmonary illness, which might have been a mild case of tuberculosis, Fulton accepted the prescription of a sea voyage and decided to sail to England to study painting. Benjamin West, perhaps because of the family connection, perhaps based on Fulton’s talent, took on the young visitor as a protégé. West would mentor other promising American painters, among others, Samuel Morse, Gilbert Stuart, and Rembrandt Peale. Fulton moved into his patron’s sumptuous home and set up an easel in his studio. With the eminent Benjamin West providing introductions, Fulton’s career blossomed. He received many prestigious commissions and in 1791 even succeeded in placing two paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, of which West was about to be named president.

  West was providing social introductions as well, and Fulton became a familiar figure in British society. At one point, he met the aptly named Duke of Bridgewater, who owned a series of coal mines and had recently supplanted the standard pack horse means of transporting his product to market by digging a canal. So successful was the venture that Bridgewater had interested investors in a plan to create a network of canals across the English countryside. But terrain was an impediment; Bridgewater’s canal did not vary a great deal in elevation, but where topography was uneven, prohibitively expensive locks would be required. If a simpler and less expensive means to equalize water levels could be developed, Bridgewater’s venture could be immensely profitable.

  Fulton found himself fascinated with the problem and began devouring everything he could find on canal building. The more he read, the more enthralled with engineering he became. From that point on, painting would never be more than an avocation. In 1794, Fulton had patented a system of inclined planes to replace locks and published the definitive Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation. In September 1796, he sent copies of the book to George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, then an army general, and the governor of Pennsylvania.

  To President Washington, he wrote that he was sending the book “to Exhibit the Certain mode of Giving Agriculture to every Acre of the immense Continent of America By Means of a Creative System of Canals.” Fulton added, “When this Subject first entered my thoughts, I had no Idea of its Consequences: But the Scene gradually opened and at length exhibited the most extensive and pleasing prospect of Improvements; hence I now Consider it of much national Importance.” Washington politely acknowledged the letter in December but, to Fulton’s disappointment, expressed no interest in actively pursuing the project. Nor did the publication of a series of articles on canal building in the London Morning Star arouse the interest in England Fulton had expected.

  Also in 1796, Fulton became a partner with the utopian socialist, Robert Owen, in the Inclined Planes and Canal Excavations Company. But Fulton chafed at the requirements of day-to-day business and the partnership lasted only one year.

  Although Napoleon did not reply to Fulton’s letter, he must have passed it along, because Fulton received word from Paris that his method would be employed in a planned canal from that city to Dieppe, on the Channel coast. In 1797, during a rare pause in the ongoing hostilities between Britain and France, Fulton traveled to Paris and there was taken in as a houseguest by Joel Barlow. He would remain at the Barlows’ for seven years, developing a relationship so filial that Barlow and his wife, who were childless, came to call Fulton “Toot.”

  Whether Bushnell’s and Fulton’s stays at Barlow’s overlapped is not certain, although they well may have. Even if they did not, Bushnell would have only very recently departed when Fulton arrived at Barlow’s door. And while Fulton never acknowledged Bushnell as the source for his idea, he began talking of building a “plunging boat” soon after his arrival in Paris, having not uttered a word about it previously.

  The Paris to Dieppe canal was never undertaken, but Fulton quickly moved on to other ventures.* In addition to aggressively pursuing submarine design, he took on another major enginee
ring project, this of a far different sort. While there were no moving pictures in the 1790s, approximately a decade earlier, an enterprising painter named Robert Barker had devised a primitive facsimile that he called a “panorama.” First exhibited in Edinburgh in 1791, the panorama was an enormously long painting, eight to ten feet high, mounted on spools, similar to camera film. The spools were offstage, left and right, and the canvas would be steadily advanced, again like film, depicting to a theater audience a series of episodes painted on the backdrop. To the audience, it would seem as if they were peering at the tableau out the window of a moving train. A narrator dramatically described events as the tale unfolded, or more accurately, unspooled. Panoramas were an immediate rage—exhibitors could feature any theme, from the classics, to romance, to melodrama, to war—and remained so until the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Fulton’s panorama was huge, almost twice the size of Barker’s, who by that time had moved to London and grown extremely rich. In April 1799, Fulton was granted a French patent on the machinery he had designed to advance the spool. He then purchased land on the right bank, built a circular loft, and, to great fanfare, presented his first panorama, “The Destruction of Moscow,” a tableau of “pillage and devastation,” complete with the city being set ablaze. Tickets were 1½ francs, pricey by the standards of the day, but Fulton rarely did not sell out. So popular was Fulton’s extravaganza that the street outside his theater was dubbed “Passage des Panoramas.”† A dozen years later, life would imitate panorama, and Moscow would indeed be beset by pillage, devastation, and fire, this time marking the beginning of the destruction of Napoleon’s Grand Armée.

  Fulton followed his Moscow depiction with others, but once again, despite making quite a bit of money, he found that he had no taste for running a business day-to-day. With what he hoped was a favorable change in the French government, he licensed the company and devoted himself fully to his submarine.