An original drawing by the author, Alan H. Burgoyne; reproduced from “Submarine Navigation, Past and Present,” by permission of E. P. Dutton & Company.
But many of the underwater craft invented between 1850 and 1900 can be classified only as freaks. Most of them, fortunately, were designed but never built, and those that were launched miraculously refrained from drowning any of their crews. There were submarines armed with steam-driven gimlets: the
“nimble tail,
Made like an auger, with which tail she wriggles,
Betwixt the ribs of a ship and sinks it straight,”
that Ben Jonson playfully ascribed to Van Drebel. Dr. Lacomme, in 1869, proposed a submarine railroad from Calais to Dover, with tracks laid on the bottom of the Channel and cars that could cast off their wheels and rise to the surface in case of accident. Lieutenant André Constantin designed, during the siege of Paris, a boat to be submerged by drawing in pistons working in large cylinders open to the water. A vessel was actually built on this principle in England in 1888, and submerged in Tilbury Docks, where the soft mud at the bottom choked the cylinders so that the pistons could not be driven out again and the boat was brought up with considerable difficulty. Two particularly delirious inventors claimed that their submarines could also be used as dirigible balloons. Boucher’s underwater boat of 1886 was to have gills like a fish, so that it need never rise to the surface for air, and was further adorned with spring-buffers on the bottom, oars, a propellor under the center of the keel, and a movable tail for sculling the vessel forward. There were submarines with paddle-wheels, submarines with fins, and submarines with wings. A Venezuelan dentist, Señor Lacavalerier, invented a double-hulled, cigar-shaped boat, whose outer hull was threaded like a screw, and by revolving round the fixed inner hull, bored its way through the water. But he had been anticipated and outdone by Apostoloff, a Russian, who not only designed a submarine on the same principle but intended it to carry a large cabin suspended on davits above the surface of the water, and declared that his vessel would cross the Atlantic at an average speed of 111 knots an hour.
Apostoloff’s Proposed Submarine.
An original drawing by the author, Alan H. Burgoyne; reproduced from “Submarine Navigation, Past and Present,” by permission of E. P. Dutton & Company.
As late as 1898 the Spanish government, neglecting the promising little electric boat built ten years before by Señor Peral, was experimenting with two highly impossible submarines, one of which was to be propelled by a huge clock-spring, while the other was perfectly round. Needless to say, neither the sphere nor the toy boat ever encountered the American fleet.
At the same time, the United States government declined to accept the war services of the already practicable boats of the two American inventors who were about to usher in the present era of submarine warfare: Simon Lake and John P. Holland.