Try as he would, he could not drive the screw into the tough English oak of which the hull of the ship was made, and this he must needs do in order to fasten the bomb to the bottom of it.
Finally, just as the clock-work of the torpedo was about to explode it, he set it adrift, and the young officer made off just in time to save himself. As it was, the bomb exploded close to the stern of the boat, but it did not do any serious damage.
Robert Fulton’s Submarine.—About the year 1800, Robert Fulton, the Famous American inventor, who built the first successful steamboat, designed and built a submarine that was far ahead of either of those I have just described.
It was cigar-shaped, to begin with, and this lessened the resistance it offered to the water, and it was fitted with a keel, a rudder, a propeller, and a conning tower, so that the pilot could see where he was going. Fulton did not attempt, though, to use a steam engine to drive the propeller, but turned it by hand. His submarine is shown in [Fig. 5].
Another big improvement that Fulton made was to cover the hull of his submarine with copper plates. Taken altogether it came as near being a real submarine as could have been made with the materials and inventions which were available at that time.
After offering his submarine to the French, British, and American Governments in turn, and after it was turned down by all of them because they failed to see in it a useful weapon of war, Fulton turned his thoughts toward home and craft of a more peaceful nature.
Had any one of these governments been able to see the wonderful possibilities of the undersea craft that Fulton had so greatly improved upon, the submarine would have been perfected long before it was.
Fulton’s remarkable experiment, with his Nautilus, as he called his boat, on the Seine River, which flows through Paris, attracted much attention, and a plan was set on foot to use his submarine to rescue the exiled Napoleon from the Island of St. Helena. Again Fulton was doomed to disappointment, for the Great Emperor died before the scheme could be carried out.