Robert Fulton and the Submarine

by William Barclay Parsons

The other mechanism in the interior of the boat is simple and self-explanatory. There were two anchors with windlasses, one anchor to hold in the usual manner against drifting, the other to regulate depth when lying stationary. There were pumps for emptying the water ballast chambers. On deck was a conning tower quite similar to the tower on a modern submarine, which served when closed as a lookout for the helmsman, and when open as means of ingress and egress for the crew. This conning tower had glass windows through which an observer could watch big prey, or steer his course when the boat was partially submerged. Plate Fifth shows how the conning tower could be used when it should be the only part of the vessel above the surface. This particular plate is of peculiar interest in that Fulton has drawn a picture of himself looking through the glass-covered ports. In the original drawing the head is full size.

Attached to the conning tower were two pipes marked F and G in Plate Second. These pipes led to the interior of the boat and permitted fresh air to be drawn in, and the vitiated or mephitic air (as Fulton called it) expelled. These pipes permitted the boat to be submerged so that the deck was just awash, the only part above the surface being the upper half of the conning tower and the air pipes. This is the situation as shown in Plate Fifth. So operated, the boat did not differ materially from a modern submarine under similar conditions with her periscope out of water.

From Fulton’s small conning tower he had only direct vision. A periscope enables the boat to be wholly submerged with vision obtained by reflecting mirrors. But a boat submerged so as to be just awash, with only the conning tower showing, and driven by a hand-operated propeller could have entered at night unseen almost any harbor, because in those days there were no powerful searchlights to illuminate the surface of the water at a distance.

The British were right in the secret note that they sent to the naval commanders that Fulton’s boat, even without the later improvements that he showed the British Government, could in the hands of the French have made an attack with very serious results upon an open roadstead such as the mouth of the Thames.

According to modern phraseology, Fulton’s British boat was a submersible rather than a submarine. The latter term defines a vessel that has powers of offense under water by torpedoes that in turn have means of locomotion. With such a torpedo neither Fulton nor the art was acquainted. His torpedoes or “bombs” were immobile affairs intended to be anchored, dragged by a boat or allowed to drift with the tide and to explode by concussion.

With the Nautilus it is true that he contemplated dragging a “bomb” beneath the bottom of a ship to be attacked, and in this respect the Nautilus possessed some feature of a true submarine. The plan that he proposed for the Nautilus presented many serious difficulties depending as it did on the fixing of a spike in the bottom of the other vessel. Fulton himself apparently reached the conclusion that this suggestion was impracticable, through actual experiments or further study. The boat that he proposed for the British Government had no such attachment, but instead was designed to carry “bombs” to be deposited secretly in an enemy harbor, and there to be anchored so as to remain beneath the surface when they would come in contact with the bottoms of passing vessels, or to be released in couples held by bridles and thus to be carried by tidal currents across the cables of anchored ships when the “bombs” would be drawn beneath the vessel and explode.

What Fulton called “bombs” are today known as mines. No means are shown in his plans by which these mines could be placed or released while his boat was submerged. The capability to submerge and to move beneath the surface was expected to permit the boat to work into a harbor unperceived, and there to lie in wait beneath the surface until night presented the opportunity to rise unseen, when the mines would be placed or set free. The successful experiment with the Dorothea showed that his mines could be completely effective and that, therefore, his submersible mine layer, as perhaps she can be correctly described, could have been developed into a very effective engine of war.

In Fulton’s bombs, as he calls them, we are not particularly interested because he has fully described these devices in his book that he wrote on Torpedo Warfare. It is, however, in view of subsequent events exceedingly interesting to point out that Fulton foresaw the conditions that actually obtained in the recent war.

On pages 71–2 of the “Descriptions” he explained how hundreds of such bombs or mines could be strewn in the channel of the Thames or along the coast and it would not be in the power of the whole British marine to prevent such practice. This is precisely what the Germans undertook to do, forcing the British, even though they had control of the open seas, to sweep the Channel by daylight, day after day, in order to remove mines that might have been planted during the night. Furthermore, Fulton pointed out that a line of such mines could be strung from Calais to Dover, rendering it “impossible for any vessel to pass without certain destruction.” When the German submarine attack on British commerce became seriously acute, the British authorities put into execution that which Fulton had suggested and strung a line of obstructions across the Channel from Dover to Calais thereby compelling the German submarines to pass around the northern coast of Scotland in order to reach the open sea.

Speaking of the effect of submarines and mines, Fulton’s language is worthy of repetition because the sinister side of his prophecy became so nearly realized between 1914 and 1918: