It is a very great pity that we know no more about these earliest submarines. Cornelius Van Drebel died in 1634, at the age of sixty-two, without leaving any written notes or oral descriptions. We must not think too hardly of this inventor of three centuries ago, unguarded by patent laws, for making a mystery of his discoveries. He had to be a showman as well as a scientist, or his noble patrons would have lost all interest in his “ingenious machines,” and mystery is half of the showman’s game. Besides his “eel-boats,” Van Drebel is said to have invented a wonderful globe with which he imitated perpetual motion and illustrated the course of the sun, moon, and stars; an incubator, a refrigerator, “Virginals that played of themselves,” and other marvels too numerous to mention. Half scientist, half charlatan, wholly medieval in appearance, with his long furred gown and long, fair beard, Cornelius Van Drebel marches picturesquely at the head of the procession of inventors who have made possible the modern submarine.
Eighteen years after Van Drebel’s death, a Frenchman named Le Son built a submarine at Rotterdam. This craft, which is usually referred to as the Rotterdam Boat, was 72 feet long, 12 feet high, and of 8 foot beam. It was built of wood, with sharply tapering ends, and had a superstructure whose sloping sides were designed to deflect cannon balls that might be fired at the boat while traveling on the surface, while iron-shod legs protected the hull when resting on the sea bottom. A single paddle-wheel amidships was to propel the boat,—just how, the inventor never revealed. Like so many other submarines, the Rotterdam Boat was built primarily to be used against the British fleet. But it failed to interest either the Dutch or French minister of marine, and never went into action.
The earliest known contemporary picture of a submarine vessel appeared in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” in 1747. It showed a cross section of an underwater boat built and navigated on the Thames by one Symons. This was a decked-over row-boat, propelled by four pairs of oars working in water-tight joints of greased leather. To submerge his vessel, Symons admitted water into a number of large leather bottles, placed inside the hull with their open mouth passing through holes in the bottom. When he wished to rise, he would squeeze out the water with a lever and bind up the neck of each emptied bottle with string. This ingenious device was not original with Mr. Symons, but was invented by a Frenchman named Borelli in 1680.
Submarine navigation was a century and a half old before it claimed its first victim. J. Day, an English mechanic, rebuilt a small boat so that he was able to submerge it in thirty feet of water, with himself on board, and remain there for twenty-four hours with no ill effect. At the end of this time, Day rose to the surface, absolutely certain of his ability to repeat the experiment at any depth. But how could he turn this to practical account?
Symons’s Submarine.
It was an age of betting, when gentlemen could always be found to risk money on any wager, however fantastic. Day found a financial backer in a Mr. Blake, who advanced him the money to buy a fifty-ton sloop and fit it with a strong water-tight compartment amidships. Ten tons of ballast were placed in the hold and twenty more hung outside the hull by four iron rods passing through the passenger’s compartment. When the rest of the boat was filled with water, it would sink to the bottom, to rise again when the man inside released the twenty tons of outer ballast.
Shut in the water-tight compartment of this boat, Day sank to the bottom of Plymouth Harbor, at 2 P.M., Tuesday, June 28, 1774, to decide a bet that he could remain twelve hours at a depth of twenty-two fathoms (132 feet). When, at the expiration of this time, the submarine failed to reappear, Mr. Blake called on the captain of a near-by frigate for help. Bluejackets from the warship and workmen from the dockyard were set to work immediately to grapple for the sunken craft and raise her to the surface, but to no avail. The great pressure of water at that depth—150 feet is the limit of safety for many modern submarines—must have crushed in the walls of the water-tight compartment without giving Day time enough to release the outer ballast and rise to safety.