by Deborah Lake
Unshakeable in his ideas, Bauer hawked them around the courts and palaces of Europe. He demonstrated a model to Prince Albert, an irrepressible enthusiast for technical devices, at Osborne. With royal backing, the Thames-side yard of John Scott Russell, a leading naval architect, began work on Bauer’s new boat. Increasing suspicion on both sides caused the Bavarian to leave England before completion of his design. Scott Russell’s men finished the submarine. They took it to the river for tests. It sank.
Bauer found more encouragement in Russia. The Tsar and his advisers, locked in the Crimean conflict with Britain and France, needed something, anything, to threaten the Allied fleets that blockaded their coast. Bauer designed a new submarine, Der Seeteufel although the Russians preferred the French rendering of Diable-Marin. Twice the size of Brandtaucher, her most warlike excursion honoured Tsar Alexander II’s coronation. A quartet, dignified by the title of orchestra, played patriotic melodies from the bottom of the harbour.
Allegedly, Bauer conducted 134 diving trials of his boat. They appear to have achieved little. The vessel spent her days either on the surface or motionless on the ocean floor. Movement under water was a major problem.
Bauer designed a 24-gun submersible, powered by steam. The Russians decided that it would not work. In any event, the Crimean War had ended. A disappointed designer left Russia in 1858, but he continued to preach the values of underwater vessels. When Prussia went to war against the old enemy, Denmark, Bauer volunteered for the Navy. His flow of new ideas, some extremely perceptive, failed to reach fruition. He never built another submarine.
In the American Civil War, only the North had an effective navy. The Confederates faced the familiar challenge of breaking a blockade. Less industrialised than the Union, the South nonetheless countered the Federal Navy’s supremacy with commerce raiders, armoured ships, rifled naval guns and mines.
The war was the first conflict in which mass production and technology played a significant part. The production of muskets, previously largely made by hand, became almost fully automated. Machines shaped the elaborate wooden stocks and butts, metal parts flowed from specially designed equipment.
In the South, private inventors flourished. A government with little formal routine supported their efforts. In the North, an entrenched bureaucracy that also supplied funds hampered rapid development. War was no excuse for bending established rules.
A New Orleans consortium that included Horace Lawson Hunley, a Customs officer, and two practical engineers, James McLintock and Baxter Watson, designed a submarine. When New Orleans fell to the Union in 1862, the three men hastily moved to Mobile, Alabama, to continue their work. They launched their third prototype, known variously as ‘the fish boat’ or ‘the porpoise’ in July 1863.
After successful trials, she moved to Charleston in South Carolina. Good financial reasons pushed them there. The South Atlantic Blockading Squadron of the Federal Navy patrolled the coast with iron resolution. The destruction of a Union ship brought a high cash bounty. Smashing the blockade was essential for Southern victory.
In August 1863, Lieutenant George Gift of the Confederate Navy helped prepare the ‘very curious machine for destroying vessels’ for despatch by train. With cheerful disregard for secrecy, he described the 40ft ‘torpedo fish-boat’ in a letter to his fiancée:
In the first place imagine a high pressure steam boiler, not quite round, say 4 feet in diameter in one way and 3½ feet the other – draw each end of the boiler down to a sharp wedge shaped point. The 4 feet is the depth of the hold and the 3½ feet the breadth of beam. On the bottom of the boat is riveted an iron keel weighing 4000 lbs which throws the center of gravity on one side and makes her swim steadily that side down. On top and opposite the keel is placed two man hole plates or hatches with heavy glass tops.
These plates are water tight when covered over. They are just large enough for a man to go in and out. At one end is fitted a very neat little propeller 3½ feet in diameter worked by men sitting in the boat and turning the shaft by hand cranks being fitted on it for that purpose. She also has a rudder and steering apparatus.
Embarked and under ordinary circumstances with men, ballast etc. she floats about half way out of the water & resembles a whale. But when it is necessary to go under the water there are apartments into which the water is allowed to flow, which causes the boat to sink to any required depth, the same being accurately indicated by a column of mercury. Air is supplied by means of pipes that turn up until they get below a depth of 10 feet, when they must depend upon the supply carried down which is sufficient for 3 hours! During which time she could have been propelled 15 miles!
