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.
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.
Bauer’s Submarine Concert, Cronstadt Harbor, 1855. See [footnote], page [120]