The secret weapon was, indeed, made from a steam boiler. Lengthened and deepened, she took a crew of nine. The craft had two hatches, one forward and one aft, diving planes, removable iron ballast in addition to her water tanks, and a compass. General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the Confederate commander at Charleston, found one innovation particularly fascinating. ‘Light’, he noted, ‘was afforded through the means of bull’s-eyes placed in the manholes.’
The general liked unusual weapons. Under his aegis, the Confederates developed a steam-driven vessel, with a crew of four, known as the David design. About 18ft long, it had a 134lb spar torpedo, the standard mine on a pole. As it merely rode low in the water, rather than submerge, it was hardly a submarine.
Nonetheless, a David attacked a Union ironclad, New Ironsides, on 5 October 1863. The Confederates killed an ensign on watch with a shotgun blast before they detonated the mine. In the explosion, a cascade of seawater extinguished the David’s boiler. Outraged Federal sailors captured two of the crew. Sent to the North in chains to face a threatened court martial for using a devilish weapon, they never faced trial. Both sides soon agreed to an exchange of prisoners.
New Ironsides escaped relatively unscathed. The threat kept Union lookouts on edge. Anything in the water could be a floating bomb.
Like her predecessors, the Mobile blockade buster carried a spar torpedo. Once this was placed close to an enemy hull, the submarine would leave and detonate the mine from a safe distance. James McLintock had gone to Charleston with the boat. His cautious handling, allied with technical difficulties, exasperated the military. The Army seized her and replaced the civilian crew with Confederate Navy volunteers. On an early trial, unfamiliarity with the boat sent her to the bottom of the harbour when she dived with her hatch covers open. Five sailors died. An embarrassed military raised the wreck. Repaired, she underwent more trials, this time with a civilian crew from Mobile. Horace Hunley himself captained them.
Everything went well until 15 October 1863. On that day, submerged, Hunley made a simple error with the forward ballast tank. The boat buried its nose in the harbour silt and mud. She stuck fast. Water flooded in. This time, nobody had time to equalise the pressure. All eight crew drowned.
Fresh volunteers continued training and trials with the salvaged submarine, renamed CSS H.L. Hunley. Finally, on the chill, cold night of 17 February 1864, the submarine reached the sloop USS Housatonic, at anchor off Charleston. A vigilant lookout spotted Hunley in the moonlight as she approached. Despite a smattering of rifle and shotgun fire she reached the ship. The submersible planted her 135lb mine and backed away. Minutes slithered by as Hunley cleared the ironclad. The night split apart with a roar of flame.
The explosion shattered the Housatonic. She sank in less than three minutes with the loss of five sailors. For the first time in history, an enemy submarine had sunk a warship.
Hunley did not return home for 136 years. She went down on the return journey. Found in 1995 in almost perfect condition, raised in 2000, she is now preserved. Her crew of eight received honoured burial in Charleston’s Magnolia cemetery. The first two crews of the Hunley lie close by.
While men in grey and men in blue fought and died at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga and the Wilderness, Europe watched the creation of a truly monstrous machine: the French Le
Plongeur.
She had the right credentials. Designed in 1858 by a naval officer, Captain Simon Bourgois, the design gained the approval of the Corps of Naval Constructors. One member of the Corps, a naval commander, Charles Brun, who later became Director of Naval Construction, gave the project his full support to the extent of designing an amazing engine.
Work began on Plongeur in 1860. The boat was 45m long and displaced 420 tons, far more than any previous design. Iron plates fastened to a stunningly heavy keel formed her hull. The important development was an alternative to strong men with monstrous thighs to work pedals. She had an engine, driven by compressed air. One remarkable feature was a boat, bolted in position inside the hull, to carry twelve men. Internal pressure was kept slightly higher than that of the water outside to prevent seepage at the bolt fastenings.
On the surface, the French submarine behaved with decorum. Submerged, she became a recalcitrant beast. Plongeur employed a network of pipes, valves and pistons to move water ballast from one end of the hull to the other. This worked only slowly. The unfortunate creature, long, flat, unwieldy, had little grace as she porpoised through the water, apparently changing her depth as Gallic fancy took her.
The engine developed 80hp. The need to carry enormous bottles of ‘fuel’ dictated Plongeur’s size. Her bulk overwhelmed the engine while her traditional spar torpedo was hardly worth the weight of vessel behind it. It took no heart-searching for the French navy to abandon the project, despite the many advances incorporated in the design.
In 1872, the implacable Confederate James McLintock tried to sell an improved Hunley to the Royal Navy. The Admiralty, updating its plans for a war with the United States, intended to enforce the time-honoured blockade, should hostilities occur. Anything that challenged their plans interested them.
In the event, nothing came from McLintock’s approach. It seems certain, though, that the papers reached the Royal Navy’s Torpedo School, HMS Vernon. Arthur Knyvet Wilson, whose lower-deck nickname of ‘Old ’Ard ’Art’ succinctly describes his disciplinarian reputation, took command of the school in 1876. More technically minded than many of his contemporaries, Wilson later wrote, in 1901, that during his time at the Torpedo School
. . . a very well thought out design for a submarine boat was brought to my notice . . . which only required one small addition . . . to make it efficient. Experiments were carried out which proved the practicability of the one point in this invention which was novel, and the inventor was given no further encouragement. . . . A very similar course has been adopted with all the various submarine boats which have been brought forward since. Each design has been carefully examined and sufficient experiment has been made in each case to ascertain its probable value. It has then been quietly dropped with the result of delaying the development of the submarine boat for about 20 years.
Wilson let a modest cat out of a dark bag. Their Lordships did indeed keep wary eyes on submersible development. They discouraged any progress for good reasons as Wilson made clear: ‘Now, we cannot delay its introduction any longer, but we should still avoid doing anything to assist in its improvement in order that our means of trapping and destroying it may develop at a greater rate than the submarine boats themselves.’
Not only the submersible started to assume practicality. The spar torpedo, the mine on the end of a long stick, had limited use as a weapon. To place it involved difficulty as well as danger. Neither could it successfully cope with a moving target. As the American Civil War ended, Captain Giovanni Luppis of the Austro-Hungarian navy produced the answer. He designed a small boat that carried an explosive charge. Steam or clockwork powered his invention, which, vitally, could be steered by cords from its parent vessel.
A small propeller and pistol detonator on the nose provided a brilliant firing mechanism. While the boat approached its target, the propeller spun. As the propeller spun, it unscrewed a safety lock on the detonator. When the lock opened fully, the charge exploded.
Luppis found it hard to convince his admirals that his invention had a use. An Englishman, Robert Whitehead, boss of a marine engineering firm in the Adriatic port of Fiume, believed it had. In 1868, the pair unveiled their self-propelled or ‘auto-motive torpedo’. Driven by a compressed-air motor, retaining the original firing device, the 135kg weapon had an 8.2kg warhead. A range of 180m, allied to a speed of 6 knots, scrawled a warning to surface ships. An improved prototype with a 270m range soon appeared.
The Royal Navy took notice. The new invention might be slow. It might not go very far. Improvements, however, were no more than a matter of time, of money. The essential fact was that the Luppis– Whitehead torpedo carried explosives to a distant target.
By 1870, the production version had a length of 4.9m, carried a 35kg guncotton warhead at 8 knots over 360m. Whitehead travelled to England. One hundred test firings amply convinced the Admiralty. They promptly bought rights to manufacture the design themselves. The ideal weapon for the submarine had arrived.
In the United States, an Irish immigrant, John Philip Holland, a New Jersey schoolteacher, peered at his students through wire-rimmed spectacles and dreamed dreams. Always interested in the potential of submarines, he sent his plans for a one-man submersible to the Secretary of the Navy. A blunt reply told him that it was not something to which anyone would trust himself.
Undeterred, the walrus-moustached Holland looked for financial support. An Irish nationalist, he did not need to look too far. The Fenians, revolutionaries for Irish freedom, came to his aid. Anything that could strike the detested Queen Victoria and her military a telling blow interested them. Holland I duly appeared. A mere 15½ft long, the boat took after a pencil, sharpened at both ends. The single operator necessarily wore ‘diving dress’. The control room flooded each time the craft submerged.
There was one great advance. Holland’s boat used a petrol engine. It did not work brilliantly but engineering had finally made the pedal genuinely obsolete. The prototype performed well enough to encourage the building of a larger version.
The Reverend George Garrett, an Anglican clergyman in Manchester, forked out £1,500 in 1879, to build a submarine to his own design. At 45ft long and 10ft in diameter, she similarly resembled a short stub of pencil, pointed at each end. With a deft touch of divine inspiration, Garrett named his creation Resurgam: ‘I shall rise again’. A patent closed-system steam engine gave enough power to drive the boat underwater for four hours.
After successful trials of the vessel at Wallasey, the Royal Navy took an interest. Resurgam set out for Portsmouth in February 1880. Technical problems forced her into Rhyl. Repaired, but towed by a steam yacht, she left harbour on a gale-swept night. The steam yacht broke down. Resurgam’s crew left their boat to transfer to the yacht to lend a hand.
Since the conning tower hatch closed only from the inside, the submarine shipped water. The towrope parted. Down went Resurgam.
Garrett, low on funds like inventors before and after him, turned his eyes, not to heaven, but to Sweden. Thorsten Nordenfelt, an arms manufacturer, had an interest in submarines. They were the weapon of the future, and weapons turned a profit.
In 1881, Holland produced his second boat, 31ft long, armed with an air-powered cannon. Tests dragged on. The Fenians, anxious to send the Royal Navy to perdition, became impatient. Eventually, they stole their own boat, hiding it in a shed in Connecticut, where it stayed for thirty-five years.
Holland formed his own company, the Nautilus Submarine Boat Company. It took two years to produce its first boat, the Zalinski. Holland named it after Captain Edmund Zalinski, his major investor as well as inventor of the terrifying air-powered gun of the earlier boat.
In Europe, in the United States, designers of submersibles tried out their ideas. Claude Goubet of France built two generally ineffective boats that incorporated another innovation: power came from electric batteries. Technology spurred its way into creative minds.
Less useful than an electric boat was Josiah Tu
ck’s Peacemaker. The American used caustic soda to propel his creature through the water. His anxious relatives, probably more concerned that he squandered the family’s substantial wealth on his inventions, committed him to an asylum for the insane. Years later, hard-headed German designers investigated the same technique.
Thorsten Nordenfelt launched his submarine in 1885 in Stockholm. She used the same pattern steam engine as Garrett’s Resurgam. Nordenfelt I weighed 60 tons, measured 64ft in length and carried a single torpedo tube. Speed and manoeuvrability were not her main assets. It needed twelve hours to build up sufficient steam for underwater travel. She took thirty minutes to submerge. Once under the surface, the Nordenfelt design behaved like an eccentric aunt with a mind of her own.
The Swede did not become wealthy by allowing such minor details as poor design to impede his progress. Specially trained, carefully chosen men demonstrated the invention before royalty, presidents and prime ministers. It always impressed.
The Greek navy bought one. Nothing more was heard of her.
Nordenfelt moved to England, establishing his works at Barrow.
The Turkish navy acquired two of his later design, Nordenfelt II, to counteract the threat from the Greek boat. Bigger and better, at 100ft long with twin torpedo tubes, Barrow built them in sections. They were shipped to Constantinople for final assembly. When the first boat tested her torpedo, she unhesitatingly tipped backwards to slide, stern first, to the bottom of the Bosporus. The second boat then languished in pieces for years at the Constantinople navy yard, before reappearing in August 1916. Originally named Abdul Hamid, she became the Yunusbaligi or ‘Porpoise’. She entered the water. She sank.
Russia stumped up for Nordenfelt III. This was bigger still, at 123ft long, with a surface speed claimed to be 14 knots. On the delivery trip, she ran aground. The Tsar’s navy took the opportunity to cancel their order.